Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think a lot of the things that I would read about teams just are naturally focused on, well, you want to build things that customers love. You want it to be an enjoyable experience, you want to deliver on time. There's a reason we're there as a business, but there's also a lot of company building that happens in building the people structures and just when you go from one to many to a multitude, there's a lot of work that goes into it. This is enablement type work and it's where I focused a lot of my time and my career helping make teams and organizations successful. So there is this people layer, however, I've thought about this a lot over the years and I think it would be highly convenient if we could just focus on building products that people love and getting product market fit, talking to customers. It would be great if it could only be that, but the reality is we're humans together and there's a lot of opportunity to build companies that delight people where they're excited to be included in decision-making about how the organization grows and changes or shrinks. So yeah, there's this whole kind of other area of work that I think just doesn't get enough attention and I guess that's where I live and breathe. Awesome. Okay, so I definitely want to get into the five types of reteaming as you described, but before we get there, what I find with reorgs and change is that it often leads to the biggest career opportunities because there's new roles to be filled. If things aren't changing, there's not going to be all of a sudden, "Hey, we have this new role that we want for you." I don't know. A lot of the leaders that move up quickly are the ones that seem to take advantage of change and think ahead and get involved and position themselves in a way where like, "Okay, cool, there's a new position. Oh, clearly it's going to be Heidi." Is there anything you can share there? Any advice for people that maybe see reorgs coming and what they can do to help themselves in that pending change? I really like it when there's transparency in reorgs. There's a story in my book from Christian Lima at Spotify about how they reorged a large infrastructure team. They visualized it on whiteboards and brought people over to the whiteboards to see the future team structure that the leaders wanted and they got input into the design. We did this at Procore as well inspired by Christian and his story and we had... I think there were 80 people involved in this platform organization that was splitting from two large clusters of teams into three. And I remember when we rolled out the whiteboards from a back office where we were talking about this change for a few weeks and it was scary to roll these whiteboards out because it impacts people's day to day. It's like when somebody is suggesting that maybe you do something different or that something different happens, sometimes it can be kind of triggering. You want to know what's going on. So anyway, but we had courage together. So we rolled these whiteboards out and it had the team structure with everyone's names on it. It had the name of the team, the mission of the team, how many open slots for hiring across all of these different teams, and then people's names in their existing team positions. And people were invited to look, give feedback. They identified mistakes that we had in the design, "Oh, this team might be better over here and here's why." And people had the opportunity to see opportunities within their own company that they might say, "Hey, I'm interested in this, might I be considered for this?" And then they could have their discussion. So I really liked that the opportunities were shared and presented, so it wasn't some sort of thing that happened in some kind of back room for the whole time. We unearthed the beginning of a plan. I think sometimes when you convene people for a meeting to talk about anything, it's good to have a starting point. So we had this starting point, we had a variety of different things and I call it whiteboard reteaming in my book and I write about that. And there's even structures that are more open than that. Redgate Software in Cambridge UK. Chris Smith is a colleague of mine and they do regular open self-selection reteaming activities when they're changing their strategic priorities. He talks about this globally very interesting space and it's even more open than putting the names on the whiteboards. They have teams give pitches and this is what they're looking for and they have a whole method for enabling people to say, "Hey, I'm interested in this." I think that really helps because sometimes you might think, "Oh, no one's going to want to work on this." But people can be delighted by working on things that another person doesn't think are particularly interesting. So giving choice is important. And again, there are different grades of transparency.…

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