Welcome to June layoff-ee’s – Pride month, the start of summer, and even more companies are still doing layoffs. I had hoped that things would have settled down a bit now, and I know a good number of senior leaders (in particular, but others as well) are still looking for their next role. I know this is dragging on longer than I wanted, but now we’re heading into what I fear may be a quieter time as vacation season kicks in. This issue will be about caring for yourself while in your job search.
Unlimited PTO is great if you’ve got it and use it. Those of us still job searching are still with “unlimited UPTO (unpaid time off),” which is not quite the same but has some of the same perks. Indeed’s “You Days” (monthly scheduled days off) were also a great addition to the mix. I had already transferred those “You Days” to my personal calendar; the next one is coming up on June 16th. I’m looking forward to a day off from job searching and focused on taking care of a few errands before summer gets busy.
Given that the hiring managers and recruiters will be out of the office for the company and federal holidays, those are great times for you to get away as well. This article has a few easy suggestions for when to take your time off and get extra days due to holidays (3 min read, but an easy skim).
Looking Forward – 11 Rules For Self-Help
This article on Mashable summarizes “every self-help book ever” (actually dozens) into 11 rules. (15 min read, but it saves you ∞ time by not reading every self-help book ever.) In particular, the rules like “take one small step,” “change your mental maps,” “be useful to others,” “Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat,” and “Write it all down” are on theme’s we’ve already covered here.
Today’s Tip – Searching and playing games
I mentioned a few weeks ago about trying Otta. So far, I’m impressed with the user experience and simplicity, but not yet impressed by the engineering leadership roles on the site. I’m also giving Blind Talent a try, but I haven’t gotten too deep into their experience yet. I’d say it’s still worth branching out as I see various jobs on these sites vs. LinkedIn, where I tend to look the most.
As an aside – In the meantime, I’m playing some Valheim (now that it’s on the Xbox Game Pass) and enjoying the baseball season (even though the Cardinals are off to a rocky start.)
Fun Stuff
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
Happy Memorial Day to all those in the US. A special thank you to those in the service and those who served. I hope you all enjoyed the unofficial start to Summer. I know we certainly did. Our family spent the weekend with good friends, good board games, and a rental house that included a pool. It was a perfect start to the Summer and a great way to get back up and around again after being sick so much in May.
We played a lot of great games (not strictly endorsing here, no affiliate links or anything, and in no particular order), namely: Hamburg, Planet Unknown, Next Station: London, Iki, Isle of Cats, Who Should We Eat, and more. What I enjoy most about new games is learning their mechanics. This one is a worker placement game. That one is an engine-building game. Let’s break down some of the mechanics of the layoff game (not to make light of layoffs, but games can be pretty serious.)
Looking Back – Setup Mechanics
Each game has a setup phase; getting all the pieces into place is critical to starting the game on the right foot. As some of us enter our 10th week, there are a lot of unfortunate friends who are just beginning their journey. Pass this journal along to them, give them a word of encouragement, and help them however you can. Those first few weeks are hard.
This LifeHacker article has a handful of tips for helping others, and if any of these are things I can do to help you, please let me know. I’ll be happy to help you all out. (5 min read)
Looking Forward – Overwhelming Mechanics
The process of job searching, finding the right job search site, networking, and all the rest has been overwhelming. It’s been tricky to manage, even to the point of wondering how I’d fit a full-time job into the day with all these activities. It’s a lot of plate-spinning, juggling, or whatever analogy fits best for you.
This HBR article has some great suggestions for managing around mistakes we make when we’re overwhelmed, and I couldn’t think of a time that I’ve been more overwhelmed than being laid off for ten weeks. (5 min read)
Today’s Tip – Mechanics of Joy
Dessert is important. It’s the thing that puts that final finish on a great meal. It’s the reward at the end of the day. Find that thing that brings you joy and add it to your day. It doesn’t have to be food. Finding something that lets you enjoy a bit of fun every day will give you that serotonin and dopamine hits to get through another day. It’s a great way to end each day on a high note, no matter how bad. Finding some great comedies, tasty snacks, a good book, or whatever it is, that helps you end the day on a high note.
Fun Stuff
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
For those laid off by Indeed in March, today marks the two-month anniversary of Indeed being without you (and me.) The time has flown by in some ways, and in others, it has crawled past. I continue to hear stories of more and more ex-Indeedians who’ve found their next role (congratulations to you all!) and heartbreaking stories of ghosting, black hole applications, and worse (I’m sorry, and I’m right there with you.)
As for me, May has been a bit of a wash. Between the flu, caring for family with the flu, and now COVID, I’ve been out of commission more days than I care to count. But beyond that, I’m doing something I love. I’m leaning into a couple of startups that I’m excited about. All of them are pre-funding, which is terrifying and new for me, but it is also an excellent opportunity to help shape them into something extraordinary. Not just monetarily but genuinely building a culture that rivals the Indeed I miss. Getting my hands on code again and helping bring something out of nothing has been invigorating. Hopefully, we can raise some funds and honestly give this a go full-time soon.
