What I've Learned at FullStory | Customers, Etc.
Learnings from some of the best five years of my life, before I begin my next journey
In my last post of 2021, I mentioned I would be hosting a webinar to talk about my MBA experience. Interested in joining? It will be next Tuesday, January 11 at 7 PM EST. Here’s the Google Meet URL. Reply to this email and I’ll add you to the calendar invite. See you then!
On Friday, January 7th, I will close out my chapter at FullStory. I’ll be taking on an exciting new opportunity in mid-January, which I’m eager to write about once that journey begins, but for right now I want to talk about FullStory. FullStory remains one of the best organizations I’ve ever had the pleasure and honor of working for and I find it easy to continue recruiting people and encouraging my peers to consider FullStory for their next career opportunity. (Seriously).
I’ve experienced more growth at FullStory than at any other point in my career. I’d like to take this newsletter to share a few of the things I’ve learned.
Models
A few months back I was part of a team researching a new area of product development. As the Technical Program Manager (TPM) responsible for the Costs program, it was my responsibility to model the costs. Most of the product decisions had already been made, so I slotted one week to model the costs associated with its design.
The first time I presented the model—I originally had thought there would only be one meeting about costs—there were a surprising number of questions. While the questions were couched in terms of the cost model I had proposed, in reality the fundamental design decisions about the new product direction were being called into question. Interesting. I had thought this was more of a formality.
Over the course of the next several weeks, multiple iterations of the cost model emerged, each with subsequent meetings that further questioned, clarified, and eventually changed design decisions about product direction. I’ll readily admit I wasn’t expecting this to happen, nor it was it my intention for product direction to change when I set about modeling costs.
What I learned from this experience is that models, however flawed, can give people an opportunity to ask questions, which can then be used as the foundation of an emergent strategy. Sometimes when you’re trying to make difficult decisions as a team, you can get caught up questioning all sorts of hypothetical technical scenarios. Though significant, these conversations can be difficult to pin down because of a lack of data—the thing in question doesn’t exist yet. Designing a model—however flawed, because all models are inherently flawed—gives you something to sink your teeth into. You can point out flaws, ask for clarification, and occasionally eliminate incorrect assumptions rather quickly because the answer is in the data.
Values
One of the things that can be confusing as a new manager of a small growth company is wading through the myriad tools and solutions designed to solve problems managers supposedly like you face on a day-to-day basis. The problem is that most solutions, quite reasonably, focus on established businesses with large teams—i.e. the enterprise—because that’s where they make most of their money. Businesses don’t usually design software for start-ups because start-ups aren’t going to be in the start-up phase for very long. They either grow out of the phase or go out of business. It makes sense not to target them at that stage! This presents a problem for managers at start-ups. Oftentimes the solutions that exist for helping large companies succeed aren’t the same solutions for the problems you’re facing on a day-to-day basis.
For example, if you’re looking to improve the quality of the customer support team’s interactions with customers, you’ll find solutions that are heavily driven by numbers: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and even internal QA tools all exist to give you a numeric representation of the quality of your team. To be sure, using a numeric approach to measure quality isn’t wrong—if you’re a large enough team, you certainly need to be measuring quality numerically—but numbers alone don’t tell the whole story, and they’re not the best way to drive behavioral change on a small and growing team. And for a start-up, driving behavioral change is critically important because the team must adapt to face challenges tomorrow that they’re not currently facing today.
One of the “aha!” moments I had while managing the support team was that we could use qualitative questions about FullStory’s watchwords to promote the behavioral changes on the support team to better align with the company’s values. I’ve written about how we implemented this process in Beware of Zombie Values and a bit at a high level in Contract Quality vs Brand Quality, so I won’t go into detail about the process here.
Asking qualitative questions related to the company’s values wasn’t the first selling point of any of the software solutions we had looked at when researching a QA tool for the support team, but that’s what we needed. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. It wasn’t about a ticket “score”. It was about internalizing values to provide consistent service to customers across all touch points in the customer journey1. It’s amazing how well this worked.
People
I think I’m probably an incredibly harsh interviewer. Nobody has ever told me that directly, but I give a lot more 2s than I do 3s. 4s are rare2. It’s not that I don’t want to work with the people I interview. Quite the opposite. When I’m talking with a candidate, I can’t help but get excited. Usually by the end of the conversation we’re both excited to start working together.
That’s usually how I approach my “hiring manager” calls. Let’s just get excited together about this opportunity, both for you and for us. I’m not trying to filter you out. Sure, maybe it becomes clear that you’re not a fit, but I’m mainly interested to see if you get excited about the problems we’re trying to solve. Just about everybody is a 3 or a 4 after the hiring manager interview. Great, let’s move on to the take-home challenge3.
Grading the challenge is where I get the sense that I’m harsh. If the hiring manager interview is where I’m mostly in System 1 “fast” thinking, grading the challenge is where I switch into System 2 “slow” thinking4. The challenge represents someone’s work. There’s very little opportunity for charm. Either you can do the work or you can’t.
What I love about the challenge is it gives you a work product that cuts through the noise that can sometimes crop up in face-to-face interviews, e.g. “I’m struggling to know if they’re a good fit for the role, but I absolutely loved my conversation with them” or “I dunno, they seem like maybe they can do the job, but they just didn’t have great energy.” As much as you want to hire someone because you enjoyed talking with them, you want to make sure they can do the work. Designing a good challenge helps with that. It also helps to eliminate bias that can creep in when we only rely on conversational interviews. This can let stellar candidates shine through via their work.
Why am I writing all of this stuff about hiring philosophy? The single greatest thing I learned at FullStory is that people are the most important part of the company. Do lip service to this insight at your peril. I’ve been at FullStory for over five years, which is a lifetime in the tech world. Hands down it’s because of the people.
I remember when I first started managing in customer support, I wondered if it even made sense to try to hire the very best people. Do smart, empathetic people hang around in customer support or do they just burn out and move on to greener pastures? I mean, if you’ve ever worked in customer support, it’s a fair question.
The customer support team at FullStory is phenomenal, blowing away any doubts I may have had about putting together a high-performing team. I was amazed at who we were able to add to the team (all while keeping a high hiring bar—it was a ton of work!). They do incredibly high leverage work on behalf of FullStory customers—both in and out of the queue—and I’m proud to have been part of their story.
Stay tuned
My next role will be in customer experience and I can’t wait to tell you about it. Make sure to subscribe to the Customers, Etc. newsletter so you get the news in your inbox.
If you’d like to learn more about my MBA experience, be sure to tune in next Tuesday at 7 PM EST via Google Meet. Reply to this email and I’ll add you to the calendar event.
And yes, I plan to continue writing this newsletter.
Even though my focus was on the touch points with the support part of the customer’s journey (i.e. mostly post-sales and related to retention), I had explored expanding this program as part of my brief stint leading customer experience management. I highly recommend using company values within various business functions to align the customer experience across all touch points.
The scale here is:
1 = Absolutely don’t hire this person
2 = No hire, but I could be persuaded otherwise
3 = Hire, but I could be persuaded otherwise
4 = Absolutely hire this person
I know that take-home challenges can get out of hand. I’ve been on the receiving end of those and have probably been guilty of handing out oversized bodies of work myself. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion we’re talking about an appropriately sized challenge that doesn’t feel burdensome to the candidate.
I’m borrowing language from Daniel Kahneman’s excellent work, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I'm sooooooo excited to hear where you're headed next. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