Hustle in Comfort: How to Build Amazing Software Teams with nCino VP of Engineering Dory Weiss

Alright, good morning everyone and welcome to ZA/STR Annual. You are joining the first roundtable session of the day and this is with Dorie Weiss. I'm going to give a couple more minutes for a few folks to join in and then we'll dive right into some housekeeping items. All right, we have quite a few that have joined us this morning. I'd love for us to dive straight into the housekeeping before kicking it off with Dorie. All right, you have joined us for a roundtable session. You have your videos on. It is an interactive session, but 15 minutes, it's gonna fly by. And we encourage you to keep your cameras on. You are muted, but you can unmute yourself as well to join the conversation as Zori's going through some of the slides. You are able to do so by clicking the raise hand button on the participants icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen. These sessions will be recorded, and so that you will have access to them after the fact. So I'm going to continue admitting folks into the session, but please, I hope you have a fantastic session. Looking forward to kicking it off with Dori. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Tammy. Thank you for having me, and, and thanks everyone for joining me this morning. I know it might be bright and early, especially for folks on the West Coast, so thank you for starting your day with me and starting SASter with this session. My name is Dory Weiss. I am the VP of Engineering at nCino. nCino is a fintech company. We are the worldwide leader in cloud banking. We help customers originate any type of financial product and onboard into a financial institution and do so securely and transparently and provide great, great customer service. I joined nCino in 2013 as a software engineer. I was the 5th person in our product engineering department back in 2013. We now have almost 400 folks in, in that department, over 1,000 folks in the company, and worldwide offices. And so that, um, the speed of that growth was, was incredible, and I think surprising to all of us, even with our highest hopes. And so what I wanted to spend a little bit of time with folks today is just talking through some of the insights and some of the experiences that I've had and that we've had as a company trying to grow our software teams. But also, I think none of the things that I want to talk about this morning are unique to software teams. I think that these are things that are generally applicable throughout your companies, throughout your organizations. You know, I do hope that we can make this as interactive as possible in the time that we have. So I have a few questions for the group. If you have answers, please raise your hand if there's something that you'd like to add in that moment. And if you have questions for me, then please feel free to add in. So one of the things that we like to say, or one of the— we hearken back to all the time at Encino is this quote from Peter Drucker, who, you know, did a lot of sort of foundational thinking about organizational dynamics in businesses. Peter Drucker has this very famous quote, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." And that insight is one that we have really sort of grounded ourselves on from day one at Nsino. In a strategy-led organization, you end up with a command and control type of structure where you've got a couple of folks at the top of the organization who have the big ideas, they've got the plans, and they sort of dole out instructions to everybody else in the organization who just sort of follows— follow those instructions as though everything is a very clear recipe that you can just sort of punch out the steps to. But realistically, when you're trying to solve complex problems in an industry where things are moving quickly, things aren't that well known. Things aren't easy to compartmentalize in a way that you can describe as a recipe. And so what we have wanted to do and what we think about as we build our teams and our organization is how to place our culture and the individuals that we bring into the company at the center of what we do. Because by focusing on our individuals and focusing on that culture, We think that allows us to be flexible and resilient in ways that are really important for the organization. So I always like to say my job is to hire the smartest, best human beings that I can find, to give them a really clear picture of what our goals are and what we're trying to accomplish and my expectations for how they interact with each other, and then just sort of get out of their way and trust that with each of them, you know, doing their best and bringing their own insights and experiences, we'll get this sort of exponential growth of ideas and creation in a way that we could never approximate if I was trying to tell everyone what to do. So with that as sort of the core of how we think about organizing, you immediately then have to ask yourself, okay, so if we're gonna play place our culture at the center of the organization, then the very first thing you have to do is define what that culture means. And I think that what we have found really helpful is that from the very beginning, from the first day of the company, our CEO identified what he thought were the 6 core values that were the most important to our company. If you look at them here on the slide, you know, there's nothing— there's nothing sort of brain-breaking about these core values. These are fundamental sort of human values. Do the right thing. Respect