Building a High Performing Team with Snowflake’s Guan Wang (Workshop Wednesday)

Everyone a second to get their Zoom and their settings set up. Thanks for joining us. Happy Wednesday. Today we are officially launching Workshop Wednesday. So every Wednesday at 10:00 AM Pacific, we will be here rain or shine. We're going to bring along a SAS expert to walk us through some content that they're an expert in, then kick off an interactive discussion. So you'll have the opportunity to interact with the speaker directly, get any questions answered, and connect with fellow community members. Guan is here today to join us and help us kick off. Guan is from Snowflake. He's going to be talking through the playbook to building a high-performing team and retaining top talent. I'm not going to waste any more time. I'm going to pass it over to him. So here's the way the format's going to work. He's going to talk through about 15 minutes of his content, and then we're going to open it up for a discussion. So we want to make this as interactive as possible. Please feel free to turn on your videos and unmute yourself when we get to the question time. So we want to give you direct access to our speakers so you can ask any questions to the speakers themselves and also to other fellow community members that are joining us. So, Guan, take it away. Thanks so much.

Thank you, SASR team. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first SASR workshop. My name is Guan Wang. I'm the Global Director, Marketing Intelligence, Snowflake. I've been with Snowflake for 2 years and have grown the team for over 300% with 0% turnover. In the next 15 minutes, I'm going to share my authentic story, my playbook to build a high-performing team and retain top talent based on my first experience building teams of the last 3 companies. After that, we will have plenty of time, at least 15 minutes, for open discussion. Arguably, people are the most valuable asset of an organization. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build a high-performing team and retain top talent. Based on my research of the SaaS community, the majority of our audience today are probably very familiar with the customer lifecycle, which includes customer acquisition, customer onboarding, customer adoption, customer cross-sell and upsell, as well as customer retention. Every stage of the customer journey is critical to deliver the best class customer experience. I want to, I want to use a metaphor to describe the employee lifecycle since there's lots of commonalities between customer lifecycle and employee lifecycle. Talent acquisition is similar to customer acquisition. Both are the first stage of the journey. Some companies have the recruiting team lead the recruiting process, and even have a separate talent sourcing team to identify candidates for initial phone interviews. Other companies have the hiring managers in charge the end-to-end talent acquisition process, where the recruiting team supports throughout the entire process. Employee onboarding is similar to customer onboarding. Employee onboarding can be as short as a few hours, but can also be as long as a few, a few days, or even sometimes a few months if it involves technical boot camps for job functions as such as software engineering, data science, and machine learning. Employee development is similar to customer adoption. In that customer adoption is to make sure your customers adopt your products or services for their business use cases. And employee development is to make sure your team members build the skill sets and mindsets to succeed in their roles. Employee promotion is similar to customer cross-sell and upsell in that Customer cross and upsell is to make sure your customers adopt additional products or services for their use cases. And employee promotion is to recognize your employee or team members' achievements in their current roles and move on to more challenging roles. Employee retention is similar to customer retention. Employee retention has been a hot topic over the last couple years since the beginning of pandemic. Last year, many companies struggle with losing talent or keeping talent due to the Great Resignation. But this year, especially the recent months, a lot of companies started worrying about the micro economy. And potential layoffs across industries, which could impact the employee sentiment and attrition. Based on both customers and people should be part of your company's core strategy. If you have a playbook to succeed throughout the entire customer lifecycle, you should have a playbook to succeed throughout entire employee lifecycle as well. To build a high-performing team, first of all, you need to understand the top attributes of making up high-performing team, which I have a slide show you later. It's like a compass that can guide you as you build a high-performing team. Every decision you make, every conversation you have with your people, and every conflict you run into, you as a leader shape the attributes of your team that ultimately drive your team performance. In addition, you can adopt the specific tactics, which I will also share with you later, throughout the entire employee lifecycle, which help you build a high-performing team. At Snowflake, we have a leadership book club. We have a group of managers come together to discuss the tactics from building a team to increasing team productivity to building a great culture. One of my favorite books is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. This is