Monthly Archives: November 2021

School, Work

How I Prioritize to Make the Most of My One-Woman Team

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Over the past 18 months, I’ve been quickly taking on more at my current company. I’ve moved quickly from a specialist role into a manager role as well as from a role solely supporting our Sales team to one that supports the entire Revenue team. My current role, the Sr. Revenue Strategy & Analytics Manger (I know – it’s a mouthful), is a role that was once held by multiple employees.

Because of this change in dynamic, for the past 6 months, I’ve been tasked with getting the work of two people done as just a single contributor. Though I’m efficient, I am not two people, so my life saver in maintaining my trust with colleagues as well as my sanity has been prioritization.

Though this is nothing revolutionary, it’s been ground-breaking in making my work more rewarding as well as making me a more impactful partner to the leaders I work with. Specifically, as I analyze my projects going into 2022, I’m using the same framework that I learned not only in my Sales role before this but also from my very first Ops manager: the effort vs. impact matrix.

The Effort vs. Impact Matrix

Every time I re-evaluate my project prioritization, I’m using the matrix above to classify everything on my plate. When our organization went through a re-org, this is what we used to prioritize handing off tasks between teams. When I set my goals after taking over the RevOps position, I put every project through this matrix. Even as a Sales rep, when I was working through my deals and accounts, this was the matrix I used to decide what activities I needed to do in a day to get the most out of my book of business.

The matrix forces you to classify every single activity as either high or low impact and either high or low effort. This should help you narrow in on the quickest, most impactful activities, while giving you time to fill in the gaps with quicker, smaller wins and plan for the long-term major wins. Here’s I usually utilize this list:

  • High Impact, Low Effort (“Home Runs”): These are the activities I want as my top projects to be working on in this moment. They’re going to allow me to have the most impact as quickly as possible. These will have the highest return on investment for my time commitment.
  • High Impact, High Effort (“Big Bets”): These are the activities I want to kick out a bit as I make more incremental improvements and do more research. There is a huge return on these projects, but it may involve additional work that can be done through other projects or potentially a learning gap I need to bridge.
  • Low Impact, Low Effort (“Quick Wins”): These are the activities I like to use to build confidence with my partners and may use to progress us closer to some of our more long-term goals. They may not necessarily be the biggest return, but if used correctly, they can build momentum and even progress more long-term initiatives.
  • Low Impact, High Effort (“Fall Backs”): These are the activities that I avoid until I can’t avoid them any more. Until they become a major impact, have added value to another higher impact project, or a simpler solution appears, these are things I put on the back burner immediately.

Where I’ve Applied This

I use this in almost every aspect of my life, including personal decisions. I cannot stress enough how useful this framework can be. However, I’ll provide a few examples across different positions and projects where it’s been most useful.

The first time I was introduced to this was in my Account Executive role. They used this exact matrix to talk about how we should be prioritizing our customer interactions. They pushed us to create a list of sales activities we needed to accomplish in the day and forced us to put them through the matrix. This immediately got rid of all the mediocre touch points I had arbitrarily created during my Sales process and pushed me to create more meaningful deadlines and follow-ups with my customers in order to justify interactions being in the matrix. I became not only more efficient, but honestly, a better partner to my customers.

Within that same Sales role, our leaders used this framework to classify accounts. We thought of “Impact” as the actual revenue we could recognize with this customer and “Effort” as the likelihood that customer would buy from us. Since we were selling “seats”, it was pretty simple to classify “Impact” as the size of the company. “Effort” on the other hand became a combination of a few different factors comprising of industry, volume of ideal contacts, familiarity with our product, tech literacy, and more. My entire book of business was classified in this matrix, which helped me further customize my outreach to the “Home Runs” and “Big Bets” while automating my outreach to my “Quick Wins” and “Fall Backs”.

Moving into Ops, this matrix is my life saver. Every quarter, I put my projects back through this matrix. Each quarter I’m working to knock out while I need to get done while collecting more and more project requests from my partners in our Revenue leadership team. As I near my standard quarterly check-in, I’m compiling every project within our Revenue Operations scope, and running it back through this matrix. This helps me catch anything that may have become easier but been put to the wayside prior due to having a high effort to execute. It also helps me surface projects that may be becoming a large pain to the business than previously. Being a one-woman team in my current company, this is what keeps me sane, and also helps me build trust with my colleagues by openly communicating why I may or may not have time to execute against all projects that have been requested.

