Excel vs Salesforce 𧱠/ đą
The many (thought-inducing) gains of written interviews, two approaches to enterprise software, and notes on scalable pricing structures.
Hi there,
Welcome to the twenty-seventh 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!Â
In this edition, youâll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of SafeGraphâs Auren Hoffman, Trelloâs Michael Pryor, and Datadogâs Olivier Pomel.
#1: Why SafeGraph does written interviews (and why you should do them too) â SafeGraphâs founder and CEO, Auren Hoffman, lays out a case for instituting the written word in the interview process; âmy goal is not to hear the first answerâŠI prefer to hear the candidateâs best answer.â (Source: SafeGraph)
Most jobs at SafeGraph require a written interview. Weâve found these written interviews to be extremely valuable, and including them in our hiring process leads to better resultsâŠ
A written interview is not a testâŠand it is different from a project or presentation. It is essentially the same thing as a live interview except it is communicated in written form so candidates can take their time to compose their answers.
We simply send candidates a link to a Google Doc with 4â8 questions. We ask them to get us responses within 3 daysâŠso they should have ample time to think things throughâŠ.
While we are not arguing that companies should stop doing live interviews, we think replacing one of those live interviews with a written interview will significantly increase the interview experience (for both companies and candidates) and ultimately lead to better outcomesâŠ.
Not everyone does their best thinking on-the-spot (I certainly donât). Some people (myself included) need to take some time to think about a problem before having a decent answer. A candidate should be prepared to talk about some topics live and on-the-spot (like their work experience), but other areas require thought (and research) to deliver a good answer.
[Outside of salespeople, no other function in a company has âthink fast on their feetâ as a core requirement for the role.]
Written interviews can also change the dynamic of the interview process. With written interviews, you provide candidates an opportunity to comfortably showcase their creativity and critical thinking skills in a way that is abstracted from questions normally asked in an in-person interviewâŠ.
There are three types of well-written interview questions:
Expectations Questions are usually ones that give the candidate a chance to opt-out. For instance, if a job requires a massive amount of overseas travel, you might want to ask âthis job will require you to be on the road 6â9 days a month. Are you ok with that?â
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Research Questions are ones that require the candidate to do some research and get back to you. For instance, you might ask a marketing candidate: âEvaluate our website. What do you like and what can we do better?â
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Thought Questions are more open-ended questions that take consideration to provide meaningful answers. As an interviewer, my goal is not to hear the first answerâŠI prefer to hear the candidateâs best answer.
#2: Excel vs Salesforce â Trelloâs (and Fog Creekâs) co-founder, Michael Pryor, contrasts the two core paths of building horizontal, enterprise software and explains what both entail for users. (Source: Traction Conf)
The problem is, every time youâre adding features, youâre creating a more complex system. And thatâs what developers do all day long. You think of an abstraction and you create code around it. And then you present it to a person. Devs are really good at doing that.
But when you have that system and people come into it, then you have to explain to them what it does. So, for example, you use Salesforce, youâve got to come up to speed on what a lead is, what a contact isâŠthereâs all these concepts in there, all these rules around it.
Once you understand that, Salesforce becomes a very powerful tool to use as a sales person. And because Salesforce, the app, knows about the data that youâve put into it. It can tell you all these amazing things. I can be like, âhey, your pipeline is too short, youâre going to miss your quota next month.â
In Trello, weâre trying to do something more akin to what Excel did. Which was, weâre going to give you some building blocks thatâs going to help you solve the problem the way that you see the problem. Iâm not coming into a very specific role and saying, âhey, youâre a salesperson, these are the tools that you need, these are the objects in your world.â
You can add labels to cards and that can be whatever you want. I donât have a preconceived notion of how you work. So Trello is allowing you to build that system as you go. In the same way that when you put data into a spreadsheet, you start to tell excel, âwell this column represents this.â
Even when you go to add a chart in excel, you kind of have to tell it, what you want it to chart. It doesnât know. Whereas, like in Salesforce, you can be like, âhereâs your bookings next month.â
So building a horizontal tool where you donât know exactly what people are going to do with it, you have to think about giving them really easy building blocks. Itâs tricky, because then, thereâs a little bit of work that they have to do. But it also means that it can be applied to so many different situations.
#3: Reflections on enterprise pricing â Datadogâs co-founder and CEO, Olivier Pomel, recounts the essentials of arriving at a scalable pricing structure. (Source: Matt Turckâs blog)
Pricing, first of all itâs really hard to know what you need to price before you do it. The story there is when we launched a product, we priced the product initially we were going to price it at $12 per instance per month. And the night before we said âletâs put $15.â
If we put $15 it worked fine and you know later we actually raised that price to $18 and it didnât change any of the metrics. So thereâs really I think room for discovery in pricing.
In terms of pricing philosophy though, we had to be fair and what we wanted to achieve with the price and the number one objective for us was to be deployed as widely as possible precisely so we could bring all those different streams of data and different teams together.
I wanted to make sure we were in a situation where customers were not deploying us in one place and then forgetting the rest because they canât afford it.
We looked at the overall share, what it would get, how much they would pay for their infrastructure, we decided which fraction of that we thought they could afford for us, then we divided that by the salary and infrastructure you know so we could actually get a price that scales.
Now the most important thing about pricing as weâve been scaling it â and customers send us more and more data â is to make sure that customers have the control and they can align what they pay with the value of what they get.
So one common example is log management systems because machines are very good at generating large amounts of data and not all of it is valuable. Yet until very recently the only way we could buy log management was by volume so basically you sent everything and everything you send you get charged for it.
For that we had to differentiate, we had to find a way to give customers some flexibility so that they could actually say âthat part I donât care so much, that part I care about a lot more so Iâm going to do more with that part and pay more for that, that part Iâm not going to pay anything or going to pay very little for it.â
From the Relay archives:
AMAs: With YouCanBook.meâs co-founder and CEO, Bridget Harris. Featuring Bridgetâs thoughts on: Hiringâs principal/agent problem, why âbootstrapping is an art, not a strategy,â how âa degree off at the start is a huge degree off, 100x the scale,â and more!
Until next time,