My Values for Hiring and Employee Evaluation

The below are the criteria I consider important for driving performance in an organization. I generally evaluate ICs (Individual Contributors) and Managers a little differently as the latter group has additional requirements to be successful. I also have a separate treatise for ICs who want to be managers (will post that here). Far too often I see people get one report because they wanted to manage (please don't do this unless you plan to give them at least 4 headcount :).

I group these values and expectations into 5 categories. The first 3 are Self-Management, Working with Others and Culture - these cover how to engage physically and emotionally in the workplace and in life. The remaining two categories: Strategic and Operational discuss cover what it takes to build a successful business. I think of Strategy as how we prioritize the things to work on to maximize the value created by the business and Operations as how we execute these things once prioritized

Self-management

The following are mostly tied to enabling deliberate learning, keeping a growth mindset and maintaining emotional capacity for working with others in stressful situations

• Have a sustainable physical, emotional and spiritual life - find a pace of work that's sustainable for YOU and maintain capacity for occassional sprints

• Learn and develop

  • Get smarter - we learn by having endless intellectual curiosity and finding the best way (for you) to retain the information one encounters. By learning how to synthesize that information and make connections from disparate threads, we are then able to create something truly original
  • Stay motivated to work hard - it's difficult to work hard without an internal source of motivation. We love people who have a True North on why they're doing what they're doing but everyone needs a helping hand finding that motivation sometimes. If you find you're flagging for whatever reason, ask for help working through it!
  • Make giving feedback easy - you can't grow without feedback from others!
    • Be likable - make it easy for people to want to help you succeed and grow. Not surprisingly, people like helping people they like :)
    • Be humble - if you acknowledge that you will always have more to learn, and are open to help from anywhere, it's amazing how often people will offer to help

• Use feedback and your personal values to develop a clear, actionable plan for growth

• Treat every day and every moment as an opportunity to learn. Refresh and repeat every day until new skills are integrated into your being. Then find the next area of growth

• Have an ownership mentality - understand what is best for the business and put that above short-term personal gains. If you and the company aren't aligned, talk to your manager or an exec to figure out why! Also, take accountability for your own growth and for resolving conflicts you might have within the company

• Always have empathy:

  • For co-workers: Assume positive intent and remember building a company is stressful! We all have days when we aren't our best selves
  • For customers and partners: especially early on, they're taking a bet on you and your company's ability to execute. You have a responsibility to do everything you can to make them look good
  • For examples of how I think this applies at Extend and its key constiutents, see below:
    • For merchants: We're an early-stage company and they're taking a bet on us. Remember that they're putting one of the most delicate parts of their business (helping resolve a faulty product) in our hands. We need to honor that trust...even when they let their anxiety get the best of them
    • For our insurance providers: While we can do lots of things they can't, they are trusting us with portions of their risk management, levels of profitability therein, and ultimately their brand. We are the face of their business on the claims side and need to treat this business like it is our own
    • For our consumers: Warranties are notorious for being unfriendly to customers. Incentives have been misaligned between merchants, consumers and warranty providers for decades and many incumbents are notorious for doing anything they can to encourage breakage (i.e. unredeemed warranties). Every purchase consumers make is a leap of faith that we'll actually make it right if their product breaks. We need to create a better experience for them and build a trusted brand through that process

• Positive mindset - taking ownership for creating positive change and avoiding blaming at all times (see Competent is Not an Option by Art Turock)

Working with People/Company/Society:

We don't live in a vacuum. Every company should be cognizant of how it serves its customers and fits into broader society. We should always try to support their growth (if we don't, eventually customers will leave or the press or government will come knocking). Similarly, every employee should think about how they work with others and can help the company grow.