On another note, our family has a tradition of attending BoardGameGeek’s Spring convention in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend. If we can stay healthy, we’re incredibly excited to spend the weekend with good friends, good board games, and the official start of Summer. Contact me if you’re attending or in the area; I’d love to catch up! Let’s get to the newsletter.
It’s not a shock to anyone who knows me that I’ve always enjoyed innovation. My whole time at Indeed was marked by it. We were developing new product ideas and building the engine for iterating on those ideas simultaneously, which was a different type of innovation. Even before Indeed, my work in startups for the ten years before was also marked by innovation. I also love and hope to continue doing it in my next career step as well.
I’m unsure if any of these innovative ways of catching an employer’s eye are right for you or me, but I love the inspiration. (4 min read) The key takeaway is not to give up hope, to keep thinking of new ways to reach your target audience (hiring employers) and leverage your strengths.
Looking Forward – Finding Love At Work
Obviously, many people have found romantic love at work (startups are often fertile ground for dating and marriage, in my experience,) but that’s not what I’m talking about today. I’ve touched on some of these topics before independently, but finding a way to love the work you’re doing (or going to be doing) is vital to the enjoyment of that work and feeling fulfilled. This FastCompnay article breaks down several approaches to finding, aligning, and leaving jobs in search of roles you are passionate about. (6 min read)
I’ll warn you, though, that their last point about lowering your expectations is both realistic and very disheartening. I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree with it. The key to me is that love is a verb. It’s an act of give and take. You put your efforts in, and the company responds, obviously monetarily, but hopefully also with praise, recognition, and maybe even a chance to see the impact of your work in the world. But this is where the parallels of love and marriage begin to break down. You’re not committed for life to this company. They should continue to “woo” you through compensation, benefits, growth, and impact. I hope you each find a company that’s as excited to have you join them as you are to join.
Today’s Tip – Time For A Breakup
I’ve used this tips section for a lot of guidance on using LinkedIn over the last two months. And honestly, LinkedIn has been handy for one thing in particular – staying connected to colleagues in the field. Unfortunately, as I mentioned last week, it has not yet produced progress toward job interviews. So, my suggestion this week (and I’m saying this so that I will also take this advice) is to branch out. If you’ve been using one job search site this whole time, it’s time to try another. I will give Otta.com a chance and share my results in the coming weeks, but for others, maybe that’s giving LinkedIn, Indeed, The Ladders, or something else a shot.
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
Happy Mother’s belated day to all the mothers (biological, adopted, spiritual, or any other kind.) I hope everyone had a great weekend. Before several more family members got sick (thus another short and late journal, sorry), my wife and I saw “To Kill A Mockingbird” on stage, and a quote stood out. Scout Finch says, “Trying to do the right thing is the right thing.” That is a great encouragement for anyone struggling with the layoff.
At Indeed, many teams focused on the “Black Hole Problem.” For those unfamiliar, this is the concept that many job applications disappear into the void and never get a response from an employer. It’s so disappointing not to get even a simple reply. I’ve been trying to use my network for most of the jobs I’ve applied for, but I have stumbled across some roles on LinkedIn that I felt I was well qualified for and would enjoy and got no response from them. I’m trying to also reach out to the recruiter, CEO, or hiring manager via LinkedIn, but even that is not enough to drive a reply. It is disheartening, but I have to assume that there are reasons for no response. In one case, I was ghosted by a company that turned out to be right on the edge of bankruptcy, so I dodged a bullet there.
If you have suggestions for avoiding the “black hole problem,” drop them in the comments to share them with others (and me.)
Looking Forward – Being Responsive
As a hiring manager, it’s often my job to evaluate candidates. I look forward to joining an organization that creates a great candidate experience. Much of this is responsiveness to candidates, as we discussed above. But, there are a lot of other attributes as well that are important. Things like:
Clear communication on the types and order of interviews.
Consistent interviewer training.
Useful rubrics for evaluating interviews.
Today’s Tip
This may be a little on the nose, given that I’m still recovering from the flu and helping my family as they battle it as well, but stay healthy. Catching a bug like this is taking a bite out of my ability to search, apply for, and follow up with jobs. Get your rest, water, eat well, and take care of yourselves.
Fun Stuff
For those who’ve gotten new jobs already.
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
I caught the flu late last week, so this week’s journal will be shorter than usual. Thankfully I saw it early enough to get the medicine to speed up the recovery, hopefully. There’s a good analogy here of proactive vs. reactive planning. I didn’t plan on being sick, so being proactive about it (aside from eating healthy, drinking water, and exercising, ~ whatever that is. ;) wasn’t part of the game. However, as soon as I realized I was sick, I could get to the doctor and get diagnosed, which allowed a more rapid response (and hopefully recovery.)
Indeed was particularly good at reactive planning. Looking back on the data-driven nature of Indeed a few weeks ago, I remembered just how much of our planning was in response to data that guided the next steps. The core measures of job seeker engagement, quality interactions, and more helped make decisions about what product features and products were built.
