Captain’s Log: Week 4

Our fourth week’s reflection in the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.

Recap

Our third week of the accelerator was all about leaving the lab. We honed our user discovery best practices, met with DivInc partners, and conducted a few user interviews. During our fourth week, we dug in deeper — kicked off a research collaboration for measuring impact, practiced our pitch, and interviewed more users.

Measuring impact. Social impact is as much a goal of ours as our bottom line. The DivInc program partnered us up with Social Venture Partners and Sustainability Investment Group members to help us thread this needle. We will align on 3-5 impact metrics that fit our business model and explain how that contributes to our business, users, and broader stakeholders.

Pitch practice. The pitch is a succinct, engaging encapsulation of what you’re working on, and something founders often share. We got best practices from Scroobious’ founder, Allison Byers, to refine our pitch. We also had time to pitch to the rest of our cohort and share feedback.

Even more interviews. We interviewed eight managers and validated portions of our jobs to be done framework. Our sample demographics now break down as follows:

• gender: 45.5% women, 54.5% men
• race: 45.5% Black, 9% Latinx, and 45.5% White
• company size: 73% from very large companies (>10,000 employees)
• management experience: moderate to significant

Our biggest learnings from the fourth week are:

All managers spend the most time doing interpersonal and administrative work. For context, we define interpersonal as aligning up, down, and across an organization or team. We define administrative work as HR functions, e.g., performance and comp reviews, budgeting, recruiting, etc. We’re also learning that managers leading craft-based teams must make time for individual contributor/creative time.

Most of the headache exists in aligning up, down, and across. Although we’re still interviewing and are currently synthesizing results, this consistently comes up in our conversations. When inquiring about managers’ most significant pain points, it’s frequently interpersonal work. It manifests as being spread thin that they can’t be proactive regarding their product work or nurturing their teams.

Tangibly, an interviewee from a large employment-focused company mentioned that becoming a manager was “trial by fire,” with “no training” and scarce documentation, save a few boilerplate videos.

Despite being integral for company’s success, managers are not set up for success by their organizations.

We’re learning that managers are regularly promoted by tenure or being an all-star independent contributor—neither of which innately predicts success. This experience comes with growing pains, especially as an underrepresented minority where the consequences of underperforming are higher. And yet, there’s little time given and resources for managers to use — a costly mistake, both monetarily and emotionally.

We’re still finding our rhythm as an organization. Last week, we accomplished a lot, but not everything we intended. Specifically, reaching out to our SMEs as we prioritized our research. That was in spite of us being in separate states, having narrow windows of collaboration time, and one of us experiencing personal hardship. Scoping work is hard; scoping amid life’s uncertainty is harder.

We should get feedback early and often from our users. We spoke with a program alum, founder, and fantastic woman, Madison Long, about her famous pivot halfway through the accelerator. Among other insightful nuggets, she shared an anecdote about how she validated the company’s new direction and demonstrated traction by surveying prospective users. Without writing code or wire framing, she gauged demand for by putting the concept out there and letting the public decide. In a matter of a couple of weeks, she had over 1,000 people on her waitlist.

What’s next

Our main goal is simple: to put our concepts out there and see what our users think. This week, we’re moving into giving our idea form. As we receive feedback, we’ll reflect and refine accordingly. Meanwhile, the interviews continue, especially from demographics not captured in our current dataset. The research never stops.

So, managers, what do you think about our ideas?

If you are or have been a middle manager, please give us your feedback in our short survey — should take about the time of your favorite song.

Here’s our current fave — enjoy!

If you’re looking for a quicker start on how to advance DEI and achieve your business outcomes, we’d love to talk to you. Let’s do better.

You can follow our accelerator journey here on Medium, our website, or our social media accounts.

Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better

Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better