a business book published 20 years ago, but has a practical framework that can still useful today for building a high-performing team. I want to highlight the 5 attributes of high-performing team: trust, constructive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. As well as actions you can take to build your team attributes. Trust is a foundation of a high-performing team. So how to build trust? You, as a leader, need to be human. To be more specific, you need to cultivate a safe environment where everyone in your team can speak up Team members support each other as well as leverage the strengths of each other. A lot of teams broke this layer. It's easier said than done. Every team runs into conflicts, so how to solve those? You as a leader need to demand debate And to be more specific, you need to get input from stakeholders and then find root causes and develop sound solutions with minimal politics. We all commit to something at work, but is there a trick why some teams do it so well and not others? You, as a leader, need to focus on clarity and delivery. And to be more specific, you need to build an alignment on common objectives with your stakeholders, clarify directions and priorities, as well as highly engage your team members throughout the entire process. Next, how do you build a culture of accountability? You, as a leader, need to confront difficult issues. Sometimes you need to hold your team members accountable and really manage the poor performers. In addition, you need to hold the same standards for everyone in your team. Lastly here, the top of the team performance pyramid is the results. You as a leader need to focus on establishing objectives and roadmaps on a regular— on a regular basis for your team. And ultimately, you as a leader need to inspire your team members to deliver the results according to objectives and roadmaps. Next, let's switch the gear to focusing on the tactics. Employee lifecycle is made up of 5 phases: hiring, onboarding, development, promotion, and retention. Let me share the specific tactics you can apply throughout the entire employee lifecycle. For hiring, one of the key tactics I've done at Snowflake is to build a clear vision and mission for my team that we can share with all candidates during the interview process. So there's an early alignment between all the candidates and my team. In addition, you can build your company brand deliver great candidate experience, and build a strong talent network, which will help you hire the best people. For onboarding, one of the key tactics I've done at Snowflake is to build a 30-, 60-, 90-day plan so new employees are clear about the priorities as they join my team. In addition, you can set clear expectations, help your team members build a network, and provide detailed instruction and documentation as they start working on projects. You should be clear that you will never hire the perfect person who knows everything on their first day of the job. So talent development should be part of your core tactics to help your people succeed. One of the key tactics for me is to prioritize learning and development for my team members. In addition, you need to balance the sustainability and the longevity of your team members and make sure you understand and support your employees needs as you help your team grow into the next phase of their careers. At a certain point, some of your team members are ready for promotion. Promotion could be a really, really sensitive topic, as you can't promote high performers in your team at the same time. So my philosophy is to celebrate promotions as team wins rather than individual career milestones. In addition, you can use opportunities to inspire other team members and provide nurture opportunities, but you need to be careful that you need to calibrate your team members carefully and justify why some people get promoted Retention is a highly sensitive topic for many leaders. It's a hard problem, as lots of industry-leading companies struggle with retaining top talent. According to a LinkedIn survey, the tech industry has an average turnover rate of 13.2%. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the turnover rate for startups is double the industry average at 26%. My tactic of retaining top talent is to execute extremely well in steps 1 to 4 to make sure my team members are happy and motivated. In addition, you can instill a psychological safe environment where your people can openly share their perspectives, challenges, and sometimes even mistakes. Also, you need to be aware that every career move has a potential risk and cost associated with it. You need to make sure the potential upward opportunities you provide in your team can be hardly matched anywhere else. And this wraps my story. Now open for discussion.

Thank you, Guan. Questions? So feel free to raise your hand, come off mute, or drop them in the chat. Will kind of help facilitate one and hopefully kick off some interesting discussion. So Jason's going to kick us off. We got a first question in the chat here.

I can go first, but everyone can go out. I'm curious what you've learned from the data on promotions. How many folks are promotable, like reach a certain bar, versus slots? Like, what's the, what's the ratio? And what have you learned from the data? We don't always know this at startups, but what's What's that ratio? I know a lot of times in sales teams with SDRs to AEs, it's also almost often 3 to 1, but what have you learned about that ratio and how to handle it?

