Tag: supportdriven

7 months at my new job

November 9th, 2018

I have been told that it takes about six months to start feeling competent in a new role: to know where to look for things, to make decisions on your own, and to feel like maybe your employer didn’t make a mistake in hiring you. This was true for me in my job as a Happiness Engineer — at six months I felt like Ok, I can do this. When I became a team lead and mentored new hires, I comforted them with the same prediction.

Four months into my new role in operations, I wasn’t sure if that would be the case.

When I first began at Support Driven, we were in the midst of planning our biggest conference of the year, Support Driven Expo in Portland, Oregon. My job was straightforward for the first three months: execute the conference. If there’s anything I know I can do, it’s get in there and get shit done. In the back of my mind, I knew there would be harder things to do later. I didn’t have time to think them through, though, and I mostly pushed them aside.

Expo was a success. More than 400 people attended, we offered 76 talks and workshops, and we managed to get through the event without any major catastrophes. Attendees shared positive feedback, appreciated the practical lessons they were able to implement at work, and offered useful suggestions for how to improve next year.

During Expo planning, I didn’t think much about whether I could do my job, I just did it. In the weeks after, I wasn’t as sure. Once Expo was over, the work to do next was brand new to me: define organizational core values, write event-planning playbooks that had enough detail to get the job done but not so much that the manuals became overwhelming, bake in quality assurance so we can know at a glance if things are on track, think about the organization of the organization, make decisions about internal communication structures, make decisions about what direction to take the organization, write job descriptions, interview, hire, decline, negotiate, document, document, document.

I had days where I questioned my ability. I questioned if I had enough experience to do this job. I questioned if I was as good at organizing as I thought I was. I questioned if I was firm enough, nice enough, visionary enough, if I was doing the right work, thinking about things the right way, accomplishing what Scott was hoping for when he hired me.

After writing my first job description and making my first hire, which I knew was a good one — hi SarahB! — I started feeling more confident. Sarah, who had helped organize WordCamp US, took the wheel for our next event, Support Driven Leadership Summit. I documented a ton of event-planning information after Expo, and we handed it over to Sarah to start testing its efficacy.

With Sarah steering Summit, I started working with the community to plan for our next event, Support Driven Expo Europe: finding a city and venue, spinning up the website, writing timelines, writing a job description for its coordinator. Also, since Summit was in Sarah’s competent hands, Scott and I were able to start digging into some of the broader organizational questions we needed to explore: how can we best serve the Support Driven community? How do we need to hire to accomplish our goals? What do we need to do first?

Now, seven months in, and especially with Expo and Summit succeeding as valuable events for attendees — Summit sold out a month ahead of time! — I’m starting to feel competent. We’re getting things out of our heads and into documentation, we’ve improved and defined our hiring process, we’ve clarified our purpose and our core values as an organization, and we know what we want to make progress on, what we’re going to do first, and how we’re going to hire to do it. We’ve hired two people I’m super excited about to join us part-time, and I created an onboarding process to introduce them to Support Driven and their roles.

Best of all, I’m feeling closer to the community. Leaving my old job was really hard. I still miss hanging out with my teams — the team I led and my team of co-leads. Now, between being at Support Driven for seven months, participating in the book club, and attending Summit without being the primary organizer, I’m starting to get to know people better and make new friends.

Now, at seven months, I’m feeling like, Ok, I can do this.

The photo above is me at SD Leadership Summit, ringing a bell to help gather people at the end of breaks. The bell was super effective — major props to Volunteer Coordinator Yanina Wolfe for suggesting it.
Forging a career path… through blogging

October 3rd, 2018
As a writer and a power user of WordPress.com, landing a job with Automattic and supporting the WordPress.com blogging software was a dream come true. In addition to helping users learn how to publish their content on their own personal sites, I also got to spend my days writing. At the end of my 3.5-year tenure I had written more than 635,000 words on Automattic’s internal blogs.

As a customer support agent, I wrote internal documents on how to lean into customer frustration, reminded ourselves to under-promise and over-deliver, and recommended we say “Thank You” more than we say “I’m sorry.” As a team lead I wrote about how I approached performance reviews with my team, shared leadback survey methods and results, and wrote about how to advocate for team members through goal setting.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. All of it within our internal, private blogs.