Thinking about this in the context of job searching, reactive work means being responsive to employers’ emails/requests, writing thank you follow-up letters promptly, and applying to new positions as they open up.
Looking Forward – Proactive Planning
I’m looking for organizations with strength in longer-term planning for my next role. It’s not a skill that I feel particularly adept in, given the short-term nature of Incubator projects. As I interview for positions, I want to understand where the company has been and is going. It helps me to know if I can help them along their growth journey.
Today’s Tip – More job search categories
Once you’ve saved a few jobs to LinkedIn, the jobs page is a perfect place to start your search. Looking through my jobs page today I saw jobs “Recommended for you”, “Similar to a job you saved one day ago”, “Jobs where you’re a top applicant”, “Remote opportunities”, “Still hiring”, “Hiring in your network”, and more. These are great jobs to review (and re-review) to see which would be a good fit.
Fun Stuff
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
First of all, welcome to ex-Facebook, ex-Amazon, ex-Dropbox, and others who joined our unfortunate ranks of the laid-off this week. It’s still a dark time in technology, and I hope you’re all leaning in to support those in need. More on that in a minute. First, we have to talk about online scams.
Layoff Journal Week 6 – Scams, PTO, & Retirement
A former Indeedian Tom tried to scam me this week. While I was at the dentist, he texted me to stop by CVS, pick up a $500 Apple gift card, and send it to him. Now, for those who know Tom, you know this was clearly out of character, and it’s also a pretty obvious scam. The scary part was that the scammer had not only my name but also Tom’s and knew we were connected. Be careful out there, folks. Even unemployed, you may still be the target of online scams, and with your personal information on various layoff lists, you may see an influx of requests. Thankfully this one ended with a frustrated scammer, not me losing $500.
I know talking about money while laid off may be a sore subject, but we have some business to take care of this week. Let’s dive in!
Looking Back – #TakeThePTO
I’ve worked for companies with open PTO (paid time off) policies for the last 16 years. It’s a double-edged sword. I enjoy the flexibility and the openness to take the time off I need, but always feel a twinge of regret about whether I’m taking enough vs. too much. Now with the layoff, I’m temporarily leaning into that feeling and enjoying the break from the typical eight-to-five work schedule. I encouraged keeping weekends last week, but if your budget allows, thinking of a portion of this layoff as an extended vacation can be a way to recharge your batteries and put some of the negative feelings behind you.
Also, if you were planning a summer vacation like me, do what you can to keep some portion of that trip. You may need to take a shorter or closer-to-home vacation than originally planned, but having that extended break, especially before diving into a new role, will help you jump in wholeheartedly.
While we’re on the topic of vacation, let’s talk about negotiating vacation. You can negotiate to take your planned vacations when joining a new company. You can ask how much vacation the average person is taking. And if it’s not a company with unlimited PTO, you can negotiate to start with more than the standard vacation offering. Get that time off and USE IT! This HBR article shares data on why you need it. (5 min read) #TakeThePTO
Looking Forward – Words of Affirmation
As we go through the valley of despair (or the estuary of ennui, or even the fjord of feelings – Thanks, Mandy!), it is essential to continue speaking and hearing words of affirmation. Hopefully, this newsletter is a bit of that for you, but when you meet others who’ve been laid off (or others going through hard times,) brightening their day with some words of encouragement will help lift their spirits. Here are 55 examples to get you started on lifting those around you. (8 min read)
Today’s Tip – Rolling Over Your Money
This week I’ve got another timely tip. Hopefully, you were investing in the company 401k (if not, get started on your 401k immediately at your next job, it’s a great habit and way to build wealth.) If so, you need to decide what to do with those funds. This article summarizes a number of things you could, should, and should not do with that investment. (8 min read)
For those with a Fidelity 401k, the process is quick and simple. It only took me 13 minutes on the phone to get everything rolling (I already had an existing IRA to roll over into, so I got to skip those steps), which has got to be a record time for getting anything meaningful done with a financial institution.
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
It’s been a long year this past month. I’m sure many of you are feeling it, but here we are, starting month two of post-employment. Energy has been up and down throughout the month. Last week I received two rejections from companies I was speaking with. It was a bit of a gut punch to be eliminated before they completed the full slate of interviews, but it pushed me to look for roles I’d love to have and to expand my search. I returned to LinkedIn and added more job titles and roles to my set of searches, and now have more saved jobs to research this week.
Indeed was one of the most data-driven companies I’ve ever worked for. The tracking data on everything necessary, the focus on quality metrics, and the infrastructure to manage all that data made Indeed a unique workplace. It’s a quality I plan to bring to my future roles and hope to find in the culture of any team I join. It’s also a beneficial quality in your job search.
We talked in week one about having a system for tracking applications. Most of these systems see the job search process as a funnel from awareness & application, through interviews, to offer and acceptance (not unlike how we thought about the job seeker experience at Indeed.) But with any funnel approach, you must regularly add to the top of the funnel to keep the process moving forward. This quick read shows one individual’s funnel metrics and emphasizes the importance of having a variety of sources for your top of the funnel (4 min read). For each job that fails to reach the end of the funnel, going back and adding several new prospects to the top will keep your search flowing.