Jason, do you mean my specific team or the—

Yeah, well, you've got enough all-stars at Snowflake, right? Let's say there's a promotion level for a senior manager or director or however you rank things. Like, I'm sure it's systematic at Snowflake scale. For each level of promotion, how many good candidates do you have? Like folks that have earned it, but they can't all get it. Like, what's the ratio of folks that truly meet the bar, but yet— but for each slot, is it 2 to 1, 1 to 1? Are there 10 great folks for each promotion? What have you learned from the number of folks that meet the bar for each promotion?

Yeah, yeah. First of all, Snowflake is a high-growth company. I joined the company 2 years ago. There was about 2,000 people. Nowadays, I don't have the latest number. I think our last earnings report, If I remember correctly, it was over 1,500 employees, you know, tremendous growth. And also that means, yeah, a lot of opportunities for, you know, new, for employees, you know, particularly in my team, you know, when I joined the company, my team has about, including myself, has 3 people. Nowadays we have, you know, close to 15 people. And at some point next year, hopefully we can get to 20. And that means a lot of growth opportunities. So over the last 6 months, I promoted 2 new managers. They are the first-time managers. They were individual contributors when they joined the company, but they have done tremendous work. And I promoted one to manager once he crossed the 4th year anniversary at Snowflake. Um, and across other functions, I think SDRs and AEs, definitely a lot of opportunities. You know, our SDR leader, Lars Nielsen, his team has over 200 SDRs at this point, and I think his team, um, I think, um, promoted a lot of SDRs every quarter. If I remember correctly, it's like more than 10 SDRs every quarter they will promote into other functions, either become corporate AEs or become, you know, some joining my team or, you know, other marketing teams, as well as, you know, sales enablement, etc. So there's definitely a lot of opportunities. And also remember, promotion is not like you move level 1 to level 2 or to level 3. Sometimes it could be, you know, you jumping to a different function. That could also be a promotion.

Guan, you talked a lot about building a roadmap and, you know, publicizing it and how important that is as a leader. How do we do this? How often do you bring it up to your team? How do you share it and make sure that it's top of mind for the team? Can you tell us and dig a little bit more into that?

Yeah, sure. Great question. So how my team builds roadmap, you know, we're definitely like a technical team, but we also have enablement strategy and thought leadership component because my team use Snowflake product to build a lot of stuff. We actually, it's a two-way process. One way is for my team, we proactively partner with business stakeholders, including CMO, our CMO Denise, on big initiatives. We come up with our proposal, our recommendations, our ideas, And then the business leaders and stakeholders will vet, is this good stuff, or is this a good project for us, or is it not? And then another way for us is we have a standard BRD process, business requirement document process. So all stakeholders, when they request a project from my team, they need to fill out a BRD that my team can clearly— at least at a high level, we understand what people want to achieve. And then based on those two-way process, on a quarterly basis, we release something called What Matters. That's across marketing. And every single team member at Snowflake Marketing, we have our quarterly matters. Usually it consists between 3 to 5 big rocks we will deliver every single quarter. And as a leader, my job is to make sure we establish the quarterly what matters, and we have a roadmap even for the next 1 or 2 quarters out. And some project even is 4 quarters out. And, um, my job is to make sure every single team member in my team deliver those quarterly what matters. Hopefully that answers the question.

Awesome, thank you. All right, we're getting tons of questions in the chat. Raise your hand if you want to ask live. If not, I'm going to keep asking. So one question, how did you learn to be an excellent people leader? Obviously a Snowflake guru, how did you adapt or learn to scale with the company?

Just to re— that's— can you repeat? Yeah, can you repeat the question a little bit?

Yeah, how do you learn to be an excellent leader? I think it's probably something that really takes practice and just comes with experience. But I think coming in, you mentioned that there's been a lot of growth at Snowflake since you started. So how do you grow as a leader, and how have you learned to adapt as the company has scaled and as your team has scaled?