One day, in a conversation about career development, our head of support said something to the effect of, “One of the best things anyone can do for their career is blog about what you do. All this great stuff Happiness Engineers are sharing internally — why not blog those tips publicly?”

Why not indeed.

Shortly after that, I began writing about career topics more openly on my blog, like explorations of What is a Career? and What can I contribute?

It was when I joined the Support Driven community about a year and a half into my time at Automattic where it really hit home how valuable it is to share our inside knowledge outside. As I read through the Support Driven Slack channels, I was dumbfounded: here was whole world of support professionals outside of the company I worked within — support agents, team leads, department directors — who were talking with each other and asking questions about many of the same things we talked about and wondered about within Automattic: how do you schedule weekends? How do you support a teammate who’s interacting with an abusive customer? How do you help team members control time-consuming tangents in live chat?

Here were others who might have answers! And I might have answers for them. We’re in an industry where there aren’t a lot of books about what we do. I could be helpful here.

So I started blogging more about work-related topics. And blogging led to speaking, and to helping out with conferences, and to getting to know others in the industry who have helped me along my path. I even started a spin-off career blog.

I’m not great at the career blogging stuff. I don’t lay posts out like instructional articles with headings and bullet lists like I probably should for them to be most useful. My posts are more a messy “omg here’s this thing I just realized and maybe it will help you, too” format, or they’re rough-cut because I’m limited for time. Imperfect and published is better than perfect and unpublished.

BUT. My blog has been a friend to me throughout my post-40-start-a-brand-new-career life. And here are headings and bullet lists that share why.

Writing is a form of learning
- The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to someone else.
- And what is writing about work but trying to teach a thing you know to someone else?
Maybe I can help
- In an emerging industry, where there are limited how-to or best-practices books and blogs, support professionals are hungry for resources
- I’ve written, spoken, or have the knowledge to write about some of the topics I see support pros asking about in the Support Driven Slack
Blogging expands my scope of influence
- Before Automattic, my scope of influence was limited to my blog followers (and I love you for following, thank you!)
- Within Automattic, blogging internally helped me expand beyond just my role and into parts of the whole organization
- Beyond Automattic, blogging externally helps me expand into the whole industry
This last one, about expanding my scope of influence, makes me feel squirmy because it seems nakedly ambitious. And maybe it is, and maybe I shouldn’t feel bad about that.

When I couple 1) the Automattic head of support’s advice to share our knowledge with people outside the company to help move the whole industry forward with 2) Buffer’s career framework for how individuals at Buffer advance without becoming managers, where influencing the whole industry is the highest level of impact one can attain, it makes sense to want to help and have as broad an impact as possible.

So in answer to the Support Driven Writing Challenge prompt, Do you blog about work or career related topics?, the answer is yes. It’s scary, and every time I publish, I fear ridicule, and that someone knows better, and that I’ve got it all wrong. But writing and sharing help me grow, and they hopefully help others in their terriciting growth as well.
My first big event at my new job

June 19th, 2018

I leave tomorrow for Portland, Oregon, where we’re producing Support Driven Expo, a conference for support professionals. I’ll be in a cab on the way to the airport at 5am Eastern, hopefully with completed slide decks on my computer and an agenda for the two days post-Expo where Scott (SD owner) and I will be planning for Support Driven’s future.

I’ve been with Support Driven for three months today, and I’m amazed by how smooth the transition has been. Maybe it’s because I was already involved with the community and helped organize the first two events, so it’s not something I had to learn from scratch. Or maybe it’s because I’ve worked with Scott before, so there wasn’t a huge learning curve with figuring out communication styles. Or maybe it’s because my primary focus is communications, which, 😍.

Whatever the reason, I’m in my element, and am feeling a wonderful balance of freedom, opportunity, and challenge. When I joined Support Driven full time, Expo planning had already begun, so I had some catching up to do. But I also got a chance to dig in and start organizing and documenting to make things easier for ourselves next time around. I’ve gotten a chance to write — a LOT — and I’m proud of the weekly Expo Updates we’ve been posting on the SD blog, the program of 80+ speakers we’ve put together, the comprehensive Expo Guide we compiled to help with any questions participants may have, and the app content we assembled to help more than 400 attendees navigate a schedule that includes talks, workshops, Support Bars, a Career Fair, and a Career Unconference.

