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Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
In a fast-paced industry like ours, team management is not only a moving target; as a company grows and scales, the way you manage your team can also be a competitive edge in itself. Factor in hybrid, remote, and cross-time-zone working arrangements, and things can quickly get complicated.
We spoke with Michelle Brooks (Chief People & Culture Officer at Security Compass) and Mike Gozzo (Chief Product Officer at Ada) to get some tips about how they design and manage high-performing teams.
Key takeaways:
- Strong communication is crucial, and prioritizing in-person face time with your team can make a huge difference.
- Transparency can do wonders for teamwork, allowing people the ability to have open conversations and providing important context to make decisions.
- When hiring, start by thinking about business needs and use those to define roles, as opposed to picturing a certain type of candidate. That way, you’ll avoid unnecessarily limiting your talent pool.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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Creating and maintaining a high-performing startup team – especially across time zones – requires communication, intention, and the right hiring framework. But what does this look like in practice?
Today, we’re sharing some insights on hiring, leading, and team communication from Michelle Brooks, Chief People & Culture Officer at Security Compass, and Mike Gozzo, Chief Product Officer at Ada.
1. Communication Is Crucial
Mike knows from experience that good communication is key when it comes to making decisions – before Ada, he headed a global team at Zendesk, managing across time zones and continents. He realized a couple key insights during this time:
- Written communication should be prized as a key skill, especially when working remote. “I can’t stress how much how important writing is as a skill for anybody in the new remote environment that we’re operating in,” said Mike. “Clarity of the written word and the ability to use language to make sure that the concepts are understood and are inspiring is a superpower.” This is especially true when communicating how a task relates to the company’s overall strategy and vision.
- Meet in person as often as possible. At Ada, the executive team meets in person at least once a month, and he tries to visit his staff as often as possible as well. “We can’t underestimate how important it is sometimes to just get on a plane and not talk about work when you get off on the other side,” said Mike.
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2. Foster Transparency For Better Teamwork
Another north star for Mike is transparency, specifically when it comes to work processes—and especially when managing product teams. Mike observed a common criticism when it comes to product: that other teams give them feedback based on their own perspective or customer comments, but the product team doesn’t respond. Making their work more transparent, by documenting product requests and customer feedback notes as well as the product team’s response, means that it can be “viewed and audited” across the business—but it also allows the product team room to prioritize while explaining their rationale.
“If somebody wants to argue with the rationale, there’s a basis for them doing it,” said Mike. “And they do pick it up and argue sometimes. But making sure these things are just part of the drumbeat and part of how it operates and done in a consistent way is really key.”
Likewise, Michelle Brooks, Chief People & Culture Officer at Security Compass, uses transparency as a guiding principle for SaaS leaders, describing it as “giving as much information as you can, at all times.” For example, if an employee knows the company is aiming at a certain outcome (for instance, an exit or product launch), they can use that insight to help determine which tasks are higher priority. Being transparent not only builds trust and fosters better communication, but it also “gives people the context to make decisions,” said Michelle.
3. Keep It Simple
For product managers especially, balancing myriad requests, practicing good communication, and spending time with different teams can place a huge demand on your time. Mike encourages them to focus on simplicity and solving the right problem: being the voice of the customer in product meetings to ensure the right solution is being built.
“Product Managers in any of the [organizations] that I’ve run really obsess about whether or not they truly understand the problem that the customer is facing,” said Mike. “Does it change that customer’s life at the end of the day? Because if it doesn’t, we can sell as much product as we want [and] you’re going to ultimately hit a wall where the technology that we are delivering isn’t resonating and being loved by and sticky with our customers.”
4. Define Roles First, Then Identify Competencies
When it comes to hiring, Michelle says it’s tempting to start by thinking of a type of person when describing a role. This is especially the case in early-stage startups, where roles might need to be relatively flexible or change scope quickly. But she cautions against that, instead recommending that hiring managers focus on what the role in general will be doing—because designing a great team starts with business needs and flows down to the individual, not the other way around.
Once you’re clear on what the job looks like and what tasks this person will do every day, you can move on to identifying which competencies are necessary to complete the tasks. Then, it’s a matter of outlining a decision-action structure for each role, defining what percentage of this role’s time will be spent doing the following:
- Tactical execution: Doing a task.
- Operationalizing: Planning or designing processes by which work is done.
- Strategizing: Ideating at a high level to set a target or overall plan.
Once that is done, it’s easier to envision the type of person you want to hire—and you can even design a candidate persona to help with this process.
Michelle emphasizes this order of operations for a reason: it puts you in a position to “pick up talent from places you didn’t expect.” In other words, you might be unnecessarily limiting your talent pool to people who have only occupied certain types of roles in the past if you don’t think business-first. “If you can think about competencies, what will happen is that persona will look very different,” said Michelle.
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