Gracious Eloise
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February 14, 2012 Women’s 2.0 - Fifth Annual PITCH Conference & Competition ‘From Concept to Cash’: Really enjoyed some amazing presentations by amazing women especially Robin Chase of Zipcar; Katie Mitic of Facebook; Leah Busque of TaskRabbit; and Caterina Fake of Flickr & Hunch. Loved being surrounded by such hard-working, determined and revolutionary women!
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Recruiting A Designer To Your Early Stage Startup
By Dana Rosenberg
For startups, the design element is becoming more important than ever. Consumers are developing an appreciation for design that is driving their purchase and engagement decisions. Simultaneously, the expanding global market for mobile and interactive web services is creating a need for designers to take on new interfaces and evolving challenges.Startups like Flipboard and Pulse are heralded for their great user experience and sleek designs, while Massive Health and Instagramcapitalize on great design to drive photo-sharing behavior and social interaction.
Design is an increasingly strategic part of product development and marketing. Creating an exceptional user experience becomes more than a competitive advantage, it’s a necessity when you’re an early-stage startup looking to get an edge on the market. Designers aren’t drawn to early-stage startups for equity or perks. So if design is so important to the success of your early-stage venture, how do you go about attracting and retaining top designers to your team?
Designer Tip #1: Highlight the creative challenges, not the startup idea itself.
For any entrepreneur, it’s essential to be completely dedicated to and passionate about your startup idea – because without it, you’re unlikely to make it through the many challenges you’ll face along the way.
For designers, the motivations at a startup are very different. While a designer may be interested in the company’s mission and vision, the designer will be more excited at the possibility of solving complex problems inherent in the user experience design:
Tracy Osborn, founder and designer at WeddingLovely, says:
“I worked [at my last startup] for 4.5 years because the solving problems part was really fascinating…How could I improve the flow of the website? How could I teach myself new techniques that would increase our conversion rate? The topic itself was droll, but the challenges within it were very fun.”
This means that you don’t have to be the most interesting startup in the world to attract top talent, but it does require you to focus on pitching the creative challenges that make your startup unique. In the end, designers want to feel inspired by the tasks they take on day-to-day, knowing that they’re using their skills to tangibly improve the product and advance the company.
Designer Tip #2: Provide candidates an opportunity to get to know the people
For any employee, cultural and team fit is an important aspect of choosing a company. Particularly among creative teams, being “in sync” with your colleagues and having a similar aesthetic and experiential vision is key. During most interviews, it can be challenging for a designer to understand how they’ll fit within a team.
To increase transparency, startups can use creative marketing materials and modify the traditional interview process. At HealthTap, we have a strong focus on team and company culture that is well integrated into our selection process for new candidates.
We use unique hiring videos and a “Tappenings” blog column to give candidates a genuine perspective on HealthTap and daily life as a team member. We also view the interview process as a two-way street, and encourage candidates to interview the company as much as we interview them, which allows us to better understand what’s important to the candidate, and distinguish ourselves from other companies.
Additionally, as part of our late-stage interview process, we provide candidates with a short sample project to perform with the product team. This helps designers understand what it is like to work at HealthTap and with current team members, while giving the company an opportunity to evaluate fit and skill in context.
Designer Tip #3: Give them design freedom and opportunities for growth
Like many people that join startups over larger companies, designers are attracted by autonomy and the opportunity to build from scratch. Most designers seek creative freedom over their visual design, and opportunities to contribute to other aspects of product development.
Grace Ng, the UX and Brand Director at Lean Startup Machine says:
“Large companies are siloed in their approach to design… I liked startups because of the ability to be hands-on, do multiple things, and see a project through to the end.”
While creating professional growth opportunities for your designers is important, it doesn’t have to be difficult.
You can enable your designers to work in close proximity with developers, facilitating a self-sustaining learning environment that is appealing to many designers. Or, you can provide designers with the freedom to attend industry events that help them expand their expertise and improve their existing skill set.
The Bottom Line
At heart, recruiting top designers to your startup isn’t that much different than attracting any other employee, except that there’s such high demand for their talent. The startups that attract the best talent will be the ones that stand out in the recruiting process and make an effort to meet the creative and professional aspirations of prospective candidates.
Editor’s note: Got a question for our guest blogger? Leave a message in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Dana Rosenberg is the Community Development Lead atHealthTap, where she is in charge of user acquisition and engagement, marketing, PR, and branding. Dana is also the Lead for Women 2.0 Founder Friday Silicon Valley. Prior to moving out west, Dana was a consultant at a boutique healthcare strategy consulting firm in New York, where she advised clients on target screening, acquisition and product commercialization opportunities. Follow her on Twitter at @Dana_Rosenberg.{Article Link: Recruiting a Designer}
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How to Write a Thank-You Note That Matters
Thank-you notes are so rare in this digital age that a good one makes a huge impression. Here’s how to write one.
I work with some of the nation’s top marketing communications professionals. Every day. So you might think I receive a constant stream of well-crafted, even artful follow-up correspondence. Or maybe just thank-you notes that feature correct spelling.
If only that were true.
It is scary how few people take the time to say “thank you.” The notes I do receive often have typos and grammatical mistakes, even though they’re sent by professionals in a line of work where perfect copy ought to be second nature. This doesn’t build my confidence in them, and it doesn’t do much to help build the type of relationship they intended.There’s no faster way to create a positive impression than with a handwritten note or card. For your employees. For partners. For customers. Keep some simple, professional correspondence cards handy. Then push away the keyboard and write one or two sentences — by hand.
A masterful thank you is so rare in this digital age that it speaks volumes about the sender. Rarer still is a handwritten note from a business owner or executive. When the sender is a busy executive, handwritten notes are so remarkable that they easily earn awe and admiration.