Looking Forward – Funneling Your Energy
The same author, in the next part of his series, describes the “valley of despair” that comes in weeks four to 12 of the job search process, and of course, your mileage may vary on which weeks are up or down. (3 min read) The key here is to remember that during this difficult time, you have to work even harder to keep your energy up. Those in-person meetings with friends, family, former co-workers, and others will give you energy, expose you to more opportunities, and keep your momentum up.
I took this weekend off from job searching. It was a nice mental break from the constant refreshing of LinkedIn, email inbox, Slack, and many other things on my job search to-do list.
Of course, it didn’t have to be Saturday and Sunday, but with my family still in school mode, that made the most sense for me. It would be easy to stay full-time, seven days a week, on the job search process, but without a bit of time to rest and recharge, my energy level would drop each week. I’m re-energizing today to dig into the new roles I found late last week and see if they’d fit me well. I hope you take some time for yourself this week, but for me, it’s time to get back to work!
Fun(nel) Stuff
Using that funnel the way it’s intended!
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
I’ve been thinking a lot about friends this week. So many of my friends have reached out to support me and others in this layoff that I’m humbled to have so many great people in my network. Beyond just the network, having friends reach out provides a great support system for this challenging time. These people have met me for coffee, lunch, and beers or even dropped off dinner for my family one evening to show their love and support. I hope that everyone affected by layoffs is getting similar support.
However, I was challenged this week as I realized that I have so many friends, and yet for the last (nearly) seven years, I have never been this intentional about spending quality time with them. I have been very focused on my team, my career, my family, and more, and friends were a distant afterthought. Sure, I wanted to have more time with them, but when they didn’t call and I was super busy, time just got away from us both. I was intentionally scheduling time with friends during the first year of the pandemic, but that slowed down dramatically in 2022 and 2023. I’m bringing back that intentionality with a plan to maintain and grow my friendships even after I find another role, and I encourage you all to do the same.
Looking Back – On Mission With Friends
Indeed inspired me with its mission (“We help people get jobs”) even before I joined the company in 2016. I loved working on products to help job seekers find new roles and others for employers to find the right hire. In the first month, I saw firsthand how the mission would be used to gauge product success as a feature that was good for revenue but bad for job seekers was shuttered to protect the experience.
I’ve been a big believer in intrinsic value for a long time and always tried to help my teams understand the value they were creating, not just the revenue they extracted. Our User Experience teams were also instrumental in regularly refocusing the team on the customer experience, problems we were solving, and how we could help job seekers. Rallying around these problems with coworkers made them much more than peers; it grew so many new friendships. This article in Forbes on the importance of a mission-driven company shows the data behind that intrinsic motivation and a few questions you can ask to understand company culture around motivation/mission. (4 min read)
Looking Forward – Leadership & Worry
Another great article I read this week was on worry by RandsInRepose. (4 min read) Rands lays out that worrying/pessimism may seem engaged, helpful, or even essential but is doing more damage than good. Good leadership is the counter to worry: listening, understanding, staying curious, hoping, and more. I want to work with friends who exhibit this kind of leadership in my next role.
It’s easy in a layoff to move to a place of worry. Will I get another job? Will my budget work out? Will the market continue to get worse before it gets better? If we instead focus on listening to the feedback we’re getting, growing our skills during this downtime, we’ve been given, and most importantly, never losing hope, we will see brighter days.
We were laid off because the company made a mistake. Hiring you was a good decision, not a mistake. The mistake was not aligning hiring to the business needs. Your skills are valuable and are in demand somewhere. You have something unique to give. I hope you find that spot this week!
Today’s Tip – Negotiating
I’ve heard some folks have already gotten offers and are deliberating which to accept (and some have already accepted new roles, congratulations to everyone who’s seeing progress). Let me share a tip I’ve used in previous job searches with those closing in on a decision. Recruiters or hiring managers will ask you what your salary expectations are (where that practice is still allowed, here’s a list of places it is not.)
Preparing for this requires a bit of thinking about your budget, growth, and the longer-term opportunities in this role. My tip (I’ve lost the source for where I originally started this) is to develop three numbers: 1) your must-have salary, e.g., the take-home pay you have to get to make your budget work; 2) your desired salary, a reasonable balance of what you need and some extra to make things more comfortable, and; 3) your “happy place” salary, the amount you’d be very happy to get and would make you stop searching anywhere else.
When you share your desired salary (if you choose to share), share your mid and high numbers as a range. If the company comes within that range, you’ll be able to accept it comfortably. If they come in under your mid-point but above your must-have, you’ll know that the budget works and determine whether you want to negotiate. And, if the offer comes in below your must-have salary, you’re armed to push back and potentially walk away from an offer that won’t work for you.