Yeah, I think people leadership cannot— I mean, you can learn something from the textbooks in a podcast or even this, you know, workshop. However, I think you have to really put those learnings into practice. You know, every single leader will have different leadership styles, and you have to find a way that's most, you know, authentic to you. You know, my leadership style is, um, I'm caring and I'm supportive. I want to help each other. And I want to help my team member grow. So that's my leadership style. And over the course of the last, you know, 6 or 7 years, I learned so much from my first leadership role to today. You know, I think, you know, my wife remind me, you know, think about yourself 6 or 7 years ago when you first became the first-time people manager. You were such— you were struggling with your job because I need to deliver projects on my own, but I also need to manage a team. That time was very, very difficult. But I came a long way through the journey. I took a couple of leadership training courses and the programs on my own. And also, and then trying to talk with some of the amazing leaders, like Jason here, but also many leaders at Snowflake that's just wonderful person I can just learn from. And I always want to observe how other amazing leaders, you know, lead their teams. So, you know, and then leadership is a journey. I don't think, you know, I'm a perfect leader right now. And I, you know, always remind myself there's always room to improve. Even my team is doing amazing, but personally, I see— I think I still a lot of things I can learn. From amazing leaders here in the industry.

Yeah, of course. It's a constant iteration. Sheila has a question she's going to ask live.

Hey, Guan.

Thanks for spending your time and kind of contributing to the community. Really appreciate it. The question I had was, you mentioned in your process, like, this fair evaluation process. And I was wondering if you have any recommendations for startups on balancing the need of, like, a systematic process. Like, large companies have, like, all of these things that they roll out with giant companies, like SuccessFactors. Versus a right-sized process for a scaling company? How do you build that infrastructure just in time at the appropriate level for the size of company you have?

Yeah, I can speak from both my current experience at Snowflake as well as my previous companies. By the way, I worked for Fortune 500 companies as well as startups. I really like the framework called Nine Box. Shira, have you heard about something called Nine Box?

I have. I do have some Fortune 500 experience before startup as well, and so ultra familiar with Nine Box.

Yeah, basically we put the people into one of those boxes. But that's like a framework. Basically, you put the people there. But I have my own process, thinking, when before I put anyone in, into a box, I will have a framework to rate, you know, their current, um, or the past 12 months, um, employees' performance. What's the strategy and plan for that particular individual, as well as what are the feedback from the stakeholders, um, you know, any rooms to improve. And I will rate across my team and write every, you know, write, you know, 3 to 5 bullet points for individual people in each of those categories. And then I will compare, do like holistically compare across my team. And, you know, and that will really clear my mind, you know, the rating will be fair because I have, you know, that 360-degree, you know, feedback group from all the stakeholders for for all the team members, for the leaders, and before I put anyone into a box. So that's a framework and then the process I've taken. I really enjoy doing that because it helped me clear my mind. You know, sometimes some team members could be really talkative, they share amazing things, but, uh, you know, on the other, on the other end, some of the team members may be shy, they don't share anything. So you have to balance out. Sometimes, you know, you cannot be emotionally controlled or dominated by certain team members. You know, again, the performance review, promotion, those could be really sensitive topics. We need to be cautious about and thoughtful about anything we do there. So that's my philosophy about performance rating or any of the, you know, I mean, particularly here, we call it— on Snowflake, we call it annual marriage review. So that will include some of the compensation adjustment.

Sitting here Googling 9box. Jordan doesn't have a mic, so we are going to ask the question for him. What does accountability look like for SDRs? In my case, I have an SDR that's doing the work in terms of email send and open rates. The positive response rate is nonexistent over the last 4 months. Other SDRs have done well but are reaching out to a different segment. Do I chalk this up to a problem with management, i.e., bad batch of leads, bad product, or is this poor performance by the SDR? It's a great question, Jordan. What do you think, Guan?

