Geoff Charles: evaluation

Transcript context

…You also mentioned this idea of lofty goals and that's something I've seen a lot. At Airbnb, there was a ... It is very known for lofty goals. Brian was famous for going to meetings where people present their goals and their plans and he's like, "How do we 10X that? What do you need in order to 10X that goal?" And then that ends up being your goal and often works shockingly, sometimes burnt a lot of people out. How do you think about for just finding that balance and, I don't know, is there an example of just like, "Here's a really ambitious goal?" Or maybe the question is just, how do you find the balance of ambitious but not just impossible? Yeah. So the first thing is we have market comparables, which is very exciting for us. So when you look at Bill.com, they're a publicly traded company, Expensify, publicly traded, or Concur or Coupa, these are all large players that are actually very motivating and largely de-risk some of the business decisions you're making. That's existing markets. We've also been able to create markets. Spend management was an actual market before we and other competitors jump into it. So that's motivating. Go attack that market and go drive that revenue is very motivating. We also use designs as a way to motivate teams. So we spend a lot of time with designers crafting out what the future of this thing could look like and that's also extremely motivating. So we constantly go back to these cornerstone, Loom walkthroughs of Figma prototypes that the design spend a lot of time talking through and I think that's a big part of the motivation. And so both of those things combined, I think, helps us stay motivated. I think there's a constant pushback to like, "Okay, what can we actually achieve?" But you're able to move super, super fast if you have those two things in mind, the market and the revenue goal, because very revenue driven as a company and the designs that can really keep you anchored on what this could look like. I know another important ingredient to how you all operate is you really like to empower product teams and give them a lot of control over how they operate and what they build and how they set goals and things like that versus micromanaging them. I think you have this concept of context over control. I'm curious how you actually operationalize that. A lot of people love the idea of empowering their teams and then they do that and then they do the wrong thing or they take too long or they set the wrong goals. So how do you actually make that work and create empowerment within your teams?…

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