The recent few months have impacted tech companies of all sizes, from seed to post-IPO. Within these companies, tech leaders have had to readjust their processes and practices to work more effectively, and align with their companies’ changing priorities. Which new technologies do these leaders look for and prioritize? How do they handle scaling / downsizing / process challenges while their employees are working remotely? Overall, how do these leaders best juggle those priorities that are tugging them from all directions? We recently held our fifth panel conversation to answer these burning questions. Joining us this week were, Peter Secor, VP Engineering, Slack, Tamar Bercovici, VP Engineering, Box, and Nadav Leshem, Co-Founder & CTO, Jolt.
We have a recorded session or you can read a summary of our conversation:
Slack had a pretty notable product launch during the pandemic…how’d you pull that off? What are the learnings and how did you get everybody on the same page?
Peter: We’ve had a number of big launches over the past few months. One thing we did was measuring from a developer perspective how productive everyone was. We found that actually not much changed at all. Within three weeks everyone was basically back to their normal productivity models for the most part. Only real difference was that we were physically not in the same locations so we just gave everyone $1,000 to buy stuff to make their home work environment comfortable so they could be productive. For product releases, we actually did not change our workflows much at all.
Aaron Levie talks a lot about his desire to get back to seeing people in-person. How is Box thinking about the work environment over the next few months? Is productivity changing at all?
Tamar: We’ve found that we are able to have meetings more efficiently. People are more on time, conversations are single threaded so they are more focused and streamlined. Everyone is being intentional about when we ask people for meetings because everyone is juggling more at home with kids, homeschool, etc. So meetings are moving out of the lunch hour, for example.
As we look forward, we already had a process for people going remote and we’ve certainly seen an uptick in that. We had a policy that Boxers could work remote full time until the end of the year. The world has focused this rapid shift to work remote and we’ve all seen things we can’t unsee — some things are definitely better now and will likely be here for the long haul. When we come out of this, we’ll reform the way we work in a different way.
Jolt just went through moving its physical learning spaces for its product to online. Can you walk us through how you did that?
Nadav: For a lot of our students, it’s about survival now so we have to respond quickly to what is going on to best meet their changing demands. We found that it was surprisingly easy to work from home. For us as technology leaders, it’s kind of easier for us to understand how to create online/offline pipelines to facilitate the change. So we think it’s our responsibility to teach the rest of the company how to work this way. New conversation with your team — what is the best way to motivate them to be productive?
How do you keep the team motivated now three months in? How do you prevent burnout?
Tamar: At Box, our product strategy is not at odds with what is happening. A lot of customers find us to be existential for them which has proven to be a huge motivating factor for our team. Our weekly company all hands has actually been really amazing even over Zoom which isn’t what I thought would be the case. It’s become much more intimate, engaging, etc. and we’ve brought in customers to join for a few minutes since they no longer have to travel to participate. It’s tightened our relationships with customers.
With our team, you have to uplevel the volume and make more time for Q&A and conversation setup with the team. Standing hours to be on Zoom, where team members can hop in to talk or ask questions. More asynchronous communication.
Peter: One thing that has changed for us, is having lots of quick direct message conversations with more people. I personally upped my use of these messages by 25x since the pandemic. I block out 20 min to ask as many questions as I can to get the info I need and then some of these can blossom into Zoom chats if need be. One other thing we’ve done that’s different is upping the frequency that we do AMAs. We bring different people from across the company in to answer how they just went through a specific project and people can ask anything about the process. The learnings are much clearer and direct.
What is going to happen to physical office space? What do you think Jolt will do to change the way it operates a year from now? What will you keep?
Nadav: One initiative that I’ve been trying to push for the last year was to have start an offshore development center, but managing that from afar seemed like it was going to be difficult. But the crisis has given this idea renewed importance. Now is a great time to innovate and try new things. Recruiting for this center was actually really simple because Zoom has made it easy to interview all these people. Onboarding has been more challenging because of the lack of face to face interaction and small talk. We’re still figuring that part out.
Peter: We have always paid attention to creating a very diverse funnel for hiring. We have a number of programs internally and are intentional about trying to find as many different types of people as possible. We’ve proven that it’s possible to be just as productive to work remotely than in office and so we have changed our hiring process to focus on finding the best candidate no matter where they are. We’ve made every position work remote-enabled. One rule we made is you have to be within three time zones of your team, and this is mostly to help with onboarding and improving communication with your team. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but we want to see where this goes.
Tamar: I think we’re going to find that different people have different preferences of how they like to work. For larger companies with a big headcount, we’re all going to have to figure out how to accommodate different groups of people and their different preferred working structures. All of us being remote is an incredible equalizer. We’ve seen that we are most productive when we are predominantly in an office, but we’ve also seen now that can be true if we are all predominantly remote. We’re going to have to figure out what the path forward looks like when we get back to the hybrid model.
I do think the timezone aspect is interesting in that having some window in the day where you can have “in-person” conversations is going to be really important. This is critical for how you build community in a smaller team.
How do you think about working with startups and build vs buy decisions?
Tamar: If it’s something that has to do with our core product differentiation, that’s something we’ll build vs buy. If it’s more about how we better serve customers, that’s a deeper conversation that has a lot of moving parts and stakeholders. The places where we are more open to experimenting with smaller startups, is outside those big areas. There is more flexibility for us to try things out in those departments. Anything where we are investing in our team to be more successful is another area where we look to bring in the best outside platforms because it isn’t tied with our customer base directly.
Peter: If you’re thinking about core functions, you’re going to want to build not buy. If I’m going to need to modify something down the road, I’m going to want to have built that.
Nadav: One thing that was really noticeable in this crisis was that everyone switched into commando mode where everyone is being super scrappy. Everyone wants to shine — so empowering people to find hacks and unearth interesting data has been really valuable to us.
Have you had to build any new tools that you didn’t necessarily have to have before?
Tamar: We’ve definitely looked through our product roadmap and listened to customer to figure out what to focus on and where to invest our time and resources to enable remote work and how we best serve our customers during this time.