each other. Make someone else's day. So when we talk about defining the core values, the core culture of a company, it doesn't have to be an obscure experience. It doesn't have to be this incredibly lofty mission statement that you feel like you're, you know, creating, trying to seek out new insights that no one has ever had before about human behavior. These can be really fundamental things, and they should be really fundamental things. They should be sort of the core pieces of how human beings should interact with each other. So we started with these 6 core values, and what's important about those values is that they then become built into the fabric of the everyday of your company. And I think that this is the place where companies that define their, their core values and really have a clear picture of their culture— culture is what you do every day, culture is the sum of your actions and the sum of the way that people treat each other. And so it's really important to take these ideals and make sure that they show up every day in how you do your business. So for us, that meant that every time we write a job description or every time we prepare to hire for a new position, there need to be questions that we ask the candidates that we're interviewing that directly relate back to, to our values. If these are the core part of how we see our organization, then they need to act as a gate or as one of the gates that folks pass through as they join the organization. So taking the core values and making them a part of our hiring experience, making sure that they're reiterated all the time during onboarding, The job expectations that we share with everyone, no matter what their role is in our company, they are— our values need to be present in our job expectations, or else you create a disconnect that leads people to wonder if your core values are really your core values, because they're not showing up every day in that lived experience. One of the things that we've found really really powerful for Encino is that from the very beginning, our marketing department and our recruiting department have been connected. So our recruiting team sits in our marketing department because for us, defining our brand and making sure that that is, it is a deep, everyday center of the company thing. It both helps with our understanding of ourselves as a company. It helps with retention, but then it really does also help with recruiting and hiring because this— our culture is our company. Those things are deeply embedded in those ways. And so when I think of one great example of that, I think is for us, this hashtag #LiveTheSix, since we have our core, our six core values. Live the Six. I have no idea where it came from. It actually didn't come from our marketing department. But what we started to see was that on Instagram and on Twitter and on LinkedIn, as our employees would post pictures or stories about their day, they would use that #LiveTheSix hashtag, which to me is like the perfect example of the fact that we've really gotten this right. And this is something that has momentum. Outside of leadership trying to tell people what the company culture is, that the company culture has taken on a life of its own in those ways. So I'm curious for the folks who are here this morning, for those of you who have defined core values for your company, are there— what particular ways have you found successful in terms of making those core values part of the day-to-day for your company. I, uh, I won't let the silence stretch out too awkwardly since we only have a half an hour, but I think that that means that your homework for the rest of the day is to think about what your company core values are. If you haven't defined them, to think about how you would define them. And if you have defined them, to think about ways that you can connect them more deeply into the day-to-day experience of your teams and of your companies. And it doesn't have to be— like I said at the beginning, it doesn't have to be earth-shaking. It can be as simple as I want to make sure I have an interview question that I ask everybody that really gets at this thing that I think is foundational to our company culture. So, speaking of hiring, one of the things that is essential to the way that we think about building powerful teams, building awesome teams, is to make sure that we've got a broad range of folks in the room whenever we're trying to build software. This is something that I think, especially as startups, this can be a real struggle. Certainly for us, we're in Wilmington, North Carolina. It is a small town. It is not, you know, a quintessential hotbed of tech talent. And so one of the things that we saw a lot during the first, you know, year or so of the company was our hiring depended very, very strongly on referrals. And a lot of the folks, most of the folks that we hired came from the local university. Which is a wonderful school. We've hired really incredible talent. But one of the sort of moments that we had, you know, 2 years in was looking around the room at the team and realizing, you know, almost everyone had come from the same educational background, had been taught by the same professors, had gone through the same curriculum. And there was a moment where I, you know, sort of had that insight, you know, I have put a very real boundary around the ideas and the insights that my team is able to bring me because they all share the same educational perspective. They all, you know, share so much of the same characteristics that no one is going to be able to bring me a radically different idea. And I think that we all know, hopefully we all know the value of having those diverse voices in the room, and that that is about, you know, educational experience, it is about age, it is about race and gender and all of those things. And one way that we've really started articulating that to our managers as they hire, and then to our teams as they participate in interviews, is the idea of looking for a culture add and not just a culture fit. 