Unbouncers Uncovered: All Roads Lead to Unbounce
Hi there! Welcome to our new multi-part series where we’ll share with you stories from the talented people behind the landing page builder — Unbounce. Who better to tell you what it’s like inside our offices (and, frankly, now working remotely from the comfort of our homes around the world) than our wonderful Unbouncers themselves.
Meet Jon Ehrich. Jon joined Unbounce in 2019 as a Service Support Coach for our Customer Success team and has recently moved over to our People and Culture team as the Learning and Development Specialist for the CS department. Although Jon joined us initially in our Vancouver office, he is currently working remotely in Berlin (where we have another office in the trendy area of Berlin Mitte). His favourite part about Berlin is its openness to welcome people from so many different backgrounds — different cultures, ethnicities, religions, a thriving LGBTQIA+ scene, etc. A fun fact about Jon is that he is the only Unbouncer who has transitioned from working in our Vancouver office to Berlin, and soon will be on a plane back to Vancouver to enjoy the mountain scenery and spring weather.
We took the time to interview Jon and learn what it’s like working at Unbounce (on two continents) for him. Read on for an inside Unbounce perspective that only Jon can bring.
Tell us about your story? How did you end up at Unbounce?
My journey ending up at Unbounce was this meandering, zigzag throughout my career where with every new job, I would also just completely change the field that I’ve worked in. It wasn’t something that I intended, but it just kind of happened. I started out studying Japanese language. It was cool but then I wasn’t sure what to do with it. So I went into a more applicable field, linguistics. From there, I didn’t actually want to work in academics, so I went into science communication. I did PR for science organizations and then moved into working just in Marketing. By that time I was still living in Berlin, but looking to move to Vancouver and, well, when you look up the best employers in Vancouver, it’s hard to not come across Unbounce. It came up on so many lists.
So I applied for the Service Support Coach role. And then, funnily enough, when I sent in my application I didn’t even realize initially that there was a Berlin office. I only noticed during the interview process. I then finished the rest of the interview process directly with the Unbounce team in Berlin.
That’s kind of how that all came together. It was just me trying a whole bunch of different things over the course of my professional life and I just ended up here. Just striving to find a good place for me to work.
What does a day to day look like? What are you working on?
It really depends on what kind of projects I’m working on on any given day. So, I can tell you that right now, one of my main things that I’ve been working on since I’ve started in this position is optimizing or overhauling the onboarding process for the Customer Success department. That’s been a big one for me. I started out by just looking at how the process currently works, where we can do some improvements and now we’re going into actually creating full on new materials.
Outside of that, though, there is stuff that comes up all the time throughout the workweek. Because I’m specifically the Learning and Development Specialist for the CS department, I’m almost like a consultant for anyone in CS who wants to do some kind of training initiatives or learning opportunities for their team. For example someone would approach me and say, “Hey, I’ve noticed a particular skill gap or knowledge gap on the team, what can we do?”. So that’s the mixture of what I’m working on.
What’s something that you’re passionate about?
I will say something that I’m passionate about in my personal life, and that also weirdly became relevant when I started in this new position, is game designing. Not so much in the video games sense but more like in the collaborative kind of storytelling sense.
Game design has been an interesting resource for me to tap into. I remember about a week or two into this new position, I had this kind of moment, an epiphany, where I was a little stuck with one of my projects. And I thought, “Wait a second, this is basically what I’m doing in my hobby– like, all the time. Why don’t I just try to approach this project as if I would try to write a game for it?”. When you work in learning and development, you’re trying to come up with new formats to deliver content. So that was quite interesting for me to see my two worlds collide.
If you had to give advice to your younger self what would it be?
This kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning about my path getting to Unbounce; it would probably be you don’t need to know what you’ll be doing in five years, or even in two years. Looking back at what kind of path my life has taken and that it’s all worked out in the end is great, or at least so far. But it’s just the way that our society works I guess you’re expected to know. Once you’re done with school, you’re kind of expected to know what you’ll be doing and thinking about as a young adult in Germany. I would have been 19 when I finished school. But at that age, I had no idea what I’d be doing in the future. So I think I would just tell my younger self to just go with what seems interesting and see where that leads you and then things will work out, and you’ll find something that you enjoy.
What’s something you’ve been able to achieve at Unbounce that you’re proud of?
There was an initiative that I started in the Support team that I’m proud of. Last year we had this Slack channel called ‘CS classroom’ and it was created for knowledge-sharing just within the Support team. For a while it was kind of unclear what we wanted to use it for or how to use it. So last August I started posting in there just on a whim. It was something that I called ‘Did you know Unbounce…” which was basically little snippets of knowledge, little facts about the builder or some kind of software that we integrate with, anything that might come up in the support work. But it was material that isn’t covered in our documentation or that isn’t general knowledge. It was quite fun because it was fairly low effort for me, it would take five minutes out of my day to just check and share some weird facts. But what was more fun was over time I saw other people picking that up as well and start to share their facts as well.
At Unbounce we have many ‘fun’ Slack channels that have nothing to do with our work. What is your favourite Slack channel?
Oh, tough one. Lately I feel like I barely have time to check specific fun channels but #dailyfarm has been a blessing. I LOVE fluffy cows, and the photos from one of our Unbouncer’s farm in Northern B.C. are a balm for my soul.
Jon inspires us to go beyond the norm and to enjoy each moment. He teaches us the importance of embracing new possibilities and keeping an open mind when moving forward. He brightens every interaction with his infectious energy, willingness to help others and passion for knowledge-sharing which translates so well into his role.
At Unbounce, our diversity movement is at the forefront of our minds, and we celebrate the uniqueness of each Unbouncer and the talent that they bring to the table. Our people-first culture allows us to create an environment where Unbouncers feel CARED for and can do their best work. Unbounce is one of Canada’s fastest-growing tech companies and is the world’s leading landing page platform with a workplace of over 200 people who really, truly care about one another and 20+ very good office dogs.
If you’re interested in levelling up your career with Unbounce, check out our careers website to learn more about joining our team.
