[HN Gopher] Meeting everyone on a new team
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Meeting everyone on a new team
Author : craigkerstiens
Score : 81 points
Date : 2020-09-19 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.annashipman.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.annashipman.co.uk)
| dv35z wrote:
| Perfect timing. I just joined a company this past week as a
| software engineer. Day one, I knew 5 people, only topically. By
| the end of week 1, I have introductions/1:1s scheduled for 30+
| top-notch people at the organization. Here's the method I used to
| do this:
|
| I created a really comprehensive intro email about myself (work
| stuff, personal stuff, passions, etc). I wrote this in Google
| Docs, so it would be easy to paste into Gmail, and preserve the
| nice formatting. In this email, I included several questions (see
| below), which I wanted to ask the person. I got these questions
| from a few sources, including "The first 90 Days" book, along
| with some other questions I found through Google. At the end of
| the email, I marked in bold: Suggest 3 other amazing people for
| me to connect to, and why you recommend them.
|
| I sent the emails out, and got replies within 1-2 days - 75%
| provided me with 3 names! If some did not provide me with names,
| I politely followed up with warm, thankful email, but also a
| reminder to please send me name, which each of them did.
|
| I then sent out "cold" emails to THOSE people, starting with "X
| person said to reach out you" (helping bring a familiar name
| immediately at the beginning of the email). I used the exact same
| email template for that, along with asking for more names.
|
| I used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of all the people I
| reached out with, along with columns for questions, the people
| they referred, and who referred them.
|
| At current, I have 15 1:1s scheduled for next week, and
| tentatively 5-10 scheduled for the week after. I'm using labels
| in Gmail to flag "@ Waiting" for the people who have not
| responded, so that I can follow up after a few days.
|
| In the meeting invites I sent to folks, I included the agenda
| items in the description, so it was top-of-mind for them, as they
| checked their calendar.
|
| I'm using a note taking tool called Obsidian
| (https://obsidian.md/) to take notes on all the conversations I'm
| having with people. This tool lets you write in markdown, and
| quickly crosslink topics (like a personal wiki). The goal is to
| create a knowledge base of information, based on all the "here's
| what you need to know" topics that people share with me.
|
| Finally (and important). I made sure to set expectations with my
| manager before doing this. I basically told him: (1) I am going
| to setup conversations with many people this first 2 weeks of
| work. (2) I will use this output of these conversations to build
| a learning plan of topics which these people suggest focusing on,
| (3) I will then synthesize these notes, and will share them with
| you (manager). (4) You and I will review the learning plan, and
| prioritize it together. (5) We will use this plan, along with our
| weekly 1:1s to build out a 30/60/90 day plan.
|
| This was important, because it allowed me to "buy time" before
| being thrown into a million meetings, assignments, etc. Each
| person I have spoken to so far has had different suggestions on
| what the first several things to focus on, learn, etc are.
| However, they have all been incredibly valuable - and in many
| cases, they are things I would not have immediately known to even
| list down.
|
| The great part about this approach (in my opinion), is that all
| of the people I'm meeting are essentially pre-selected for
| awesomeness by someone awesome. All of the conversations have
| been enormously valuable.
|
| The feedback I've gotten from the people has been really great,
| and validating!
|
| Bonus: I have been using an app called UpHabit
| (https://uphabit.com/), which is a "Personal Relationship
| Manager". It lets you tag people (e.g. by skill, passion, etc),
| and then assign regular reminders to reach out to them (e.g.
| "connect with this person every 3 months"), and lets you take
| notes on the conversations you had. I have found this tool
| enormously valuable, as its allowed me to "scale" my personal
| network, and trust that important people don't get forgotten. I
| find myself a very LIFO person (the people I most recently
| connected with, I'll remember to connect with. The folks from
| long time ago, I often forget). This tool has been helping me re-
| invigorate my personal/professional relationships.
|
| Note: I have no affiliation with either of the tool
| recommendations in this post, aside from finding them very
| useful!
|
| Below are the questions I included in my intro email. If anyone
| would like to see the "full" email, I could probably generify it,
| and share directly.
|
| --- Tell me about yourself! If you feel comfortable sharing, I'd
| love to hear what you are personally passionate about, and what
| topics, processes, areas etc you are passionate for at X.
|
| What is your role & your responsibilities at X?
|
| What's a "day in the life" like for you? This helps build empathy
| and understanding for your world, and how I could best help.
|
| What are your top 3 priorities in the next two months? What
| specifically are you hoping to achieve?