Fun Stuff
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For full transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
The origin story of our Incubator (the name we gave to the organization fostering all of the Disruptive Innovation teams) started with the exploration into team charters. Amazon (and a number of other notable companies, too) has a culture of creating a team charter for discussion when creating any new team within the company. As we reviewed the past successes and failures of the Labs team, we decided to write a team charter to capture what the team was meant to do. Our main goal was to capture what it meant for the team to be impactful.
Impact is a great tool to guide your teams if you can understand and measure it. Understanding it alone takes time but starts with considering what is essential within your organization. Impact can be any number of things: clicks, revenue, connections, and growth of CPM, but it can also be less tangible things like customer adoption, high-speed execution (coding or experimentation), or collaboration. A clear definition of what is impactful to your organization serves as an invaluable North Star for your teams to guide their decisions.
Initially, our team had already shown a remarkable ability to operate quickly and collaboratively. Our team focused on discovering business value, which was also an asset to leverage. We set out to write a team charter and realized that if we turned this effort towards Disruptive Innovation exclusively, we could create an innovation engine for the company. The first draft of a team charter for our Incubator included statements guiding us to continue to be great partners to the various stakeholders around the company, to be a level playing field for all Disruptive Innovations we were testing, and to ruthlessly prioritize the various investments we were making into those innovations.
Whatever target you set for your Innovation team, you’ll want a measuring stick included in this charter. This can be tricky because you want to avoid simple Ivory Tower innovation, Innovation for the sake of Innovation, or innovation that doesn’t lead to any lasting change in the organization. Our organization knew from the beginning that we wanted to be measured by Innovations that impacted the core business, or as we termed them, “exits.” Thus began our reuse of the various venture capital terminology: angel round, series A, exit, bridge rounds, and more that we’ll explore in the chapters to come. Depending on your organization, exits may not make the most sense; it may be more around the influence of other product areas or creating a repeatable pattern that can be adopted in other product groups, but this measure (even if it seems impossible to guess what the target value should be) will help the team to know what success looks like.
While we didn’t know how to set the total value of every exit in revenue terms as you would for a VC-backed startup, we did know that if we were successful at convincing the other organizations around the business that there was value in our products and that they were worth adopting and merging into their lines of business that we would have produced something Impactful. We gave our team a lofty goal to grow each of their products into something impactful to another business area and to align with the various company metrics that made the most sense to help make it directly comparable. For the program, we picked a somewhat arbitrary goal of having at least one out of every six experiments exit successfully. This could easily have been anything between one out of four or one out of ten, but anything outside of that seemed ludicrous and like sandbagging, respectively.
Measures v2.0
After a few years of building products and running the program, we stepped back and realized we could summarize the organization’s most essential values into three key deliverables. First and foremost was the desire to create “exits.” Exits are the most tangible measure of impact as they are, by definition, your team creating additional business value for another business group. In some cases, you may even be able to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the true dollar value created or, to make yourself feel even better, just how much the company would have spent purchasing a similarly sized startup. But of course, that’s not strictly necessary, just a bit of navel-gazing.
Learnings are the second area that demonstrates value, albeit a lesser type. Here you’ll capture the failed experiments and early iterations of various teams trying to find business value. There are a lot of assets shed by the Innovation process we’re describing: original pitch decks, re-funding decks, planned expansions or pivots, and most importantly, the presentation of the final learnings.
This final presentation summarizes all of the key learnings over the timeline of this product experiment, showing both the things that were successful and the things tested which did not work. This is a blameless exercise and should be celebrated (we like cookies, or cake, or cookie cake!) as the team may feel down about the inability to produce a new viable product. The significant part is that if you keep all of these assets in a widely accessible place in your company’s documentation/knowledge-sharing system, you’ll find that it cuts off similar ideas that have not been thoroughly researched and that it also makes any related pitches for new Disruptive Innovation teams that much stronger.
Finally, as your Innovation teams need to quickly and efficiently discover new viable product ideas regularly to continue this investment, using Velocity as a measure of impact is a good idea. This encourages the team to remember that the instinct is to slow down as the product matures, but we must continue investing in ways to keep the product moving forward quickly. This means both the development and deployment of the product to end users and the experiment velocity — the speed at which an idea can be created, deployed, validated, and rolled out to all users, or else invalidated and removed from the codebase. While we didn’t work hard to directly measure the actual Experiment Velocity in any real units (See Goodhart’s law for one reason to consider not directly measuring this), having a number of other measures related to it (delivery lead time, team health, experiment duration, etc.) will give you a good indication as to whether your team has a health Experiment Velocity.
Given our team design and constraints, we had a goal to be the fastest-moving team within the company. We never made the competition with others explicit or denigrated other teams with lower velocity (recognizing that they had very different constraints they were operating under). Still, as a leadership team, we were constantly on the lookout for any tools or techniques that other teams were using that we could leverage to go even faster.
Executive Support
Once you’ve designed your team charter and defined your success metrics, it’s time to get executive support. This will take a number of forms, and you’ll need more than one executive bought in to make it work. These executives will be the board members overseeing each of your Disruptive Innovation teams to make sure they stay on track, helping clear blockers for those teams, and the person who holds the most sway in whether a team continues to innovate on this experiment or moves on to another opportunity.
