Jiaona Zhang: belief

Transcript context

…That's right. And so the biggest things that I thought a lot about for my first 90 days was at the end of the day, yes, you have to really... The most important thing for anyone's for assigning days is to build context and to build context well. But what I had to think about a lot was, "How do I quickly build context probably faster than I would be given the luxury any other time in my life?" And so I thought a lot about who do I speak to at the company? How do I create even just a calendar of speaking to people? Yes, my leadership team, but also across a bunch of functions and then across a bunch of levels. So it was really important for me to even start talking to some of the engineers from the team, some of the engineers who had been there for the longest time to really understand, what's hard about our tech stack? What's going on? What's hard about your day to day? And so I actually took time to really think about, "I want to speak to all of these types of people at the company." And I packed my first couple weeks with a lot of those meetings. And so I think that was one piece, which is like how do you build context as quickly as possible? And my tip there is again, it's not just with your peers, it's not even just with your team, but to really think across all the different functions and then think about where you're going to get the most amount of information in that particular function. I think that was one piece of it. The other piece was I was like, "I'm going to be out." I was only out for two months, but I was like, "That's still a long period of time in the life of a startup." And so what it was really important to me was like, I did not go out having just listened and like "Great, I have the context, I'll see you in two months." But it was really important for me to actually have a plan in place before I went out for my team. And so there were pieces where I was like, "I want to first, again, get that lay of the land. I want to have enough of a strategic, 'Hey, these things make sense. Keep going, keep executing.' 'These things don't make sense, let's identify what those things are and let's actually start to do research around these things so that when I do come back, we have a body of work that we can look at and be like, "Okay, this information, this data is making us choose to go down the path." Or "This is a go or no-go decision. We can make that decision now where we couldn't make that decision before."'" So that was another big piece, which is getting all the strategic pieces in place, having a plan laid out and explicitly articulating in that plan, "Keep moving. These are things that we got to do a lot more research on." And then assigning people like, "Hey, you're going to do this research and then we're going to come back and talk about it in the two months that I was out." that we got to do a lot more research on." And then assigning people like, "Hey, you're going to do this research and then we're going to come back and talk about it in the two months that I was out." And I also took the time, I actually... Funny story, I think I literally had a board meeting the day before I went in for a checkup, and then in the checkup they're like, "You're in labor. " And it was really important for me to do that because I was like, "For the things that I'm seeing, for the gaps that I'm seeing. I want everyone to be aware. I don't want to just be with one founder. I want the whole leadership team. I want all the founders, I want the board. I want everyone to be aware that." For example, engineering hiring was really, really important. And I was communicating, "Hey, we are just not staffed in a way where we can deliver some of the ambitious things that we want to do." And so explicitly calling those things out and creating awareness around them and then asking other executives to step in and be accountable, those were big pieces of what I wanted to achieve in my first 90 days. So I take notes on this. So the first is just get context, figure out who you need to talk to. Is there a tip there of just how many people? Because you could do this infinitely, meet everyone eventually. How many people did you end up maybe scheduling meetings with?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.