Category: Work

Hospitality is a Team Sport

If you’ve been reading my stuff for very long, you’re aware that I think about hospitality a lot.

I use it in broad terms – I think that the work that we call Customer Support, Customer Success, Customer Service, and so on, all fall under this same umbrella.

Before I worked for Automattic I had a successful career in high end coffee – before that I was in grad school and working in restaurants and cafes.

One piece that’s worth keeping in mind, one cornerstone to excellence in hospitality regardless of industry, is that we’re playing a team sport.

Today is my fifth wedding anniversary (Happy Anniversary, Doc!)  – last night we went out to a nice dinner. She had a lobster salad and I had the tuna steak. During our meal, I noticed a waiter serving a large table next to us.

Each of the entrées had toothpicks with different colored foil on the end – some red, some blue, you know the kind. As he turned his back to the table to pick up another diner’s plate, he’d quietly remove the toothpick, leave it on the larger serving tray, and present the entrée to the customer, announcing confidently the entrée, the sides, the special bibs and bobs requested by that particular diner.

If you’ve worked in a restaurant, you know what those toothpicks were – they indicated the done-ness of a steak, or which cheeseburger had the Swiss rather than the cheddar. They were little reminders built into the process to allow the server to present an entirely seamless and apparently perfect experience to the customers without holding all of that information in his head.

(This was a table of maybe twelve diners? Not an easy task to remember every person’s nuanced order)

It was an interesting reminder for me, that a seamless and lovely delivery to a customer, a shiny and outstanding experience, is the result of a whole team of folks working behind the scenes – working to support one another just as much as they’re working to support the customer directly.

(I’ve written some about this here and here.)

This kind of internal hospitality may seem small – a cook leaving reminders of what makes each dish special – but it adds up to a lower effort, higher-level experience for the customer.

It’s easy for us to extend this idea to the work we do in developing software. Think of your internal tooling – are there obvious, visible flags for features or situations where things are different from the usual? How much do you make your colleagues lives easier?

This doesn’t just apply to development teams working with success/support teams, either. If you work in a customer-facing role, whether support or success or whatever, how easy do you make it for others in your company to understand your work? What are the toothpicks that you offer to make their jobs easier? Do you have a standard, easily replicated template for bug reports that includes steps for reproduction, customers effected, and a consistent urgency scale?

(If not; think about making one 🙂 )

The customer experience, especially an excellent customer experience, is the end result of tons of tiny decisions, all stacked on top of one another. It’s only possible to really do the very best for our customers when we first do the very best we can for one another.

Metrics, Means, and Maps

As a younger man, I spent a lot of time reading and discussing philosophy.

In the end, I was most attracted to modern moral theorists like Rawls and Nozick, but like all Philosophy majors at the State University of New York at Binghamton, I spent some time with all of the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Marcuse, Arendt, and so forth.

(In fact, in the forward of Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick describes what I think is the most perfect description of all professional academia, not just Philosophy. I’m away from my copy, but I’ll post the passage when I get home!) edit: I gave it its own Post!

I’m bringing this up because one of my least favorite philosophers to read was Immanuel Kant. I struggled with Kant, like I suspect many 20 year olds do, as his writing is so incredibly dense, and translated from the original German. One piece of his moral philosophy that stands with me is this: to behave morally, a moral agent must treat other humans always as ends in themselves, and never as means.

To be more philosophically precise, Immanuel says never to treat other humans merely as means, but always as ends as well.  So, it’s not necessarily immoral to treat another human as a means, so long as you keep them in mind as an end also. It’s a tricky bit that’s easy to forget. Kant, he’s dense.

One thing that we need to bear in mind, whatever department we’re working in, is that our metrics are necessarily abstractions, a means to a larger end. In this way our mindset needs to be like Kant’s – some things are ends, some things are means, and we should be intentional about which is which, and remind ourselves that the distinction is important.

A quote that came up a number of times at the Growth Hackers convention this year was this: “Be careful what you optimize for,” and that, too, points at what I’m getting at here.

Our metrics, our measurable indicators of success, must necessarily be abstractions from real life. 

By this, I mean, reducing churn by 10% is only a means to a larger end, and has to be considered in that larger context. What’s the real reason? Why do you, personally and as an organization, want to reduce churn? Maybe it’s because you believe you have a product that can genuinely make peoples’ lives better, so the more folks who use it, longer, the better off they’ll be. That’s great! Maybe it’s to make more money – that’s OK too. 

In either of these cases, churn reduction is itself only a means toward a larger end. Success with this metric points to a larger success, something that you’re maybe not equipped to measure, something like Customer Happiness or Success of the Business. We need to keep this in mind.