First and foremost, you’ll need an executive sponsor for the program. This could be the CEO, President, or any other executive, and with their broader reach across the organization, it will be helpful if it is. The first thing they’ll do is provide legitimacy to the program to other senior leadership team members, convincing them to lend a few members of their teams to your program. You’ll also need some regular time with the executive sponsor to discuss a few key topics: cross-functional needs beyond the bounds of your program to ensure that all of the blockers and slow areas of the company are (relatively) smoothed out for your Disruptive Innovation teams. They’ll be essential in helping promote the organization and the opportunities to contribute to the broader company. And finally, the executive sponsor will also be the one to determine who else within the company has the power/privilege of selecting the Disruptive Innovation teams (a role they’ll likely play as well.) We’ll call this role the Product Executive Sponsor to keep it clearer.
Having seen this a few times before, if this program is solely sponsored by the Product or Engineering organization leadership, you’ll miss the larger opportunity to use the force multipliers of Marketing, Sales, Legal, and so much more. Additionally, you’ll limit your learnings from Disruptive Innovations to the Product/Engineering realms. Having Marketing, Legal, Sales, and more involved in the early stages of the project will allow their organizations to learn ways to improve their process and extract additional insights from your team processes.
The Product Executive Sponsors could be heads of various business divisions or their delegates, the heads of Product Management, Sales, or another functional area, or even active board members. What matters here is that they have the authority to green-light a Disruptive Innovation team and the business experience needed to guide it as it seeks to produce additional business value. These sponsors will meet regularly, likely monthly, with each sponsored team to review the current progress, product experiments, and planned work that’s coming up. Additionally, they’ll be the ones to lead the decision around whether or not a Disruptive Innovation team should continue or stop work on this product at seminal moments of the product lifecycle.
Avengers Assemble
Assembling the “perfect” team is another area for much consideration. A few clear elements are needed for a Disruptive Innovation team, namely the Product and Engineering team members. Still, the Innovation Program should provide a number of other cross-functional staff members to help ensure that all of the roadblocks for your Disruptive Innovation teams are eliminated regularly and efficiently.
Product Managers
The Product Manager will act as the CEO of this Disruptive Innovation team. They work with the team and the executive sponsor to establish a vision for where the product will go. They take in all of the user feedback, session data from your web applications, information from various product experiments, and feedback from the team on the return on investment of various features and provide a clear, executable roadmap for the next few steps. We’re not going to go into a ton of detail on the techniques of Product Management that make the most sense here, but “Inspired” by Marty Kagan and “Nail It, Then Scale It” by Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom (especially the Nail It section,) are a great place to start. “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries also has a lot of great resources on this topic.
You may be able to use reasonably junior product managers for some smaller projects. Still, generally speaking, a more senior product manager for any sizable product will probably be necessary to establish the right culture of innovation, experimentation, and measurement, as well as the everyday tasks of keeping a healthy backlog of ideas for the team to keep moving forward.
Very briefly, let’s talk about an anti-pattern in Product Managers. They are not the decision maker. They facilitate the team making decisions. In the worst-case scenario, they cast the tie-breaking vote or override the team with a lean experiment that will shed data on the direction the team should go next. These Product Managers need to partner and lead their team through influence, not the strength of will.
Engineering Team
Engineering teams will be comprised of at least two software engineers, never less. A team of one is no team at all. Having at least two engineers allows individuals to take time off, attend conferences, and work on their career development without feeling bad about the project’s trajectory. Generally speaking, early on, you’ll be able to do a lot of the work with more junior and mid-level engineers, depending on how many integrations you’re using to leverage your core product, but as the product grows and expands, you’ll either need to give more responsibility to your engineers or bring on more senior engineers to help the product grow and scale successfully.
Initially, some of this higher level design and planning can be led by the engineering manager for the team. They’ll be responsible for establishing simple, workable engineering processes that keep the team building and deploying software regularly. Given the overall team size, your engineering managers (unless they’re fairly new to the profession) will likely manage two or even three teams. More than that is possible for short periods, but if the teams have very many ceremonies at all or if the overhead of your organizational processes (security, procurement, privacy, etc.) takes much tax on your engineering managers at all, it will be tricky for them to manage more than three teams at any given time.
Occasionally, as the team grows, you’ll need additional engineers beyond what the project demands to ramp a new engineer up on your technology stack or cross-train an engineer joining the program. This should give your more senior engineers on the team a chance to mentor the new team member. Still, you should encourage them to use the extra time to contribute to your base project definition so that your team’s next experiment will start from an even better place.
User Experience
User Experience Designers are crucial to at least two main parts of the Disruptive Innovation teams. First, they’ll help provide mock-ups and designs for the product’s progress, such as the long-term vision. These mockups will help the team understand the value proposition for this product and how customers are expected to experience the product. But these designs are a vision, not a goal to be achieved necessarily. The second thing the Designer will provide is a clear picture of how the critical feature of the minimum viable product (MVP, see “Lean Startup” if you’re unfamiliar or need a refresher) will work. Engineers should be able to quickly and easily convert these designs into a usable products.