Yeah, great question. You know, I, by the way, I'm not from the SDR function, but we do— I've been working with SDR functions over the last 3 or 4 companies. The, um, my— I can share a little bit on my point of view. Um, you know, I, I think, you know, at least, you know, from Snowflake side, we have amazing tooling and then predictive models and then the systems processes enablement built for the SDR team, you know, help them succeed through their, you know, SDR career journey. SDR for most of people, it represents sales development representative. And then no one will stay in the SDR career for their entire career. Some people move to a different career path to become AEs. Some people become, move on to marketing. Some people move on or get promoted into the SDR management team, managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors, VPs, and definitely a long career trajectory for the SDRs. And I think the tooling data will be really important. But on the other end, also really understand the customers and understand the products and services your company provides. And make sure you deliver the core message to the customers you are trying to talk to. Even the emails you are writing, make sure you hit the main points. I was reading the other blog, something Jason M. Lemkin posted a few, many years ago about as a first SDR or salespeople, how can you send cold emails to the CEOs. So make sure it's simple, you hit the key points, and then there's actions people can take. So, uh, this is my perspective on how to be an amazing SDR and how to be successful.

But keep it short. Is that right? I'm not sure how to say that, but, um, jump in.

Keep it short, uh, hit the mass, um, deliver the mass message, um, for your product, for your company. And even sometimes it's a product position, you know, make sure you deliver that and make sure you have something interesting for the, for the people you are talking to. Don't try to be like sending the same email to the same people, not relevant. People will unsubscribe your email. Hi there, Raikke from Berlin. I have a question regarding your investment into the ramp-up phase of new hires, and that is how long do you give new hires to be up to speed in, say, months? And how much of this time is pure onboarding dedicated activities versus just on-the-job training? Yeah, yeah, great question. My team, we have a portion of a team that's technical. So what I've done on my first month at Snowflake, we build actually an onboarding doc, which is 3 pages long with every single thing, the tooling, the systems, the cost, the key stakeholders, and then all the leaders here at Snowflake they should meet with. So, and that's like the onboarding doc we have been using in my team for almost the last 2 years and has been very, very successful. For the new hires, they can start on their first day, they can look those docs and they don't need to ask a lot of questions, how can I access to certain tools or systems or platforms? They can work on their own. And Snowflake, because we're much larger company now, a lot of things are managed by our IT team or operations team. We can, people, my new team members can create the tickets on their own. Rather than asking managers or team leaders to help them to do those babysitting stuff. And then that's like the initial onboarding. And for some of the technical folks in my team, we also have really rich documentation in conference, in, you know, Elation, in many of the documentation platforms. Our team members can learn things on their own. This, again, onboarding is not— for my team, it's not like a 1-day event or 2-day event. It's like a 3 to 6 months period. People have to learn a lot of things, especially we're in the business function. There's so many things can be learned. So hopefully that answers your question, Greg. It does. Thank you.

All right, question from Brian. It seems like career progression and promotions have become more and more important to helping retain employees. How does Snowflake think of role changes, and what kind of timelines and benchmarks do you have in place to help make sure these opportunities are offered evenly to all Snowflake employees?

Yeah, great question. Internal transfers, I think that we make the whole process very transparent. We— I believe we have posted all the potential opportunities, you know, both internally as well as our snowflake.com career website. And the interview process for, you know, internal employees is the same as, you know, external candidates. And for Snowflake, we always want to hire the best people, either internally or externally, to, you know, for specific roles. And particularly for my team, we actually had an internal transfer. She's based in London, and she transferred to my team from sales planning team last year. And she has been with Snowflake for about 6 years. And that interview process was full— it's a full cycle. That process made up of 6 or 7 people. You know, here again at Snowflake, we, you know, our goal is, objective is to hire the best people, to put them into the right positions and make sure, you know, we give them the opportunities to shine. So that's about the internal transfer process at Snowflake.

What about like career progression and promotion? So for example, I feel like employees want to get promoted every month, right? But that's, feasibly not possible when you're building a company. And as Jason said, there's just not enough bandwidth and enough open positions, right, to keep promoting everybody. So do you have, you know, someone has to be in a role for a minimum of a year. I know some people have like level changes that are within a role, so you don't have to do a full promotion every time. Do you kind of have any more structure or bandwidth around that at Snowflake?

