Claire Hughes Johnson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there a story or example of that comes to mind that was really beneficial where you actually ended up follow that advice and reached out to someone, talked to someone, and that changed the way you think, changed the way you operate? There are two things that just jumped into my mind. The first one is early on at Stripe... When I joined, we were about 160 people. I started bringing in some leaders. We were building out go to market, we were starting to stabilize our support operations, building out recruiting and HR, all the things. We were really growing. And it became very apparent that we needed to put in some kind of job structure. Levels and ladders is what you would call it, which is there are different levels of pay, and they have to do with your experience and your impact and their expectations of those different levels, right? There's an engineering ladder. And this stuff is probably making some people listening like their skin start to crawl because it's never fun or easy to define all that, and it's not perfect. You're immediately getting into something that feels pretty suboptimal, but it is worse to have nothing because it starts to feel very unfair in the environment, especially if you have to start to change up compensation and reward or reward systems, right? So I realized, oh my gosh, we're going to have to put this in place. We didn't know HR people, so I basically ran a project. And the first thing I did though, thanks to Patrick and John, is I talked to Square, I talked to Airbnb, and I talked to two or three other companies. But those two conversations, I'm not going to say who said this, but one of them, the person said, "Oh, that's a blood bath." They were not encouraging about what we were about to go through. And another one said, "You know what? I'm so impressed that you're doing that so early. We waited too long." And actually, that's what a lot of my book. It's about is when should you start to think about this thing that you might need, right? And it's sooner than you think. And so putting in levels of ladders felt like ripping the off, honestly, but I was glad. One company I talked to waited until they were like 800 people, and it was apparently not fun because people don't like to be... Who likes to be categorized? Yeah, and put it at a level that maybe they're not happy with, right? They're like, "Oh, I thought I was a lot more senior than that."…

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