weeSpring Founder: “We Don’t Do Meetings!”
Originally published on July 28, 2015
Allyson Downey runs a team that leverages talent across multiple time zones to scale weeSpring, her fast-growing startup that helps new and expecting parents collect advice from their friends about what they need for their baby. She dreamed up the company after a particularly stressful trip to Babies R Us before the birth of her first child. Now a mother of two and CEO, Downey combines the power of remote with her well-honed management skills (she holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and boasts past gigs at Random House and Credit Suisse). She shared with PowerToFly some of her secrets for building a platform that features a universal baby registry and thousands of product recommendations for new parents.
How do you manage your remote team? What are your best practices?
We use Slack as our primary channel of communication (otherwise, everyone’s email inboxes would explode). We also use Hangouts often to talk things through live.
What are the benefits of hiring remotely? Do you have people in different time zones?
For us, there were no real drawbacks to having remote workers (and we’ve always been partially virtual, even from day one). We’re in four time zones across the U.S., which occasionally gets a little confusing when scheduling, but it’s never been a real problem.
What are your favorite tools or apps for task/workflow management?
We use Trello and Slack.
How do you keep your teams accountable?
We are really heavily focused on outcomes, rather than process. Everyone knows what their responsibilities are, and we look at results instead of time spent.
How do you keep your team feeling connected? Do you have any tips for creating a strong company culture?
We have continuous conversations all day long over Slack and really leverage it to collaborate and get other members of the weeSpring team to weigh in. Being able to tag someone in an ongoing thread to ask their opinion has been incredibly helpful for us. We also work hard to maintain core values (quality over quantity, keep it simple, “for parents, by parents,” and done is better than perfect), all of which speak to the idea of making your work fit around your family, rather than the other way around.
Can you share a little about your experience hiring through PowerToFly?
We were blown away by the caliber of candidates we found through PowerToFly, and we now have two rockstar women working for us. They both have babies, and they’ve made a tremendous contribution to weeSpring — sometimes at 11 p.m., sometimes at 6 a.m., sometimes at 3 p.m. It’s no big deal for one of our team members to say, “I’m going to be offline for a few hours because I’m taking the baby to get lunch with my family.” Everyone knows that she’ll pick up where she left off, and get the job done in a way that works around her life.
What does your day look like with your team? What type of meeting schedule do you have?
We don’t do meetings! Or at least, we keep them to an absolute minimum and just use them as strategy sessions. Everyone gets her job done on her own schedule — and having very few meetings leaves more time to get the day-to-day work done.
Tell us a little more about your company.
weeSpring helps new and expecting parents collect advice from their friends about what they need for their baby. We launched in 2013, and since then, we’ve built up hundreds of thousands of product recommendations for new parents. We also have a new universal baby registry, which allows parents to register for anything, from any store.
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