And that’s just Expo. I’m vibrating with anticipation of helping organize Support Driven itself, which we’ve begun work on, and that I hope to accelerate progress on after Expo. I started a Support Driven LinkedIn page, which I’m super excited about. I totally lucked out on my first hire (Hi Sarah!), and I can’t wait to work with her on our next event, which is a Leadership Summit in the fall. We’ve started a new Groups section of the blog to help give some of the rich content from our community Slack a more permanant home.

The really cool thing is that while we’re doing all of this, I also feel a balance in my life. I spend time every day in my garden. I have space in my life for errands, for taxiing the kids around, for swimming and running taking breaks when I need them. After Expo I’ll take some time with my family, and go on a sailing trip with my husband.

But right now, I need to get back to the slide decks, schedule tweaks, attendee communications, packing…
So far, so good: my first days at Support Driven

March 21st, 2018

I had to laugh Monday on my first day of work at my new job. I wore my exact same workout clothes, in my exact same office, in my exact same surroundings: our home. Like my former employer, Support Driven is a distributed company. To my family, my work life looks exactly the same: me in our house on my computer.

This was kind of weird to me at first. I wanted something external to be different. I was starting a new job! If I wasn’t going to a new office, and my current office is too small to rearrange, the best thing I could come up with was to change my routine. I didn’t like exercising first thing in the morning before — I was always having to choose between exercising and writing — so I figured this was a good place to start. I’m the only east coast SD employee, so I adjusted my daily schedule to work in the morning when it’s quiet, extend my mid-day break to include exercise, shower, and lunch, then work a little later in my day to maximize overlap with my coworkers on the west coast. I like this so far — I feel like it gives me a little more open space.

While not much has changed to my family, who still sees me working on my computer from a spot in the living room or from my office downstairs, the work itself is quite different, and I am gleeful about it. I get to focus on communication! Also, unlike other new jobs, when I started this one, rather than feeling lost, wondering what I should work on, and how long it would take me to get up to speed, I actually felt useful.

The week prior, I asked Scott, the company owner, to make a worry list. To dump all his fears and concerns about current projects into a document that we could go over together. Identifying those worries helped us identify gaps, and showed me where to focus my attention (and where he should focus his). From that list, we divided up the worries, so that I could take some of them from him, relieving him from carrying the entire burden himself, and freeing him to focus on the work that he is best suited to do.

What was super exciting to me is that many of the items on the list, and that I need to prioritize, are my strengths: communication, the website, and keeping an eye on the big picture. Also, apparently, HR.

So here, as I head into my third day of work, I’ve helped Scott feel better about where to focus his attention, helped clarify our roles, helped determine the benefits package we’ll be offering employees, and have created an editorial calendar for updates about our upcoming conference, the Support Driven Expo, in Portland, Oregon.

My to-do list is as long as my arm, and I have two more big things I want to complete this week, and I am loving every minute of it.
I’m joining Support Driven full time!

March 9th, 2018
I’ve worked with Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, for three and a half amazing years. The company, and its faith in me, have transformed me. A leadership coach recently encouraged me to start a learning journal to jot down all the things I’ve learned the past few years. I was astonished by the list, which included successfully leading a distributed team that spans hemispheres, speaking in front of large audiences, organizing events, and, along with 14 of my co-leads, helping scale the processes and operations of a globally distributed support team of more than 120 Happiness Engineers.

An opportunity fell into my lap a few weeks ago: an opportunity to join Support Driven, a small company that exists to serve a growing community of Customer Support professionals. At first I didn’t consider it. I had everything I wanted at Automattic: smart and funny coworkers, freedom to learn and grow, a decent work-life balance, the ability to work from home, acknowledgement and recognition from my peers, great salary and benefits. I was safe, content, and doing well in my work. I wasn’t looking for a new job.

When the Support Driven founder, Scott Tran, presented me with a Director of Operations job proposal, I told him it looked pretty exciting for the right person. They’d get to help design the company structure from the beginning, make strategic decisions for the business, play a key role in shaping company culture, and bring value to the entire Customer Support industry. I got a nervous thrill about it, even though I wasn’t looking for a career change. Scott probed, asking what concerns I had about taking the job myself. Aside from the fact that I wasn’t looking to leave my current job, I had really big apprehensions: security, stability, time with my family.