Of course, I can’t leave out how this helps me in my group projects at school. To be a good team member, it’s important to always deliver as much value back to the team as possible. When working in a group for school, especially while also working full-time, this can be really difficult to balance. For me, it’s helped to think of the overall project or work we’re doing in small chunks and put these through this matrix. When I see a “Big Bet” on the matrix, I’m trying to find ways I can quickly progress out team to moving that over to the “Home Run” category. When I see a “Quick Win” on the matrix, I’m trying to volunteer what limited time I do have to knock those out and help our team continue to progress. It can be really difficult to be a good teammate when you’re also working 40 hours per week, but when you’re making those most of those hours you do have for the course by prioritizing in this way, your limited time becomes 10x more impactful to the broader team.

Conclusion

Prioritization can be used in any role, and 100% should be! If you’re not doing this on paper, you’re probably doing it in some way. The times where I find it most impactful are those where I feel like I have a lot of things to do and not enough hours in the day to do them.

I know we’ve all felt this way at some point in life, careers, or school. It can feel really wasteful to take a step back and slow down when you’re in that moment. However, the value you will get in return to running all those tasks through a matrix will save not only your time but also your mental health. Give it a go next time you’re in this loop! I promise it’s worth it.

Women in Tech, Work

Hiring the Best: 3 Ideas to Diversify your Hiring Pool

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This article is a little different from my usual but was sparked by an incredibly exciting event in my professional career: hiring my first official direct report!

Though direct management experience will be a first-time experience for me, I’ve spent a lot of time researching, learning about, and putting into practice some best-in-class hiring practices. From taking courses in recruiting to interviewing in others’ hiring loops to networking to help colleagues find new talent pools, I’ve gained a lot of great tips along the way that have made me super proud of the candidates I’ve sourced for my own direct hire.

Start with Referrals

This is an awesome way to quickly start seeing candidates. Don’t be shy to ask previous colleagues, current colleagues, and beyond if they know anyone qualified for the position. Be even more proactive and peruse the networks of colleagues you trust using tools like LinkedIn. Asking for introductions can often be easier than asking someone to pull a name out a hat for your role, so get creative and go hunting for them.

It’s important to note that while referrals are an amazing way to beef up a candidate pool and they often come with glowing recommendations from the colleagues that refer them, recruiting and hiring solely in network can be detrimental to hiring diversely. Not only will you likely source most of your candidates from a small group of companies, which can lead to cultural baggage being brought to your company, but you also open yourself up to recruiting from racially, culturally, gender homogenous networks.

Referrals are an awesome start to the process, but you must be cognizant of the effort placed by individuals to create diversity in their own networks. To combat this, it’s important to further expand your pool of candidates and keep an open mind to all candidates rather than overweighting a referral.

For me, this meant constantly bugging every coworker I knew to look in their networks as well as using my LinkedIn to find 2nd degree connections with people I trusted. This helped me pick up around 25% of my candidate pool, and set a starting point for what skill sets to search for in other candidates.

Network, Network, Network

Hiring doesn’t start when the job post goes up. A good hiring manager is consistently networking to find quality candidates for their next role. Admittedly, this is one of the toughest ways to recruit good candidates, as it falls on the hiring manager to put themselves out there. However, it’s one of the easiest ways to diversify your network against the homogeny that is often persistent in corporate culture.

Join groups that support categories that are underrepresented in your field, your industry, and your company. If you are a member of one of these underrepresented groups, this can be an amazing way to get resources you may not have access to in your own corporate environment as well as elevate others like you. If you are not a member of one of these underrepresented groups, it’s an incredible way to share your own resources with these groups as well as more quickly diversify your own network. Simply diversifying your own network can lead to personal benefits through diversifying thought, ideas, creativity, and perspective in your own work.

This is probably one of the most long-term and difficult solutions to implement, but the return is exponentially higher when it comes to not only expanding your pool of candidates but also expanding your horizons. The most important factor is building and maintaining these networking relationships long-term.

Given the pandemic, this is where I personally could use the most work, though, I was still able to bring in about 10% of my candidate pool from a few connections I’d made through student organizations I’d joined while back in college. Personally, this was something I had more of a pulse on while in school than professionally, and I’m hoping to get back to that now that I’m more confident in my own career trajectory.

Market Yourself

Companies far too often put themselves in the driver seat on the hiring landscape while the best candidates have competing offers from multiple organizations. If you too want to hire the best (and you’re not a Fortune 100 company), you need to be marketing yourself to talent that is not actively looking for your company.

