299 Posts Found

One of the first things I always do when joining a product team is to setup a feedback river — an open channel for anyone who is interested to get direct access to primary feedback on the product from across various channels. This has typically taken the form of an internal company mailing list in Gmail or Outlook, but I’ve also seen it as a feedback channel … [ Read more ]

Author: Sachin Rekhi | Source: Designing Your Product’s Continuous Feedback Loop | Original Publication: Medium | Subjects: Management, Project Management

An event loop is a management checklist to run through periodically — every day, week and month. “The objective is to ensure you’re making time for the important activities that can get lost in the noise. The weekly and monthly ones are particularly tough because you cycle through less frequently, but they’re as important to make a habit.” Here’s an example of an event loop … [ Read more ]

Author: David Loftesness | Source: This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Productivity/Work Tips

A failure rate is the number of times your company is unable to deliver on its promise. A failure rate is a shared operational metric for all businesses — not just security. “To get the failure rates for your company, find them in each department first. Every function will have a different failure rate to assess their work. For customer experience it’s how many times … [ Read more ]

Author: Lloyd Tabb | Source: I’m Sorry But Those Are Vanity Metrics | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer-Related, Management, Operations | Company: Venmo

Every time Lloyd Tabb finds an outlier in Looker’s user base he looks up the customer’s contact information and calls. During the early years, he did this daily. “I call people because I want to know how they feel using our software. If they aren’t using Looker, I want to know why. Is there something wrong? Are they stuck? If they are active users, I … [ Read more ]

Author: Lloyd Tabb | Source: I’m Sorry But Those Are Vanity Metrics | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer-Related, Market Research | Companies: LiveOps, Looker

Not sure if an employee can “hack” the startup environment? Try freelancing first or do what companies like Automattic do – figure it out by having potential employees do real (paid) tasks with the team before making it official.

Source: Recruiting Strategies | Original Publication: Betterteam | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Automattic

To address inequality of opportunity, we need to acknowledge and address the systemic advantages and disadvantages that people experience daily. For leaders, recognizing their advantage blindness can help to reduce the impact of bias and create a more level playing field for everyone. Being advantaged through race and gender come with a responsibility to do something about changing a system that unfairly disadvantages others.

[…]

Use … [ Read more ]

Author: Ben Fuchs | Source: Do You Have ‘Advantage Blindness’? | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Market Research, Organizational Behavior

One multinational company built greater agility into its incentive system by keeping some investment funds in reserve until the middle of the year, then releasing them for successful initiatives requiring more resources in order to grow. In return for the funding, initiative leaders had to agree to raise their performance targets.

Authors: Kyle Hawke, Matthew Maloney, Mita Sen, Ronald Falcon | Source: Build a reinvestment machine with zero-based budgeting | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Food is a natural bridge builder. But company dinners, especially when you grow to a certain size, can get prohibitively expensive. Not to mention, when you’re stuck at a table it can be a challenge to mix and mingle, which kind of defeats the purpose. We overcame this early on with a pot-luck style strategy that brought together the joys of eating with the thrill … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Holmes | Source: 5 cheap old-school hacks for building company culture in 2017 | Original Publication: Medium | Subject: Organizational Behavior | Company: Hootsuite

When clients, customers and other end users express feedback and appreciation, employees develop stronger beliefs in the impact and value of their work. Interaction also increases empathy for customers, even when the interaction is virtual.