Going from a company of 650+ — with a stable salary and benefits, plenty of backup if I’m out sick or on vacation, where I know what I’m doing and have found a good rhythm — to a company of fewer than five people, where my efforts would be intimately tied to the success of the business (and therefore my job security) felt like a huge risk. Making a move like this wasn’t just about me and my career. The three most important people in my life — my husband and two kids — would be impacted by whatever decision I made. We eat dinner together, around the table, every night, even during sports seasons. Evenings are sacred. Our time with our kids at home is shrinking: our son will move out in four short years, and our daughter two years after that. Being absent to my family now for a job that might pay off later was not a risk I was willing to take. I’d gotten my work week down to a reasonable number of hours. Moving to a position where I might need to work 60 or 70 hours a week, potentially during evening family time and frequent weekends, in order to ensure the company’s success was not palatable to me.

I was frank with Scott about all of this. I told him my family is more important to me than any job. And for every concern I had, Scott eased my mind. He also has a family. He also wants down time and doesn’t want to work 60-70 hours per week. He is also motivated by stability and security. He intends to grow the business slowly and sustainably, and assured me that we are in control of the amount of work we do, and when, such that we can focus on the projects that work for the community and for us, and back off of projects that don’t.

In other words, he leveled the playing field for many of the external reasons for not taking a new job. I found myself in the position of making a decision based on the work itself, and the outcome of the work I’d do.

By providence, I had recently listened to an Unstoppable Women podcast interview with Anne Raimondi, SVP of Operations at Zendesk. The host, Archana Ravichandran, asked “How do you know when it’s time to leave a company?” Anne flipped that and answered instead, “How do I evaluate a new opportunity?” Her answer guided me through what would have otherwise seemed an impossible decision:
1. Do I believe in the mission? Can I get up for work every day eager to solve the problem the company is looking to solve?
2. Who will I be working with? The people around us shape us.
3. What will I learn, and what impact will I have?
Purpose

I believe in the missions of both Automattic and Support Driven. As a writer and blogger, I am a proponent of democratizing publishing. As a support professional, and especially as one who has both craved and created resources for improving in the craft of support and developing in my profession, I am also a proponent of advancing Customer Support as a career. I could wake up every day and be equally motivated to work towards both of these missions.

People

I love my colleagues at Automattic. They are like family to me. They are smart, kind, generous, and I laugh all day at work. From my interactions with Support Driven — in the community Slack, volunteering as an organizer, and at conferences — I know the Support Driven community are also smart, kind, generous, and funny. If I took the new job, I’d still get to engage with and help my Automattic colleagues who are part of Support Driven, and I’d be part of an amazing broader community as well.

At Support Driven, in addition to being part of the community, I would also be part of the company-level decision-making structure. This is a pretty huge opportunity that also requires a good look at who I’d be working alongside. Based on previous experience organizing conferences together, I know I respect, appreciate, and work well with the founder and owner, Scott. He is motivated by many of the same things I am: a rewarding job that aligns with his values, supports him and his family, brings good to the world, and does not consume him. I also like how he thinks things through: he plans ahead, gathers intel from the community, researches before acting, and is open to iteration without being attached to certain outcomes if they’re not what the community wants. These are important qualities if I’m considering taking a leap.

Potential

In terms of mission and people, both jobs are excellent choices. And so we come to learning and impact. These, ultimately, were the key. Where will I be five or ten years from now depending on the choice I make today?

In terms of learning, there aren’t many opportunities more ripe for learning than getting in on the ground floor of a small startup. Support Driven would allow me to stretch and grow in new-to-me ways, through phases that Automattic has already gone through as a larger organization, and that I’d not have a chance to learn or influence if I stayed. With Support Driven, I would have an opportunity to make decisions at the organization level, including budgets, recruiting, hiring (and firing), compensation and benefits, allocating resources, designing company structure, making decisions on what projects we will take on, managing those projects, and ultimately helping shape the company culture that, as Scott said, will ripple into the future.

In terms of impact, at Automattic I would continue to have an impact as a team lead, and somewhat more if at some point in the future I had the opportunity to lead leads or lead a support division, but the impact would stay mostly within the organization. With Support Driven, I’d be able to help not just the company, but the whole industry. At the business level, I’d have an opportunity to plan, organize, and set expectations from the start so that we are moving forward thoughtfully and with a plan. This is very attractive to me, as this is the way I operate: organize, figure out the how, name milestones, assign a responsible individual, and carry out the plan.