This is slightly different at various levels: IC, hybrid IC/manager, Manager, Manager of Managers but they're all a blend of the below:

IC:

• Practice active listening and be open to feedback/coaching
• Manage up - make sure your manager is taking the time to help you learn and grow and is doing so effectively. If not, give feedback to them and, if necessary, to their manager
• Prioritizing company and co-workers and society over personal returns. Trust doing so will be rewarded (and if you that it’s not, please escalate directly to me as a systemic problem)
• Begin practicing what’s expected at higher levels

Manager addendum:

These are directly tied to a manager's performance evaluation but are part of everyone’s growth path:

• Give Recruiting the necessary energy (and practice!) to attract top talent
• Onboard (cultural, technical and problem-solving skills) and consistently train your team
• Give effective feedback using the SBI feedback model)
• Set up incentives and goals to align with company performance
• Promote meritocracy by using a standardized evaluation system over politics
• Inspire the team (e.g. communicate why their work matters, develop team mentality, celebrate team success, etc.)

Culture:

• Promote high performance culture
• Always value truth telling
• Value the search for truth in facts and data
• Promote a culture of decision-making based on facts and data
• Value intellectual honesty
• Analysis and synthesis are fundamental to the learning process
• Create a safe space so people can try and fail. It's how one grows!

Strategic:

• Find gaps in the business to help drive the company forward. How can we do things differently? What new things can we do? What can we do to raise the bar in a specific area?
• Prioritize things that drive the most value to the business
• Understand how your work and decisions impact others and the company broadly (e.g. having more context on the entire business or code base will help you be more effective)
• Do analysis and synthesize feedback to determine best path forward
• Be aware of how the competitive landscape, regulatory environment and societal views toward our product are changing. Make sure to disemminate this information broadly and propose solutions to these potential challenges
• Be right most of the time!

Manager Addendum:

• Teach team how to implement "the method” (as laid out in True Power or The Toyota Way). Broadly, this means teaching people how to solve problems creatively and efficiently is a very different skill than doing it oneself. That’s why I separate it out here. You basically have to teach people how to think differently
• Synthesize feedback and personal experience on the competitive landscape, regulatory environment and societal views toward our product and make strategic recommendations to get in front of these potential challenges

 
Operational:

• Do good work (honestly, I could probably stop here :)
• Monitor and maintain performance in day-to-day activities tied to key metrics
• Implement new best practices quickly and effectively while making sure to not over-operationalize things early on when they are changing rapidly
• Complete day-to-day tasks and strategic projects in a timely manner at a high standard. In other words, "do the basics the right way"
• It's not just output or results that matter - how we achieve these results leads to growth (for both you and the company)

Examples of areas to exhibit doing it the right way:

• Code quality (including formatting and unit tests)
• Clear and succinct presentations
• Holding well-run team meetings
• 1:1s and feedback (SBI feedback model)
• Project planning / roadmaps and reporting
• Doing analysis and making decisions
• Sending emails with ideal content and tone
• Communicate clearly and effectively to drive change

Manager addendum: Continually teach and test competency on the technical knowledge needed for the role

A Final Note on Homogeneity and Diversity

The Strategic and Operational effectiveness of a team is optimized when you have multiple viewpoints. There have been untold research studies on how having people with diverse experiences and backgrounds on the same team leads to better problem-solving outcomes This goes for areas of study and professional background as well as gender, race, age, religion, sexual preference, etc.

At the same time, it's also been shown that teams perform much more efficiently when they are cohesive and aligned along some axis (or axes). Historically, this has been used to excuse hiring teams that are homogenous along the lines listed above, but this "desire for efficiency" often occurs at the expense of the optimal output of a team.

My view, and what I've seen work best to balance these two "competing concerns," is to create a team that's homogenous against a set of core values while seeking to maintain diversity of thought and background.

This document has tried to clearly lay out what values I believe a company should embrace to maximize its chances of success as it seeks to create and scale its business and create new business lines. I'm sure there's some language here that contains unconscious bias, but hopefully, you'll give me the benefit of the doubt on that front and try to find areas where we and the team can focus on finding alignment to continue to grow.