View your position as an opportunity for your candidate to make their next move, improve their skills, and work for a great company. What do YOU have to offer a candidate? What skills can YOU help a candidate develop? What skills are a must have in your job description? Who is your ideal candidate? Who is a candidate you could hone into the perfect employee? What does your company have that others don’t?

Once you can confidently pitch what YOU bring to the table (yourself as the hiring manager as well as your company), you are ready to find quality candidates and hire the right one. It’s important to put on your marketing hat, hone your pitch, then start doing the ground work to find candidates, whether that be through LinkedIn, job boards, an internal recruiter, or a recruiting firm. Center around what you’re looking for and what you have to offer, and go find the candidates that you think can get you there. Be sure to personalize! The best candidates are getting plenty of messages from other prospective companies.

This is where I thrived in adding new candidates. I deep-dived on LinkedIn to bring in about 50% of my candidates from this group. I tried to target top tier candidates that may be a step above what we were hiring for, candidates just below my qualifications that I could easily teach the skills they were missing, as well as candidates perfectly qualified given their current experience that should be looking for this role as their next role. My goal was to match organic applicants and referrals with this pool, which involved personalizing messages for around 10 individuals for every 1 candidate I hoped to add. This was not an easy feat, but it has contributed to some of the most pleasantly surprising applicants in my pool.

Conclusion

To get the best talent, you must see the best talent while you’re hiring. These are just a few ways to hit the ground running and make sure you’re casting a wide enough net to keep diversity in mind and find the best possible candidate for your role.

The best companies are those built on diversity and this starts with the way in which we hire talent. As a hiring manager, you are the owner of your talent pool, and you have the power to be part of a recruiting process that gives people from multiple backgrounds, genders, races, sexual orientations, experience levels, and beyond the seat at the table. Prioritize doing your own diverse recruiting – though the work on the front-end may be costly, the quality of employee you will hire by seeing a larger, more diverse pool of candidates will pay for itself in the long-run.

School

OSU CS467 Update

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Wanted to provide a brief update on my CS467 class at Oregon State. This week, we hit our midpoint, so I’ve created this fun demo video to talk more about where the team is at, what we’re working on, and what we have left to do.

In my video, I call this out, but one of my favorite dynamics of our group is our weekly group programming. I’ll dive more into how our group is really using this to drive our project forward.

Group Programming

Each week, my teammates and I meet for 2-5 hours across 1-2 meetings. The purpose of these meetings is to give updates and brainstorm, but it’s turned into one of the best places for us to knock out key initiatives.

Our project involves 15 rooms and a parser to navigate between those rooms and perform actions on objects within those rooms. This makes it incredibly easy for each group mate to own 5 rooms and the functions that occur in their rooms. However, we quickly recognized that there was some shared navigation and other verbs that crossover between our rooms.

In the first week we started coding, we transitioned our group meeting from an update meeting to an actual working session on navigation. Then our second meeting to a working session on our parser. These incredibly important brainstorms and group programming sessions has allowed our group to not spin our wheels independently working towards the same solutions but rather put our heads together and knock out things much more quickly.

These group programming sessions have been fundamental to us staying ahead of schedule and have made it so much easier for each team member to knock out their sections so much more quickly. Because we’ve worked as a team to discuss these things and all get on the same page, there’s no confusion on how to use these overlapping functions when we begin to work independently.

Implementing Group Programming

Though this is likely not the perfect solution for every project, I’ve found it incredibly valuable and a great reminder that taking the time to source feedback and brainstorm with others, though sometimes time-consuming, can actually allow a team to operate at a much higher efficiency.

This also doesn’t have to be independent to the actual backend or programming. I can think of several scenarios in my own work in Revenue Operations where I’ve been presented a problem, gone about executing a solution, and then been sent back to the drawing board when it didn’t quite meet the moment upon roll out.

There’s a lot more people involved in workplace solutions than just the programmers, developers, and project managers. Though you may not want to bore a salesperson, customer or other end user with the actual execution, it’s so critical to consistently be re-engaging with these parties to make sure you’re staying on track with the end goals and not getting too deep into just making the code work.

What’s Next?

The rest of our project timeline is dedicated to knocking out our individual portions independently and using our group time to improve the game’s usability. I’m feeling really confident about where we’re heading and even more confident that the dynamic we’ve built as a team is allowing us to do that much more quickly.

I’m really learning a ton in this course and surfacing some new ideas for collaboration that I’d really love to take back to my workplace. Group projects can be incredibly difficult, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well our team has worked together and want to scale that dynamic into other projects I’m working on outside of school.