|
| What do you feel are the top 3 challenges/blockers (1) facing X,
| (2) facing your team, (3) you professionally at X?
|
| What is your understanding and expectations of me and my role?
|
| How do you envision us working/partnering with one another?
|
| If you were in my shoes, what would be the top 3 things you would
| prioritize, learn, or focus on in the next month or two?
|
| For each of the above, what would be an actionable next step to
| make progress? (it could be as simple as, "reach out to X
| person", or "read this blog post")
|
| What do you think would be some realistic, achievable and
| impactful "quick wins" or contributions I could make, for me to
| consider taking on as I get started at Kohls?
|
| Very Important: Suggest 3 amazing people at X for me to reach out
| to, who you think connecting with and learning from would help
| make me successful in my journey at X. Be sure and tell me what
| about these people is so amazing & awesome!
| Fnoord wrote:
| > When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for
| FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the
| first things I did was meet each of them for a one-to-one. I was
| initially resistant, but it was extremely valuable, I'm glad I
| did it, and I would definitely do it again in a future role.
|
| I recently joined a startup, and I am glad I did not meet
| everyone (except learned a lot of faces in video meetings)
| because of COVID-19. More precisely, the second wave has been
| officially recognized by the government last week. Remote working
| is the status quo, and it will remain that way. Not my
| preference, normally, but it'll remain this way for the time
| being. Perhaps an interesting article in 2021.
| masonhensley wrote:
| You can do this remotely.
|
| If in a historic remote team or now, I still encourage this
| practice.
| pvinis wrote:
| why were you resistant at first?
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| The > in the first paragraph means they're quoting the
| article.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They joined FT in 2018 from what I can tell, so meeting
| everyone would have been entirely normal. In a remote working
| model, you could obviously do it over VC.
| zachrose wrote:
| > With a team of ~50, that's a lot of hours, and I was also
| working four days a week so each meeting takes up a greater
| proportion of time.
|
| At thirty minutes a pop these meetings come out to 25 hours. That
| does not strike me as "a lot of hours" given that this is talking
| to everyone who works in your department. Put another way is like
| a sanity check on the biggest and most important category of your
| department's budget, at roughly 1% of your annual time.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Would a similar strategy be valuable for an IC (individual
| contributor) joining a new team? For example, setting up 1-on-1
| meetings with direct teammates soon after joining.
| mrud wrote:
| Yes! This is what we do. We even explicitly typically put it in
| your 30 day plan.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I work remotely, where most of my team doesn't (well, didn't
| before Covid). I took the habit of initiating conversations with
| new employees, remotely or whenever I visit the office. It
| doesn't take much but it's worth it. It brings more trust and
| ease up future relations. Surprisingly, I've noticed some people
| can be isolated from their colleagues even when sharing the same
| office.
| cmehdy wrote:
| At a "lower" level, I've done something a bit along those lines
| when starting at my last job: I picked a bunch of people from
| each team at the company and reached out to them to schedule a
| one-on-one about them, the way they see things, their experience
| so far, their team, and a short introduction on my part.
|
| It wasn't about trying to be ten steps ahead of anything or about
| taking any statement as absolute truth, but to understand
| different perspectives, to explain in quick and simple terms the
| reason why I had joined and in what ways I could help them, and
| to establish those contacts to facilitate future interactions.
| Every single discussion was worthwhile, because I understood a
| lot about the company really quickly (which helped me in my work)
| and every time an issue came up I could easily feel empowered to
| connect with those people and be put in touch with the right
| person, or to hear the non-official stuff that is sometimes
| harder to share across teams and therefore help the team with a
| little bit more personality than by slinging tickets across
| boards.
|
| Assuming you're not working in a place with an overwhelming
| amount of psychopaths (which I assume is a reasonable goal for
| the majority of people), I would say that caring about other
| people does pay back quickly and significantly (as shallow as
| that might sound).
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I did something very similar when I joined my last team. I like
| Anna's questions. One of the questions I asked was 'who do you go
| to for advice and bouncing ideas off'. This gave me a great view
| of the key knowledge nexus points and how people are connected to
| each other in the team.
|
| After I'd spoken to everyone, I created a report for the
| executive committee summarizing all topics that had come up
| multiple times, and highlighting individuals that were widely
| relied on.
| ketzo wrote:
| Oh man, I love that "who do you go to for X?" question. I'm
| starting as an SWE on Monday, so that's big on my mind.
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