Another quote that’s on my mind a lot these days: “The map is not the territory.”

Our metrics are only maps upon which we build our assumptions and beliefs – the underlying terrain, the real territory of your customers and your business, is far more complex, far more nuanced. Remember that we use metrics because they are abstractions, because they take our complex world that is impossible to understand all at once, and break it into easier-to-understand chunks.

Our metrics are by design not the whole truth. They’re reductive because they must be – because only by reducing a complex concept can we hope to make meaningful decisions. If our metric were the whole truth, if the map were a perfectly accurate representation of the whole territory, it would be perfectly useless.

Measuring our work, and our companies, and our success or lack of success, is absolutely vital to the success of any enterprise in 2016. Choosing the right metrics, and bearing in mind that our metrics only represent one part of the truth, is the hard part.

 

Exposure Therapy and Building Expertise

Do you follow me on Instagram?

It’s not professionally very interesting (I try to save that for Twitter, and, of course, this blog).

In the description of my Instagram profile, I mention:

I live with The Doctor (a doctor), Mango (a baby) and Elmira (a cat).

The Doc is, more specifically, a clinical psychologist. We met in college – I was in graduate school for philosophy, and she was finishing her PhD. Our relationship is rich: we’ve moved across states, have a second kiddo on the way, and have successfully kept a Maine Coon alive (and very sassy) for almost a decade.

I count myself lucky because I learn things from the Doc all the time – she’s the closest thing to a genius that I’ve found, and has a gift of being able to share complex ideas in a way that overlaps with and takes on the character of the experience of the person she’s sharing with.

One idea that she and I have discussed at great length is an approach to treating anxiety disorder, called exposure therapy. Broadly, the big idea behind exposure therapy is that exposing a person to small amounts of something that makes them anxious (or stressed, or afraid), starts a process that can eventually help that person overcome the anxiety or fear at a larger level.

(I’m very likely butchering this concept by working in broad strokes – read the Wikipedia page, it’s good, and short.)

If, like me, you have an unhealthy obsession with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work Antifragile, you may have already identified that there’s a parallel here between exposure therapy (exposing someone to a small amount of what makes them anxious in order to help them become less anxious) and hormesis, the concept in medicine and (since Antifragile) economics, that shows us that benefits do not always follow a linear or even exponential path – but rather many inputs have a hyperbolic curve, where limited benefits can be found in one particular application, but then the downside becomes infinitely worse as the input is continued to be applied.

One example is water – in too-small amounts, lack of water will kill you. A somewhat narrow band of water application is ideal, enough so you’re not thirsty and are able to operate in a healthy biologically appropriate way. Once you exceed that healthy space though, any additional water will have more and increasingly horrible effects – pretty quickly leading to death and only death on down the line.

The mental model of hormetics is controversial: it’s not universally accepted nor is it universally applicable. In this case, it’s a helpful way to think about a bigger model for our otherwise more specific cognitive behavioral exposure therapy.

The reason all of this is meaningful is because it ties into a bigger question that I have about my life, and I figure some of you all do, too – how do we build expertise? How do we get better at a skill or practice?

The answer is, like in exposure therapy and in hormesis: with a little bit at a time. You don’t go from being horrified of public speaking to a keynote lecturer overnight: you have to create a plan, exposure yourself to the stressor in small amounts, building over time, and move toward your goal.

One point that I want to make very clear here is that executing this idea necessarily means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone – pushing a little into that uncomfortable place, and sitting there, working there, allowing yourself to survive and thrive though that low level discomfort. That’s how we get better. That’s possibly the only way we get better.

Recognize that both exposure therapy and the hormesis model agree: large jumps are not productive. Too much water will kill you. Start small, and recognize that you have to climb a ladder from the bottom – small steps, building on one another, is where change comes from and what makes things stick.

Once I started to think about exposure and hormetics in this way, as a mental model, it’s the type of idea that is very sticky, and has started to map onto my work in many other interesting ways. You can see how exposure therapy has clear parallels to things like delegation, helping your team build expertise, and even in customer relationships.

The next time you want to build your skills or hone your practice, ask yourself: what part is the scariest for me? What looks like it’s the hardest, most out of reach bit? Then, break off the smallest chunk you can, and attack that, and only that, until you’re comfortable. Then, get started on the next chunk.

 

You’re Already Interviewing Your Customers

Let’s start with a story!

At Automattic, we’re lucky enough to have some pretty sophisticated internal tracking and analysis tools. I was recently involved in a conversation with my friend and colleague Martin, about a particular slice of our customer base, whose churn is higher than we would have expected.