But even bigger than the company-level impact, I am driven by the industry-level impact. Customer Support in the way that companies involved in the Support Driven community approach support — as an integral part of a business, as an asset, as a respected and reputable career choice — is an emerging industry. Resources, products, and services for support professionals are scanty, support professionals are hungry for what Support Driven is offering, and there is huge potential for us to help a large number of people and careers, and ultimately to encourage more companies to recognize the value of excellent customer support.

So, starting March 19 Support Driven will grow by one person — me — to get to work on the projects already in progress, and to direct operations so we can continue to do awesome things for the community.

I am so grateful for everything I learned at Automattic, for my wonderful Automattic colleagues, and for the career theme park Happiness at Automattic provides to hungry learners like me. I am excited to explore a new land soon, to ride the monorail over to Support Driven, where I’ll have a chance to engage with professionals throughout Support. I can’t wait to help even more people, to provide the professional-development resources the community is looking for, and transform the way companies think about support.
Standing in the shower, thinking

November 19th, 2016

A few weeks ago, I drafted a blog post for work. I wasn’t sure about the tone or the message, and since I wasn’t confident about posting it, I decided to put it aside for a bit while I took a few minutes to grab a shower: the one thing in my day that I always forget to plan for.

I used to be a shower-first-thing person. My whole life I’ve rolled out of bed and gone straight to the shower, before even getting coffee. It was as regular a ritual for me as reading before bed.

When I started using a tread desk, that habit changed. I walk every morning for four hours while I work. I sweat.

I don’t take a shower first thing now since I know I’ll spend the morning sweating. The problem is now my shower doesn’t have a designated slot in the day. Every day is different, and being a routine-driven person, the lack of regularity throws me completely. After 35 years of showering first thing in the morning, now, every single day, I realize at some point, “Oh crap, when am I going to fit my shower in?” This is my personal occupational hazard of working from home.

On this particular day, when I wasn’t sure about the internal blog post I was to publish, stepping away from it seemed the perfect time to squeeze in my unplanned-for shower.

In the shower, I enter fully into the inner world of thought. I’ve written before about how the shower is like a fairy forest: I step in, and time warps. In the steam, the white noise of droplets clattering on the tub, the warm water on my skin, I immerse so totally in day dreams, time and space become irrelevant. I forget whether I’ve already washed my hair. I have to check the dryness of the washcloth to determine if I’ve already washed my body. I don’t know if 5 or 30 minutes have passed.

The shower is my thinking place. I don’t intentionally go there to think — our water bill would be outrageous — it just happens. Sometimes I think about cats. Sometimes I think about the grocery list. Sometimes I think about space. Sometimes I have no recollection of what I’ve thought about.

Sometimes I have breakthroughs.

I have another thinking place, and that is in a notebook, in the world of words. I write to discover what I’m thinking, to find holes and explore how to fill them. Strangely, though, I do not want my two thinking places — the shower and the notebook — to overlap. I don’t want a whiteboard in my shower. I don’t want a waterproof phone to capture aha moments.

The beauty of the shower as a thinking place is that the thoughts are uninterrupted. I am out of the way of them because I am usually unaware they are even happening. Writing would break that. It would stop the thoughts, it would disrupt their momentum. The physical act of writing would attach them and make them stick in a place where I am literally washing myself clean and trying to unstick things.

That day, on my unexpected trip to the shower, with no intention to change my thoughts or think about my blog post, and with only the intention of squeezing in a shower so I would not forget to clean myself before taking my daughter to swim practice in the evening, I took my shower and ended up thinking about the blog post. I thought about the tone, I thought about ways to make it more collaborative, and I thought about ways to improve.

When I emerged, I knew the edits I would make so I could feel good about publishing the piece. My showers aren’t always so productive, but I’m finding more and more that this disruptive showering in the middle of the day is working for me. Even if, as a structured, routine-oriented person, the chaos makes me crazy.

This is my entry for the Support Driven Week 3 writing challenge: Thinking space.

Tag: supportdriven

7 months at my new job

Forging a career path… through blogging

Writing is a form of learning

Maybe I can help

Blogging expands my scope of influence

My first big event at my new job

So far, so good: my first days at Support Driven

I’m joining Support Driven full time!

Standing in the shower, thinking