Not yet, based on my knowledge. So I think our promotion, we don't have like, you know, every annual merit review cycle, we don't have like, you know, something called the promotion quarter. Certain companies, you know, some of the larger companies I worked before have like a promotion quarter. You know, every single promotion cycle, you can have no more than, you know, 5% people promoted in your team. Et cetera. Yeah, Snowflake, we don't have anything like that. We don't have quota from HR, from our executive leadership team. It's all based on performance, your contribution, your potential. We have a full performance review cycle that we rate, at least for my team, we rate all my team members fairly and put the people to the right position and make sure they succeed. Rather than some companies, if they have certain guidance, you have to be at the company for at least 2 years and done such, such, such, and then you can get promoted. Yeah, we don't have anything like that.

All right. This is kind of a follow-up question on that from Lima. Is diversity a consideration for you and Snowflake when hiring or in promotions? And what are the reasons if it's not a consideration? So kind of just a follow-up on that to expand on your last point.

First of all, promotion is always my top priority from the whole employee lifecycle, from hiring, onboarding, development, promotion, and even retention. I always want to keep in mind because I'm personally a minority in the United States. You know, I just put myself in the shoes of my, you know, my team members and anyone I want to hire. I want to have that mindset, you know, I want to hire, you know, I'm building a diverse team. I don't want every, you know, team member in my team looks the same with same background, same skill sets, same thinking. That's no, no, no, that's not the team I'm going to build. And in order to build a high-performing team, diversity is one key components I always keep in mind. So every decision I made for my team will have the diverse diversity component and factor. Hopefully that answers the question.

Christopher has a question.

Hey, uh, can you hear me?

Yep.

Um, hey, thanks for the presentation. Uh, really useful. Um, so just looking for some advice for, for a smaller startup. Um, you know, kind of getting close to $1 million ARR. Things are founder-led, uh, pretty much ad hoc. Not a lot of like systems and processes in place in terms of hiring, onboarding, um, that whole kind of, um, employee onboarding funnel. You had some good practical tips in one of the other slides earlier. What do you think is like the highest ROI thing that we can implement early in the process? Whether that be like solidifying kind of our values or creating those 30, 60, 90-day plans. Like, what do you think is the lowest hanging fruit that we can do early on in order to improve our employee funnel?

Since it's an early-stage startup, my suggestion is, remember, I shared the 5 phases of the employee cycle— hiring, onboarding, development, promotion, and retention. You pick 1 or 2 things you can do in each of those really important things, most important thing for your company throughout the 5 stages of the employee lifecycle. And then focusing on those to develop like the foundation as your company grows. Yeah, make sure you have one, you know, one or two things in each of these areas. Even like hiring, make sure you, you know, you can build your company brand, your network on LinkedIn, and then really attract the candidates, you know, the, your company, you know, employer brand. So that's another type of brand, different from your product brand, but also important to make sure, you know, you have those foundations to, to hire the best people.

Cool, thank you.

Yeah, uh, what's— we're getting a lot of questions here. Questions from, uh, Ted: How has the significant drop in stock price impacted retention? What are you doing to mitigate the drop?

Um, So yeah, I think that's a hard question for me. Definitely, I mean, people— one thing I think maybe I learned throughout my career is don't look at the stock price every day. It just makes me very anxious. Sometimes just feel like, oh, it dropped 20% or someday up 20%. So, you know, by the way, I'm inside trading at Snowflake. I'm not allowed to sell stock or do any advice on Snowflake stock. So I, yeah, I don't tend to look at the stock price, to be honest, very often. I don't care. I want to stay with the company for long term. So I'm going to build a company, building my team, and let's see 5 years from today where the Snowflake stock is. Yeah, yeah. So that's my, my personal perspective. I don't— yeah, try not to look at the stock price every single day. And the overall markets, you know, I mean, we all— yeah, for the overall market, we can invest in the, you know, the index fund or S&P 500, so etc. So you, you know, even there's a 10% up and down, there's nothing you can do, just go, go with the ride. So yeah.