One of the ingredients for this particular group of customers was that they had, at some point in the seven days before leaving our services, interacted with our Happiness Engineers via our live chat support offering. Given the tools at our disposal, we were able to pull together a list of all of these customers – and with the churn rate being what it was, and the total userbase for that product what it was, the list was not terrifically long. Double digits.

Some of you out there know this story, right? What better way to find out what is going on with your customers (or former customers) than asking them outright? Put together some post-churn interviews, offer an Amazon gift card, learn something new and helpful about your product or service. This is a pretty standard flow for researchers – start with Big Data to identify a focus spot, then focus in with more quantitative methods, interviews, surveys, what I think of as Small Data.

In this case, rather than jump to the usual move, and at Martin’s suggestion, I pulled up all of the chat transcripts, and read through them, categorizing them along obvious lines, pulling out noteworthy quotes and common understandings (and misunderstandings!) – treating these last live chats with churned customers like they were transcribed interviews, because in a real way, that’s what they are.

I was really surprised how insightful and interesting these live chat sessions were, especially when read back-to-back-to-back like that. In fact, I did not even feel the need to follow up with any of the customers, the picture was clear enough from what they’d already communicated with us. I was honestly floored by this, and left wondering: how much good stuff is already in these transcripts? 

Moving forward, I’m including customer email and live chat review as an integral part of any user cohort research that I do – it will allow me to come to the interviews three steps ahead, with far better questions in mind, and a much sharper understanding of what their experience might have been like.

Especially with robust data slicing tools, being able to cut down through verticals, cohorts and purchase levels means that I’ll be able to see a ton of useful, relevant conversations with customers similar to those I’m looking to learn more about.

This is also the case with you and your customers.

Even if you don’t have a user research team, or even one researcher, your support team is interviewing your customers every day. Even without data slicing tools, you can do something as simple as a full-text search on your last month of email interactions and get something close to what you’re looking to learn.

If you enjoy a support tool that has a taxonomy system or plugs into your existing verticals and cohorts, all the better.

This Small Data on your customers, these conversations, already exist. You don’t need to generate new information, you don’t need to sign up for third party user testing.

You’ve heard me say it before, folks – there’s value in the data you have. Use it!

 

 

 

 

Risk and Support in Leadership

Not long ago I had the pleasure of hosting an old friend in Saratoga (where I live).

Rob and I became colleagues first, by working together in high end coffee in New England, and then eventually friends.

Rob had worked in coffee longer than I had when I joined that industry, and is still a big part of the community in Providence. He was in my neck of the woods visiting clients of his – he’s a coffee trader these days, and sells green unroasted coffee to folks who turn that coffee brown and sell it to the general public.

Over wine and Hatties’ fried chicken, we talked. We talked a lot! We talked about family and career and what it means to live a good life. It was an excellent visit with a great friend.

One of the things that he introduced me to was the idea of thinking about leadership in terms of risk and support. You can imagine these two ideas as different dimensions on a field, like so:

Screen Shot 2016-07-12 at 7.53.10 PM.png

In a leadership position, the decisions you make will tend to fall into one quadrant most of the time – the way that we can think about these dimensions are in terms of how we work with our team.

Support here means, how well do you as a leader back up the members of your team?

When someone falls down, when something doesn’t work as planned, do you step in, do you take responsibility for the team? Or do you allow the individuals to face scrutiny and take the blame themselves?

If a member of your team tells you that they have a bold career plan, as their lead do you find ways to help move them along that journey, finding or manufacturing opportunities for them? Or do you nod, ask about their day, and let them try to find their own way with neither help nor hindrance from you?

These are both different ways that we can compare high support and low support.

Risk here means, how much risk do you allow or encourage your team to take on? Do you fully insulate them from the winds of your organization’s politics, content with their low amplitude day to day work? Or do you allow them to wander outside your team’s safest places and experience both the opportunity for great work and the chance of failure?

Risk and Support are not always absolutely good or absolutely bad – you can imagine a lead who exposes their team to great risk could create a terrible environment to work in. You can also easily imagine a leader who fully supports her team in all they do, but never offers up any Risk, which means the support isn’t ever really needed.

This is why truly great teams balance the two, and achieve a state of both High Support and High Risk – offering opportunity (and the accordant risk) when appropriate, and doing all they can to also provide support for the decisions made in pursuit of that opportunity.

As far as a guideline for leadership and leadership decisions go – I like this one a lot. I’ve been asking myself, “Am I allowing for some risk? Am I supporting bold choices?” 

This is pretty half baked on my end – there’s a lot here to consider (how much risk is appropriate? Can one over-support? What does high-risk low-support look like? What about low-risk high-support?

Have you heard of this kind of structure before? How does this gel with your own experiences, as a team lead or as a team member?