Action Steps:

1. Identify groups of people who benefit from your team’s work but have never shared their feedback, such as clients, customers, suppliers, or coworkers and managers from different divisions and departments.
2. Arrange

… [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Grant | Source: Employee Engagement: Making a Difference | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

One hurdle to people doing and saying any of these [relationship enhancing] things is that they don’t feel comfortable enough with their colleagues to even start. Scott Crabtree ran into this at Intel when his division reorganized and he suddenly had to work with people he didn’t know very well. Things got competitive and confrontational fast, and he felt his happiness and productivity drop in … [ Read more ]

Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: Here’s Why Founders Should Care about Happiness | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior | Company: Intel

When you say thank you, you increase your own happiness. I know of one executive who puts 10 pennies in his left pocket every morning. Every time he thanks someone or expresses gratitude, he moves a penny to his right pocket. He won’t go home until his left pocket is empty. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself to say positive things at work, … [ Read more ]

Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: Here’s Why Founders Should Care about Happiness | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Here’s the good news: The new, bigger role of learning allows you to save money in hiring. When I launched my first company in 2008, one of my first hires was a CTO. I chose an experienced developer who was in huge demand and was an expensive hire.

I also hired an entry-level employee who demonstrated enormous potential and ambition, although he had only rudimentary development … [ Read more ]

Author: Nick Gidwani | Source: How to Support Employees’ Learning Goals While Getting Day-to-Day Stuff Done | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources, Training

Claire Hughes Johnson, COO of Stripe, occasionally finds it helpful to plot members of the team on a Venn Diagram with three circles: People who are good at their work, people who are making great impact, and people who love what they do. The ideal employee fits into all three circles. Make a list of all the people who fall into this bucket. What other … [ Read more ]

Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: To Grow Faster Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Stripe

To get delegation right, begin by scheduling one-on-one conversations with each of your direct reports. Ask each direct report to list his or her key areas of responsibility. Then ask them, “Within this area of responsibility…

• Are there areas where I need to ‘let go’ or delegate more to you?
• Are there areas where I need to get more involved or provide more help to you?”

If you … [ Read more ]

Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: Disastrous at Delegating? 4 Tips to Become a Pro! | Subjects: Management, Personal Improvement, Productivity/Work Tips

In hiring, what most leaders do is they have a set of criteria, they evaluate a bunch of candidates through interviews and resumes and other information available, and then they make decisions based on their gut. You could actually turn that process into a much more scientific approach, where you lose none of your experience but you add a lot of data.

The way I would … [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Grant | Source: Six secrets to true originality | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Too often, managers don’t know enough about what work people enjoy. It spills out in exit interviews — a standard practice in every HR department to find out why talented people are leaving and what would have convinced them to stick around. But why wait until they’re on their way out the door? Instead, use entry interviews. In the first week on the job, managers … [ Read more ]

Author: Lori Goler | Source: Why People Really Quit Their Jobs | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Every three months, either by yourself or with your admin if you have one, audit your calendar, showing the percent of time you spent on each project, the percent of time you spent with individual leaders versus in large meetings, and the percent of time you spent recruiting versus managing versus building products (change these if not appropriate to your level and responsibilities). Then adjust … [ Read more ]

Author: Fidji Simo | Source: How Facebook’s VP of Product Finds Focus and Creates Conditions for Intentional Work | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity/Work Tips

Buffer has taken transparency to an extreme. The social-media management tool firm has adopted what it calls an “open salaries” system, publishing all of its salaries, as well as the standardized formulas with which those salaries were calculated: Salary = job type x seniority x experience + location. In other words, a salary is determined by a base pay based upon job type; plus, a … [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Cobb | Source: Unfair — and Unfixable? The Simple Truth About Salaries | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Human Resources | Company: Buffer

One important milestone during the first six months is to get your new hire’s perspective on your operation. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but getting information from someone less experienced can be annoying. They have all these ideas and they question everything: why you do what you do and why you do it the way you do it. So we fight it … [ Read more ]

Author: Whitney Johnson | Source: If you want your new hires to succeed | Original Publication: LinkedIn | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

NerdWallet gives candidates the following materials to make their experience before and after company onsites better:

• An interview day outline. NerdWallet sends every candidate an outline detailing their day at the office 48-hours before they arrive. It includes: the names and roles of the team members with whom they’ll meet, interview times and duration, and any activities they will be participating in throughout the day. The

… [ Read more ]

Author: Flo Thinh | Source: Turbocharge Your Recruiting Machine — Here’s How | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: NerdWallet