Scaling with Medallia’s “tasty dogfood”
If you’re selling software to help manage customer experience, chances are you know a thing or two about how to treat employees too.
One such enterprise, actually the fastest growing customer experience company in the world, is Medallia. Recently identified as a Leader in a recent Forrester research report, they enjoy a client retention rate of 98%. They are also massively scaling up their team.
We spoke with Christy Lake, who leads the People & Culture organization at Medallia, to find out about the systems they have developed to support their high-speed expansion.
As Medallia is growing so rapidly, how do you maintain your culture?
The first step here is to treat our existing employees as customers. This means gathering feedback and objectively assessing our performance based on their degree of engagement and the likelihood that they would recommend working at Medallia to others.
We segment this by team and also by key demographic dimensions such as race and gender to help us generate specific goals within the organization. We refer to this internally as our “framework for inclusion”.
An important process here is identifying key user personas and understanding the “moments that matter” to them. These are points with the potential to have a significant impact on the employee’s experience.
For example, we have the “Road Warrior” persona for those who travel frequently — like our Sales and Services leaders who are often meeting with current and prospective customers.
Moments that matter for Road Warriors include dealing with expenses while in transit and without access to a laptop/desktop. To make sure this does not become a source of frustration, we use mobile applications for submitting/approving expenses. Other moments are finding contact information and making up the travel program. We anticipate their needs. We are also looking at things like overnight shipment of milk for new mothers who are breastfeeding.
Not surprisingly, we “eat our own dogfood” — we use our own product (Medallia Experience Cloud) to support our development. For example, we gather input from employees with the “Feedback Management” component, and keep track of how we are doing with the “Performance Measurement” component. This ensures employees become experienced users of our product, giving them greater sensitivity to opportunities for improvement. In a way, this approach has not only helped us scale, but is part of the reason we are scaling in the first place!
With new employees, we are very careful about who we bring in, making sure that they are a good fit for our culture.
What is your interview process?
After an initial screening process, we carry out interviews with specially trained staff to look more into their skillsets and compatibility with our company culture. You can see our interview guide here.
As part of this process, we capture statistics about the acceptance rate from initial screening to offer in order to keep tabs on potential bias in the recruitment process.
Could you expand on how you assess whether people are a good fit for Medallia?
We have a number of key company values. When interviewing candidates, we assess how well their individual competencies are aligned with these.
For example, one of our company values is having a “Growth Mindset”. This concept came from research carried out by the psychologist Carol Dweck. To summarize:
Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning.
In companies with a growth mindset, employees feel far more committed, collaborative, and supported in innovation — all things we need for Medallia to continue to succeed. In order to cultivate a growth mindset, it is important to be humble — not to think that you have the answer to all the questions already. So we look for humility in our prospective employees — even at the expense of raw skills if necessary!
The same goes for our value of “Digging Deep to Understand” — we want employees to understand the reasoning behind decisions and to feel free to challenge them if there is some argument or set of data that is unconvincing (see Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the “why” for more on this). We look to hire people with a natural curiosity. We ask questions like “Could you tell us about an experience you learned something from?”.
Could you tell me a bit more about the training process for interviewers?
We use a shadowing process to train our hiring managers. Those who have been trained are shadowed by new hiring managers to learn about how to conduct interviews and to compare analysis. Then the trainee starts leading interviews, now shadowed by the experienced interviewer. Once the experienced interviewer is happy, the junior is able to conduct interviews single-handedly.
What does your onboarding process process look like?
We devote 3 ½ days to culture — going over company values, the working environment and company history. We also assign mentors who are outside the new starts’ reporting lines to help them get up to speed. We find that it is valuable to create these social ties so new employees can ask the “dumb questions” everyone has when they start without worrying about whether it may affect their performance reviews.
We get them to share about themselves — what is hard or meaningful to them, as well as what brings them joy and makes them feel proud. This makes sure they feel comfortable to bring their whole selves to work. For more on this, see Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability.
What is your approach on diversity?
As Lauren, our leader of Diversity & Inclusion, said in a blog post:
The dream is for everyone to have a great experience, and feel equally able to contribute and equally valued. It’s less about, “Do we exactly mirror the makeup of the U.S. workforce?” and more, “Are we attracting the best people?” We’re interested in both mirrors — someone who understands where I’m coming from — and windows — someone who challenges me and shows me a new way. Each one of us is better when we’re exposed to diverse beliefs, behaviors, and cultures.
To increase the talent pool we can draw upon, we have a number of partnerships with external organizations. These include Path Forward who help caregivers return to the workforce after taking time out for their kids or elder care, Breakline who help recruit military veterans, and Year Up who set up internships for disadvantaged youth. Working with these organizations, we’ve made some great hires.
We also have a number of internal groups who help people feel welcome when they join, for example Q-Field, our LGBTQ+ group and Women @Medallia, who are a great source of professional support.
What initiative are you excited about?
Recently we have been having a lot of success with our new approach to leadership training. Instead of the conventional approach where trainees spend most of their time listening to the trainer, we have an extremely practical focus, drilling in very specific skills in areas such as conflict management and negotiation.
If you were trapped on a desert island, what would be the one people management tool you would take with you (besides Medallia Experience Cloud)?
Zoom — so I can connect with people :-)
How would you describe Medallia in a single tweet?
Fast growth startup, global impact, #wearehiring
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