Category: management

How to succeed at work

Lenny Rachitsky recently interviewed Elizabeth Stone – CTO of Netflix.  It was a great discussion about how very high performing teams at Netflix work and an eye opening level of information about how Netflix’s unique culture is operationalized. It is also a great lesson about “How to succeed at work”. Here are some of the tidbits

  • On Elizabeth’s background in economics and datascience and how it helped her professionally.
    • Understanding incentives : How to clarify priorities or motivate company or define problems leadership wants to solve. Externally – understanding how consumers perceive about Netflix or what kind of competition is Netflix up against. Comparison between behaviors of rational intelligent people vs same people when provided certain incentives.
    • Thinking about unintended consequences – cause and effect
  • Secret behind Elizabeth’s meteoric rise in corporate ladder and advice to people on how to be successful.
    • Dedication to work – not about long working hours. More about excellence and giving your best. 
    • Enjoy the work
    • Do the best work – not about ambition but more so for betterment of team and company
    • Build partnerships inside and across teams
    • Set others up for success
    • Communicate well – especially to both technical as well as non-technical audience and help bridge the gap of communication between both.
    • Observe and learn from others.
  • How can managers help people who report to them into leveling up to the high bar.
    • Example setting
    • Set expectations about high bar
    • Provide specific feedback on the gap (in private)
    • Help fill the gap
  • How can people avoid long hours and burnout but still meet high bar
    • Make sure the objective for a deliverable is clear. Manager should be able to help set clear expectations around the objective of deliverables.
    • According to Lenny, 3 important elements of netflix culture
      • Very high talent density with focus on high performers
      • Radical candor – being very direct
      • Giving people freedom and responsibility

    • How is the mental model about the keeper’s test operationalized?
      • Managers at Netflix regularly ask themselves about people on their team – “Am I willing to do everything in my power to keep my employees”
      • Employees in team should be able to approach managers and ask – “Am I meeting your expectations or am I meeting your keepers test. What’s going well or what’s not going well” 
      • A formal keepers test helps create a lightness around a very heavy and loaded conversation regarding employee performance and expectations.

    • How can companies hire best talent as Netflix does
      • Pay top dollar
      • However, do not bind employees in golden handcuffs. 
      • Figure out if the person is going to help company identify how to solve a problem or solve current problems more efficiently.
      • Hire people with newer perspective
      • Hire people who uplevel the current employees. Raise the bar for whole team.

    • Things other companies should not do what Netflix is able to do because of unique culture and high talent density
      • Freedom and responsibility aspect of netflix culture. Netflix has very high level of freedom for employees to figure out a way to solve a particular problem. Other companies may not have that luxury and may want to be more prescriptive about method and processes. “Lack of process and prescriptiveness at netflix hinges on great people at netflix who are smart but have even better judgement”

    How to (or not to) hire

    Across multiple years of my experience leading teams I have made enough mistakes to learn how to (or not to) hire. I remember a few years ago during downtown ( which I have experienced many in the Bay Area)  trying to hire a manager for one of the engineering teams.  Now there is no scarcity of real good and accomplished people seeking opportunities especially during the downtown. There are times  when their experience might seem as if perfectly similar to your requirement. I put out a job req  and started getting multiple resumes so much so that I could not keep up.  There were a lot of good resumes of candidates with great experience although not perfectly fit it seemed that they could more than easily accomplish the task.

     My manager asked me to shortlist 10 resumes  and start talking with these people.  I was probably too naive – I requested couple of more weeks from my manager to receive a more suitable resume to come through.  My manager  grudgingly agreed cautioning me not to extend the process too long as the current lot of resumes were quite good already.  One week passed  and that perfect resume never came.  I frantically contacted people in my network and passed on the job req.  I also reached out to two ex-colleagues I thought were a good fit for the job.  Turned out one of them was interested in talking more as the person was looking for change. 

    The person agreed to come for  interview after 2 weeks ( guess s/he was preparing for the interviews ! ). This candidate performed quite well and everybody gave good reviews. We extended an offer to this candidate. And we were countered.  The HR was blindsided and did not expect a big difference in the counter offer.  Some of the information this candidate requested was really smart, eye opening and legitimate.  The candidate was doing his/her job vetting the company,  it’s culture,  it’s position in the market, it’s long term road map and much more.  In the end the  candidate did not accept our offer and joined a different company.

     We were back to square one and I was back looking at old resumes.  Most of those candidates had moved on and we had to restart the whole process.  My manager was not happy, however he asked me to take this setback in stride. This is when he explained to me about how to (or not to) hire. Here is the best recollection from that discussion.

    • Interviewing only a single candidate for a job is lowering your bar. Minimum 4 to 5 (some companies have a higher limit to number of people they interview )  candidates should go through the full loop. This helps company understand the current candidate pool in industry and get the best out of available lot. This also gives most candidates  a fair chance which they very well deserve.
    • Some of the best candidates are not just interviewing at the company, but also interviewing the company.  Therefore, it is not necessary that in the end the person will join if an offer is extended. 
    • There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. They more you delay searching for a perfect candidate or wait for somebody in your network to be available, the more time is wasted and some of the good candidates from current candidate pool may not be available when it’s too late. You may have to settle for less fitting candidate. Thus a late hire affects the company’s bottom line.
    • A lot of hiring happens based on references and knowing people and ex colleagues in the industry. Both candidates and companies should take advantage of this connections. The referred candidates should go through the same loop as others.

    And lastly having been on both the sides of the interviewing desk I do understand why companies are hesitant in providing feedbacks when a candidate is rejected. I do however think that it would be a good thing to provide some form of feedback to the candidate. If anybody has succeeded in doing this the right way please let us know in the comments.

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