It’s perhaps a reflection on the state of working professionals right now that one of the nicest, most memorable thank you notes I’ve received recently was from a college student. It was emailed, but it still stood out.
My son attends the University of Southern California. One of his fraternity brothers, Stephen, is interested in a marketing career, so my son introduced him to me. I looked at Stephen’s resume and offered some suggestions. Stephen is interested in speechwriting, so I introduced him to someone who is experienced in that area.In return, I received a lovely voicemail message and a thoughtful thank-you note that covered:
- The thank you
- A stated desire to stay in touch with me
- A brief reminder of his tremendous experience
- Appreciation for the introduction I made for him
- A compliment about my son—always the quickest way to a mother’s heart
I know Stephen is still in college, but this young man is smart and savvy. You can bet I’ll be happy to give him my attention any time —no matter how busy I am. Working professionals can learn from Stephen’s example.
Want to knock some socks off today? Write a meaningful thank you email or, better, send a handwritten note. [Link to full article]
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The Management Team - While Building Usage
So you’ve built and launched your product. It is well received. You’ve achieved ”product market fit” and it is time to get more users or customers. You’ve graduated from the “building product” stage and have entered the “building usage” phase. What does this mean for your team?
Well first and foremost, it means you are going to have start building your team. You will need more engineers because you will have to scale the product/service and you will need to continue to build it out, make it available on more devices, and listen to and adapt to the needs of the market. You will need to make sure your product team grows in lockstep with your engineering team and the demands of your users. You will need more customer support/community team members because more users means more users you must engage with and support. You will need to think about a marketing person because acquiring more users is called marketing. You will need to think about business development because you will want to talk with other companies for distribution and for product/service integration. And you may need to hire a sales team if your product has an enterprise/SAAS focus. Finally, you might think about staffing business operations/HR/finance/legal which is probably consuming a fair bit of your time.
The one/two/three/four/or five person team that got your product to market and achieved product market fit is going to grow to at least double that and you may find yourself with upwards of twenty people by the time you are moving out of the “building usage” phase.
Your first management issue is likely to be in engineering because that is where most companies of this stage have the vast majority of their headcount. Your technical co-founder or lead engineer will find themselves managing more than coding. Managing engineering means quite a few things. It means recruiting more engineers. This is a huge time sink but it has to be done. It means retaining engineers. And it occasionally means terminating engineers. But more than building and managing headcount, managing engineers mean making sure the right people are working on the right things, it means making sure the teams are performing well, it means resolving roadblocks. It means creating the right environment for your engineers to be successful.
And many technical co-founders and lead engineers aren’t the kind of people who enjoy managing. They would rather be building the product than building the team. You have a few options at this point. You can help your lead engineer become a good manager. I strongly suggest that because everyone can and should become better at managing people. Even if your lead engineer doesn’t become your VP Engineering in the long run, this will have been a good investment. But you should also be actively discussing the long term management roadmap in engineering with your lead engineer and if it makes sense, you may have to bring in a VP Engineering who is a great manager and move your technical co-founder or lead engineer into a more technical role. That is often the CTO role.
The other management challenge at this stage is likely to be your own. If you go back to that second paragraph, you will see that many of the hires that are made in the “building usage” stage are going to report directly to the founder/CEO. The additional product hires may report to you because it is likely that you are running product as well. The community team may report to you. And who is leading that team? The business development person, the marketing person, the admin/finance/HR/legal person, and probably all the sales people are likely reporting to you. Have you ever had ten or twelve reports? It is not fun.
A founder/CEO in a management crisis at this stage of the company is a very common thing. In some ways it is unavoidable. None of the teams, other than possibly engineering, is large enough to have its own manager. And so the founder/CEO is managing the rest of the business. The best thing you can do in this situation is find other members of the team who have management talent or inclination and invest in their ability to help you manage the team. These is your bench so invest in it and let it help you. During this phase you will find your leaders for the next phase. Just because you have a flat structure and a lean organization doesn’t mean you can’t be investing in management.
Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible. I strongly suggest that founder/CEOs at the “building usage” stage start working with coaches. CEO coaches can help you build your own management skills and can help you think about how to build management skills and processes on your team as well. If you have talented managers on your team that you want to invest in, offer them coaches as well.
The “building product” stage is all about individual contributors. And the “building usage” stage continues to be largely about individual contributors. But management starts to creep into the equation at this point. Strong individual contributors are often not natural managers. Some can make the transition. Some can’t. And some may not even want to try. This is a very difficult and painful process and a huge management challenge for the founder/CEO.
Next week we will talk about the “building the company” phase when management starts taking a front seat to everything else. {Musings of a VC in NY}
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1.You are still standing.
2. What you do over the course of your career and, more importantly, over the course of your life, far outweights a single play, game, deal, etc.
3. How hard you work after failure will determine your character—not that you failed.
4. Love inspires others to be the best people possible. Hate weakens people and makes them shallow. People can never hate as much as other people can love—so hate will always lose and eventually go away.
5. The idea of giving up and walking away never really enters your mind if you are doing something you truly love.
6. If you are not open to learning from failure, your experience will be a missed opportunity.
7. You will absolutely get another chance.
8. All of the people who know how hard you worked to get to the point where what you did even mattered at all—they’ll remember your effort and bet on you again because of it.
9.Your real life results as a person matter more than your Google results.
10. There were tons of factors that led to your efforts even mattering—to think that the results simply came down to you is naive. There’s always a bigger picture to keep in mind.
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”For me, being earnest and being genuine is way easier than acting like you just don’t care, like you don’t want to be here, like this is a drag. There arejust so many things in the world that are a drag. For me it’s like, ‘This is a fucking wicked cool job!’ { Justin Timberlake | GQ December 2011 }
(via wonderpuggraphics)