One critical thing is a common design language shared between Engineers and Designers. We recommend something simple and easy to use, like Twitter’s Bootstrap UI framework, but any design library will work. The goal here is to constrain Designers to use “off-the-shelf” components as much as possible so that Engineers can quickly and easily assemble those components and focus on the core business logic that makes the product valuable to your customers. You’ll need to customize it a bit to make it look like the rest of your site, but with minimal overhead, you can have a simple and usable design library.
Another couple of things we’ve tapped our Design teams to help with have been both kickoffs and collecting user feedback. Kickoffs are the first three to five days of a new product and typically involve a Design Sprint (See “Sprint” by Jake Knapp for more information on this technique). Still, historically we used a more home-grown approach of collaborating on a Lean Canvas to identify the product attributes. Having a designer lead this effort is helpful because they’ll become very familiar with the user’s use cases, pain points, jobs to be done, and desires.
Our Design team has also been invaluable in collecting user feedback. We’ve used a number of techniques, from paying for feedback via tools like Usertesting.com to capturing structured data in our own Usability Lab (pre-Covid of course) or other tools like Hotjar and FullStory that allowed us to monitor user sessions after the fact. Teams would often do lunch every week or two and review key user sessions pre-selected by our UX team to help everyone feel connected to the pain and successes of our customers.
Marketing & Sales
The Marketing team will be critical in the early-stage Disruptive Innovation teams. Since it’s a brand-new market or product, user acquisition will be essential. A strong Marketing partnership will allow you to either “buy” users via search engine marketing (SEM) or run successful marketing campaigns via email or other mediums. Additionally, Marketing will be key in testing the messaging on your products’ landing pages, ensuring that the value proposition to users is clear and crisp.
Depending on the product, you may also need some Sales representation. The Sales team will help test the various paths to customer acquisition (direct sales, phone sales, etc.). Sales will also be instrumental in discussions and experiments centered around pricing models and price testing. Some products will not require a Sales team member, but having someone to bounce ideas off of or give other advice will still be helpful.
Program
Program Management plays a vital role in running the Incubation program as a whole and guiding each Disruptive Innovation team through various hurdles that may present themselves. Either way, the Program function will make sure that dates and deliverables are communicated, they’ll help break down some of the larger projects into smaller milestones, they’ll work with various stakeholders to make sure trains keep running on time and equally important, they’ll spearhead capturing the key learnings from each project as it shuts down or exits.
Let’s first examine the program as a whole. Here, Program will manage the group’s calendar to ensure that all executive check-ins, regular and continuation pitches, and learnings presentations where acquired or shut down projects share their learnings with the broader organization and company. Program will also be helpful here in securing various commitments from partner teams around the organization to keep the Incubator program running smoothly. Teams like Procurement, Security, Accessibility, and Privacy will often want both commitments to quality and safety. Still, they will (with some finagling) be willing to give some concessions on speed, knowing that Disruptive Innovation teams will often only last a few quarters.
How Program supports individual teams will vary based on the team’s goals, where in the project lifecycle this team is (newly funded, rapidly growing, preparing to exit, etc.) Program will help ensure that any applications or services the team needs access to are quickly secured. Program will also be the heartbeat pushing the team to capture and share learnings regularly with the teams around them and the company. Program is a bit of a catch-all role, so it would be impossible to list everything they will do, but consider them the conduit through which most interactions with outside teams/organizations will often flow. As such, they play a critical role in helping the team keep their speed of delivery high.
Legal
Depending on your organization’s risk tolerance, your partnership with Legal could vary between a consultant on your projects and a key stakeholder with “veto” power over the Disruptive Innovation teams. The key here is to build a partnership with Legal that helps them understand that your program will work to minimize risk (fewer customers, less revenue, less data, less time, etc.) in exchange for a bit more forgiveness if they push the boundaries too far.
It will be helpful to understand the key risk areas for the company as a whole (e.g., financial or health insurance compliance, Fair Credit Reporting Act or other disclosure requirements, or something else entirely.) We regularly referred to the largest risks for our company as the four horsemen, as they had the potential to end everything. These are critical to understanding and regularly training your team about them so that they can avoid running afoul of them.
Beyond the general company-ending type risks, each of your Disruptive Innovation teams will often face several other risks. Having a partner in Legal who can help navigate these risks and update any terms and conditions, privacy policies, or other legal documents will help maintain smooth operations. Initially, they’ll want to work on language that also protects the company from “beta” products. This umbrella legal coverage gives your team a lot of room to experiment.
Hiring for Disruptive Innovation
Creating and growing this team will require a fair amount of external hiring (and a healthy amount of internal transfers.) The challenge is that your Disruptive Innovation teams will likely have a rather different approach to software development than your other teams. With that in mind, simply reusing your existing hiring approach will not likely provide you with team members who are well-aligned with the Scaling Innovation approach. Hiring for these Disruptive Innovation teams is always tricky, but we’ve found a few techniques to make things a bit easier.
