YVETTE: Good afternoon!
We're in the home stretch, people!
You can make it.
I'm Yvette.
I'm the CTO of Meetup.
Today I'm going to talk about leading engineering teams through massive rapid change.
That's one of the things that I've found both really hard but so, so rewarding in my career.
So I'll first go through a framework for leading through change, and then talk about some examples
of what I learned over the last two years of leading through so much change with my
team.
So types of change: As engineering leaders, you all know that we deal with a lot of change
every day, right?
Technical and architecture change, cultural, business, organizational change.
Often these happen all at once, which is even more awesome.
I've been actually leading my team through all of these changes listed here in just the
last year.
How many other people here have been leading their teams through at least one of these
changes?
Raise your hand.
Let's see it.
Wow, that's a lot of people.
You don't hear this enough, but thank you!
No one thanks you enough for that.
Your teams really need you.
As a leader, it's one of those things that makes you feel isolated, and it's tough and
it's sometimes thankless work, so I'm here to say thank you, thank you, thank you for
doing it.
Keep doing it.
And help other people who are doing it.
Which gets me to my first point.
Which is: How are we as engineering leaders actually managing through this?
First and foremost, my very best resource for leading through change has been reaching
out to engineering leaders outside my network.
Not even inside my network but outside my network to get peer coaching, advice, and
support.
In fact, there are several people here in this room today who I stalked weirdly on LinkedIn,
I saw that they knew a lot more about a topic than I thought I knew, and I had a coffee
or lunch with them to ask them about it.
And even though it was a bit awkward, I left really inspired, really rejuvenated, and feeling
a lot better.
There's someone here I talked to about stuff.
Over there.
Someone else in the back.
Tanya, I was talking to Tanya.
So do that.
It's really important.
But I've needed more.
I've developed a working framework to help me lead teams through change.
Let me introduce that framework to you.
There are two components of the framework.
The first is the time phase.
Which means where is the company in the change timeline.
And the second are leadership qualities.
What types of leadership qualities does the company need from you at that time?
So let me first dive into the time phase component.
I've seen three distinct time phases during the time phase of change.
The first one is the acute phase.
That's a short period of time, typically following an event that sparks rapid change.
That could be a new CEO, that could be an acquisition, like in my case.
More recently.
Closing a round of funding or not, winning or losing a big customer.
Something that sparks a lot of rapid change.
And then you go into the next phase, which is constant rapid change.
And then the last phase is what I've seen -- I like to call the new normal.
Right?
Your change starts to decelerate and plateau, but things aren't the same as they were before.
But now you have a new normal.
Right?
So that's the third phase.
I love to think of this and relate it to a typical S adoption curve.
So if you plot time on the X axis, and number of changes on the Y axis, you'll see the period
of rapidly increasing change in the middle, flanked by the acute phase in the beginning
and the new normal at the end.
All right.
So the other component of the framework are leadership qualities.
I think the three most important qualities for leaders as we're leading through change
are communication, motivation, and focus.
Similarly, we need to optimize for them differently, depending on the time phase that we're in.
And what our company needs from us as leaders.
So I'll quickly dive into each.
Communication.
Right?
As a leader, we always hear: You have to overcommunicate during times of change.
What the hell does that mean?
That's just a management book, right?
What do you have to optimize for?
What are the things you have to think about?
The things I've found the most helpful in thinking about optimizing for are things like:
Should I be communicating two-way versus one-way?
Written versus in person?
What level of transparency should I be providing my team?
Usually it's a lot, but sometimes not.
Am I providing enough context?
Am I communicating with enough empathy?
And last but not least, am I listening enough while I'm communicating?
Motivation.
Similarly, we always hear that one of the most important things we need to do as leaders
is motivate our teams.
I think that's particularly important during times of change, and these are some of the
ways that I've found I can best motivate my teams, by providing inspiration through talking
about values, vision, and strategy.
Balancing leading with the right amount of empowerment versus direction.
And setting clear, measurable goals.
And last but not least, focus.
This is my favorite one.
It's one of the things that keeps me up at night the most, is thinking continuously about:
Are company resources focused on the most important things?
And I think some of the key things to think about in the area of focus are: What initiatives
are you investing in as a leader?
Is your business model still right?
Are you making money?
Execution and delivery, right?
A great strategy and vision is nothing if you can't execute and deliver.
Are you ruthlessly prioritizing?
Everyone always has enough resources to do all your company initiatives.
And financial health metrics, such as revenue and profit.
All right.
So let's jump into a visual 9-box version of the framework.
Time is on the x axis, and leadership qualities are on the y axis.
You can use this framework yourself by thinking of a time where you faced a lot of change
or are facing a lot of change, and writing down the areas you think are most important
in each of the boxes.
I found that doing this exercise retrospectively for me really helps me identify tangible,
actionable items that I can try to do better next time.
Doing this exercise as I'm going through a lot of change helps me kind of get in a Zen
place and prioritize, plan, and organize my time on the things that are most important
for me to be able to help my team and lead my team through it.
So I'm gonna go through an example now of some things I learned when my company was
acquired a year and a half ago by WeWork.
All right.
So communication during that acute phase.
I learned that I had to really overindex on in-person two-way communications.
Written and one-way just wasn't cutting it, and it wasn't until I got teams together in
small groups and did a lot of in-person two-way communication with a lot of Q and A that I
started to see trust build back up with my team and we started to get in a good flow
again.
They could really see I was empathetic to their concerns in that kind of environment.
Then as rapid change started to take off, I learned it was really important for me to
continue in-person communications, but I was able to dial it back to more one-way communications,
like presentation-style.
Like this.
As long as I provided a lot of context and helped them understand why all the change
was happening.
Then as the new normal started to plateau, I was able to dial it back even more, and
I was able to focus on written one-way communications, as long as they were frequent, regular, and
I was transparent as possible.
In the motivation world, I learned how to do a better job of team motivation, postacquisition
too.
During the acute phase, I think we did a great job, a really good job, clearly articulating
our company values and vision.
And this was so important to keeping people and the company so mission aligned and motivated
during those initial few weeks.
Then during the period of rapid change, I realized in retrospected we really should
have focused more on our product strategy and road map and talking about that at the
company level to keep everyone grounded and motivated by longer term goals and success.
And as we scaled, I also think we could have done a better job continuously resetting leading
with the right balance of empowerment versus direction.
Because as our teams grew and as we scaled, that balance changed a lot, and we didn't
account for that.
And as we reached our new normal, it was really important to be an inspirational leader.
Make sure that the team, after so much change, make sure the team could really see inspiration
as normalcy set in again.
Things like setting really clear, measurable goals for the team helped.
Because then they could see what long-term success looked like.
All right.
So focus.
One of the things I really regret, probably the thing I most regret not doing right away,
postacquisition, was ensuring we ruthlessly focused on investing only on the most important
company priorities.
It was too easy to get distracted, and we did.
Then during the period of rapid change, I learned that being highly focused on keeping
our business running was very important.
Things like ruthless prioritization, making sure our business model was still right for
the company through all the change, and making sure our financial controls were the right
ones still.
And then last we started to reach the new normal.
And a focus on execution and delivery of our key initiatives was so, so important.
As well as regularly revisiting: Were we investing in the right things?
So these are just examples of what I learned.
I hope that using this framework, either retrospectively or proactively, by filling in the areas that
you've learned are right for you and your company, is a helpful tool as you lead your
own engineering teams through change.
Thank you, and always send questions and feedback on this framework and other stuff my way.
I love talking to you.
So reach out.
Thanks so much.