Focus on the role too, and the day-to-day and the opportunity.

Exactly. Yeah.

Sheila is posing a question to the group, so I don't know if folks are comfortable sharing it again, either in the chat or coming off mute, but have other startups considered a shorter timeline for performance evals, like quarterly, for example, versus annually or twice a year?

Yeah, I, I can share a little bit of my personal perspective. My previous company did quarterly performance reviews. But other companies also do the annual performance reviews. I tend to see the annual performance reviews are better. But you have the— but I think you could have the quarterly check-ins. How we do at Snowflake, we have the annual performance reviews, but we also have the quarterly What Matters. So that's for— Every single quarter we have 3 to 5 big things we want to deliver, and those things will help us have the, to basically drive the annual performance review conversations. If you miss consistently 4 quarters, we're in trouble. But we should have the conversation early on. When you miss a second time, then that conversation should happen early on rather than waiting for the full year annual performance review. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's my philosophy and point of view on the performance review, whether it's annual or quarterly.

Yeah, bigger annual, more formal process, smaller check-in so the employee knows kind of where they stand and they're not surprised after 12 months' time. That makes sense.

Yeah, one thing to add, um, Oh, sorry. One thing to add is performance review can be really time-consuming. You know, I— one of my previous companies did, you know, quarterly performance reviews, and people just hate those. They said, why I spend so much time writing something not even used? So you have to scale. Like annual performance review, you can do a large scale. You spend, you know, 3 days writing those things. But for quarterly you spend 2 hours. So you have to balance that, not trying to make the process, you know, overcomplicated and people feel frustrated. That was my experience in one of the companies, do quarterly performance reviews, and at some point I just gave up. I don't want to do it anymore. I just write something I copy-paste from last quarter.

From the last quarter, yeah. You spend so much time talking about their performance versus actually doing it. So it kind of makes sense.

Yeah.

Um, all right. Thank you. Good point on the consideration of time commitment. Um, maybe one of our last questions, but, uh, feel free to keep dropping them in if you've got them. Guan, where do you see yourself in 5 years? What skills are needed? What resources will you utilize to achieve your own career goals? So basically, how will you prepare yourself for your own promotion?

That's a hard question. So I, you know, for my promotion, I definitely have career goals. So I have, you know, I'm trying to have quarterly or at least like once every two quarters, I have career conversations with my manager to make sure he understands what my career goals are. And, you know, in addition to that, I'm trying to be more involved in the community service, the volunteering. So I've been volunteering for a couple of nonprofit organizations, and my goal is to make sure I always have the mindset to be grateful. As Jason M. Lemkin shared something on LinkedIn last weekend, be always be grateful, ABG. Yeah, so that's my, you know, instead of just getting paychecks from Snowflake, I want to contribute something to the community, help the younger people to grow. And I went through, I made a lot of mistakes in my career. How can I share those learnings with other people so they can take on those learnings early on? And in addition to that is, you know, and engage some of the thought leadership activities, like this particular event, SaaS workshop. That's something I'm passionate about. I want to discuss with the peers in the industry. We can learn together. We can grow together. And yeah, career promotion is just like a one moment in our careers. It's not going to be like that. Career promotions are not my ultimate career goal. There will be some financial benefits, but yeah, those things are very, very short-term. Yeah, it's important, but it's not like my North Star.

Love it. Any other questions from the group? Then this officially concludes.

This was an epic start.

First Workshop Wednesday. Guan, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate you sharing all your insights and just answering and being really authentic in your responses, giving folks the opportunity to ask questions. So we will be back here next week at 10 AM. Wednesday. We're going to try and mix these up and get lots of different types of companies, different stages, different roles. So next week, we are going to have a VP from Battery Ventures, Brandon's going to be joining us, talking through our traditional SaaS metrics outdated. So great opportunity from the VC perspective to get some questions answered there. So see everyone hopefully back next Wednesday at 10 AM. Till next time.

Thank you so much.

Bye.