Flexibility
Not surprisingly, Flexibility is a key attribute of Disruptive Innovation teams and team members. You’ll need team members who can flex from their core discipline into customer support, user experience, product strategy, sales, and so much more. Additionally, flexibility will be key in finding team members who can quickly move from one project to another without being overly attached or crestfallen when a project ends.
Finding genuinely flexible people is one of the hardest things to interview for. Of course, typical behavioral interview questions will give you some indication. Still, we’ve found a number of questions like “Tell me about a time when you had to do something that wasn’t in your job description” or “Tell me about a time when you had to ‘hack’ a non-technical system to your benefit” can help you find people who not only are flexible but those who genuinely enjoy flexibility.
Initiative
Gets sh*t done. See’s a problem, kills a problem. Doers. Whatever you want to call them, people with initiative are worth their weight in gold. Initiative is critical for Disruptive Innovation teams because there’s much to be done and many more problems to fix. Of course, initiative on its own is a bit dangerous. You don’t just want people who took initiative on the various inane tasks that cropped up, but instead, those who could discern which items were worth their precious time and attention. Spotting initiative in a typical interview is tricky, but with deep questions about the work they undertook at previous employers or a few behavioral questions like “Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond” or “Tell me about a time when you had an idea and saw it implemented” you’ll be able to spot those who possess more initiative regularly.
Jack of All Trades
Being a “jack of all trades” can be considered a negative in many places, but for Disruptive Innovation, it’s a very strong complement to the flexibility we discussed earlier. Not only are you willing to take on a customer support call, but you also have vital emotional intelligence and can help solve problems to make the customer happy again. Or perhaps you can solve backend business value problems and create a clear user experience. Whatever sets of skills you have, they’ll be useful if put into practice.
There’s a good corollary to this: hiring for diverse experiences and backgrounds will give your team more chances for success. Bringing on diverse talent with varying years of experience, skills, previous company sizes, industries, and other factors will empower your team in ways a monocultural team could never achieve. Yet another win for diversity!
Happy Easter, everyone. I hope you all had a great Easter weekend with your family and friends. It was a beautiful weekend to celebrate, and amazing to see the confluence of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. I hope all of your celebrations have been equally blessed. This time of year, the grass is starting to grow, the trees are putting out their leaves, and flowers are blooming. It’s a time of rebirth, which seems very apropos, given we’re three weeks into a new start of our own. New growth builds on previous expertise and experiences, so let’s start by looking back at where we’ve been.
Another characteristic I appreciated about Indeed was the autonomy in the Engineering organization. I regularly saw teams given the leeway to set their goals, the measures of success, and the methods to accomplish their plans. I know this isn’t the case everywhere within Indeed and isn’t common in other companies I’ve worked at, but it was something I found impressive about Indeed.
We have autonomy in spades now that we’re laid off, but it’s a double-edged sword. We have the freedom to do everything and the opportunity to do nothing. We have to provide the structure for ourselves on how we utilize our time. As for me, I’m trying to balance time spent networking with time spent in self-development. Networking with those laid off and in the workforce rekindles old friendships and opens new opportunities. Self-development means journaling about what’s next in my career and “sharpening the saw” by writing some code again.
Even after you find your next job, this sense of and desire for autonomy will not immediately disappear. In fact, according to this HBR article, autonomy is now a key driver in selecting jobs and staying with companies. I appreciated the suggestion to focus on principles over policies and the breakdown of self-determination into autonomy, competence, and relatedness. (12 min read)
Looking forward
I’m hearing some stories of laid-off employees finding their next role and want to say “Congratulations!” to each of you. I know some roles will take longer, so some will be searching for some time. For you, my advice is “keep your hopes up.” Opportunities are out there even in hard times; they’re harder to find.
When you’re interviewing, most companies will give you several opportunities to ask questions (if they don’t, it’s a pretty big red flag for me.) While this article is specifically about interviewing for a VP of Engineering role, this set of questions to ask when interviewing should be a valuable resource. (8 min read)
Today’s Tip
After two weeks in a row of LinkedIn tips, I wanted to branch out and suggest some new tools. I realized a little too late that with our health insurance expiring at the end of the month last month, I should have decided earlier which insurance to get for this month. I knew I had the fallback option of COBRA coverage which could be reinstated retroactively, but I did not connect the dots that many open-market insurance plans don’t take effect until the start of the next month. It’s not a huge issue to have a one-month gap in insurance; however, since we had several appointments scheduled this month, it is a challenge. So, for those who’ve been putting off this work, if you’re considering a non-COBRA plan and you want coverage next month, be sure you get the selection made before the end of this month.
Fun Stuff
Sorry for the bit of language in this week’s fun stuff, but these are pretty tame and all too appropriate right now.
Editing your resume and …
Finally, getting back to the gym like:
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For full transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences. https://onlynewmistakes.com/
