#11: Zapier’s “AirBnOnboarding” 🏖👨💻
Claire Lew on eschewing "judo solutions," Calvin French-Owen on the two surprisingly simple jobs of enterprise software, and Wade Foster on Zapier's unique (non)remote onboarding process.
Hi there,
Welcome to the eleventh edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of KnowYourTeam’s co-founder Claire Lew, Segment’s co-founder Calvin French-Owen, and Zapier’s co-founder Wade Foster.
#1. Claire Lew, co-founder and CEO of KnowYourTeam, encourages founders to abandon the all-pervasive, Pareto mindset for certain challenges and to accept the truth that sometimes, making something meaningful, just takes a while. (Source: Relay)
Constraints have become something that I’ve changed my perception of, I think, slowly over time. Previously, I think I’d always been searching for the “judo solution” amidst constraints. That is, how can you get the maximum outcome by doing the least? And while that’s a useful frame for some problems, I think other times, in the face of certain constraints, it’s frustrating.
For example, when you’re faced with certain constraints in your business (e.g., capital, people, time), yes, you can totally seek out the minimum thing to do that gets you the maximum effort.
But also, I think if you want to create something special or meaningful, sometimes you have to accept that the constraint just means something will take more time – and that’s okay.
I think as entrepreneurs, when we’re faced with constraints, self-imposed or not, we can be hungry for the “hack” or elevator that zooms us up to the top. But when we don’t find that, it haunts or burdens us. Instead, I think realizing that amidst constraints, something will just take longer, is an important truth to accept.
A perfect example of this I think is the writing we do on our blog. I could’ve looked for the judo solution for creating organic traffic (e.g., hire content writers + editors) – but I had a specific vision for what I wanted the content to be. And I knew that we had the constraint of cash.
As a result, I’ve chosen over the past 6 years to write every single one of our 100s of blog posts myself (with maybe ~4 exceptions). And we’ve gotten incredible traffic because of it + built a loyal audience. But it also took 6 years. And I wrote everything. There was no “judo solution” because of the constraint, and I chose to be okay with that because of the vision I had in mind.
#2. Calvin French-Owen, co-founder of Segment, expands on an illuminating — “basic” — realization, that “the most valuable products more or less offer a single value prop: you don’t need to ask permission to get your job done.” (Source: Calvin’s blog)
I’ll let you in on a secret—the true value of every enterprise product, from AWS to JIRA to Salesforce, is accomplished by just two things:
1. enterprise software encodes the rules for what to do
2. enterprise software automates the doing to avoid the waiting
That’s it! Great software means that my maze isn’t a maze at all, but a high-powered assembly-line that fast-tracks me exactly where I needed to go. Great software takes all the guesswork out of getting something done, and lets me do it without asking permission.
…
Once software has 1) enforced and 2) automated the rules, then a second-order benefit emerges: de-coupling.
Of the superpowers that great products unlock (greater efficiency, cost savings, reductions in puzzled faces), the biggest is what I’d call “de-coupling” an organization.
In software, when a codebase gets to a certain size, we decide to break it up. We intentionally split the functionality into pieces so the different teams can work independently.
When this happens, these two teams are now “de-coupled.” Each one can move as quickly as possible, in whatever direction it wants to, so long as they don’t break the contract they have with one another.
As it turns out, the exact same thing happens in a business. Layers of your organization can move years faster by not having to block or make decisions for one another. They are, in effect, “de-coupled.”
...
When thinking about building great software for the enterprise, a question that we don’t ask ourselves enough is: “how can my product save asks for permission?”
We started building Segment by trying to save developers time in integrating various analytics tools. It was a simple need, with a simple solution (one API that adapts to all others). And unwittingly… we helped save PMs from asking their engineering teams for permission to use new tools.
In that time, we’ve learned a bunch of lessons about how to save users from asking for permission:
1. build API-first — for years, we didn’t support an API for administrative options (creating users, workspaces, etc). Building new products first as an API saves you from having to constantly add features to meet the customization in the enterprise, and it’s an area I wish we’d invested in earlier.
2. sane defaults and escape hatches can co-exist — in the early days, we thought there was a hard line between simplicity and customization. You could have a simple product, or one with lots of knobs to tune, but not both. In reality, it’s much more of a spectrum. The best products have customization and escape hatches at every level, but they guide the user towards ‘sane defaults’. Datadog does a great job with this, getting you value early from pre-configured integrations, but also allowing you to collect data in the ways you see fit.
3. invest in flexible permissions and notifications — there are three key areas to invest to become enterprise-ready. You want a) a flexible idea of users and teams b) an easy to customize set of permissions for what those users have access to and c) customizable notifications. Having those three things alone will let your product expand more easily into the enterprise.
Yet of all the things we’ve learned, the biggest lesson has come from how we’ve found our growth. Time after time, we’ve entered bigger and bigger markets by consistently de-coupling different parts of our customers' businesses.
#3. Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, shares a curiously-named, impactful page from their remote-first, operating cadence — AirBnOnboarding. (Source: BoS)
So once you’ve got folks hired, the next thing that we think about is what’s the onboarding process like? We do this unique thing called AirBnOnboarding, but before we get to that, let’s just talk about the normal type of onboarding.
So your first couple of weeks are spent remotely working on the job just getting setup, in tune with all the routine things you have. Do you have your accounts set up? Do you have a dev environment in place? If you do know the nuts and bolts of your typical job, and once you have that in place, this is where AirBnOnboarding comes in.
So the second week of every month we fly all the new folks out along with their hiring managers to the bay area. We rent a bunch of airbnbs and we co-work with them. And this is kind of a unique opportunity for us to really get that human connection with our new teammates early on in the process.
…
This is really important. Because new folks in your team, in the early days, they’re looking for kind of those social norms, those cues of what might make them more successful, so you have a chance to really, you know, change how people’s behaviour works and very early on that you don’t get later on.
You know, once six months comes around, they kind of start to set in their ways and do things in a particular way. And it’s a little bit tougher to change. So use these first couple of weeks on the job wisely to find ways to adapt into the way of work that you do. So, for example…
One of the things we do at Zapier we have this value of growth through feedback, we want folks to get good at giving and receiving feedback because that’s a big way that we work to improve our folks come from all sorts of types of environments where feedback may not be comfortable to give or receive or perhaps it’s done in a toxic way.
And so I actually take time to teach a course to all the new folks on how we give and receive feedback inside of Zapier to make it more comfortable in our environment. And this does a good job of kind of setting the expectations into the future.
And then lastly, you’re in person. So a lot of it’s just spent time building rapport that the founders are all hanging out with them. We’re getting to know them personally and we understand who their families are. We’ll play games within the night. We’d take them out to eat, all that sort of stuff that really lets people know, we care about why they’re here at Zapier. We care about their role and we know how their role is going to have an impact on the team. So that’s a big part of how we get folks onboarded.
Hope you enjoyed reading this edition of The Baton. The last one, this year. Whatever struggles these past twelve months have wrought, we wish you and your teams a 2021 that’s calm, restful, and brimming with meaning.
Until next time,
Astha and Akash