'Cause I think culture fit is an idea that we're instinctively sort of comfortable with. It's somebody who is culturally familiar to us, who we can imagine sort of hanging out with. We feel comfortable in a way that is attractive. And some amount of those people in our organization and hiring for culture fit can be a good thing. But where you really make strides is when you can pivot and thinking about culture add, which is the idea that someone won't just reflect the values and the ethics of the organization, but will also bring something new into the mix. You know, a new voice, a new set of experiences, and thereby sort of enhancing you know, the, the company culture, not just reverberating the, the company culture. And so one of the things that I think is important to acknowledge when we talk about culture adds and when we talk about the importance of diversity in hiring, though, is that one of the reasons why diversity is so powerful in terms of building high-quality teams is because diversity is hard. And I think we don't always talk about this in the ways that we should. We're not as honest about it as we should. Diversity is hard. Diversity should be hard. Because what we're trying to avoid is an echo chamber where everything is easy and the same sort of ideas and opinions are just getting reflected back against each other. What we want is to create a team culture where people are bringing new ideas and that we are having conversations that require folks to reconcile different opinions, to reconcile different experiences. So you want, you want some degree of friction in those team interactions. You want folks to have to think deeply about why they believe what they believe, or why they suggested the approach that they suggested, so that they have to think a little more deeply when they explain that to someone else. And then you want, you want folks to then listen a little more critically and, and take in ideas with just the right amount of skepticism. You know, it's not about being the person who plays devil's advocate just for the sake of playing devil's advocate. I am not a fan of that person because it's not always done in good faith. But it is about really thinking through new ideas carefully. And so I think I think thinking about it in terms of how do I get the right amount of friction among my team? I want everybody to be respectful of each other. I want folks to take care of each other. I want it to be a safe place in the room when we're having conversations. But I want there to be enough friction that we really are thinking deeply about the ideas that we're considering. I'm curious, you know, if folks have particular strategies in your hiring process right now that you use to sort of make sure that you're including the right sort of diverse voices in your candidate pool and then hopefully in your teams. Any insights? That's a— we could have spent half an hour on that in and of itself. Yes. I can't see the name of the person who is raising their hand, but—

It is Chris.

Chris, please.

Yeah. So I think that the diversity piece in hiring is actually quite difficult, not least because often you've got a very narrow window with which to evaluate somebody. One of the things I've done in the past is, you know, trying to involve as broad a range of people in that interview process as possible so that you get, you know, a broad range of people who are assessing the candidate's fit, or as you put it, the kind of add to the organization.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think another sort of benefit of trying to get that broad interview group, if you're able to get it, is that I think that it's really important to demonstrate to candidates that there is a place for them, there is a safe place for them if they join your company. And I think being able to look around the room and seeing a range of folks who are a part of the interview process, it's one thing to say that you're interested in hiring a diverse group of folks. It's another thing to have a candidate sit in a room and sort of look around and be like, hey, I I see a range of people here. I could see myself in this group too. Anyone else? All right. So I think kind of following along that idea that diversity is hard and that It can mean that you're asking folks to have hard conversations or complicated conversations. There is, in general, I think, this— the overriding truth that psychological safety is a really important thing, maybe the most important thing for leaders to provide their teams. This is an idea— Google, in the early 2000s, did a study of their teams to try to determine which of their teams they thought was the highest performing. And so they tried to look for a bunch of factors. Was it teams that were co-located? Was it teams that were all remote? Was it teams with a range of ages of participants? All of the sort of factors that they could try to examine for. And what they ended up finding was that the teams that were most effective were the teams that essentially reported being places where they really felt like they could be themselves. And I think, for myself at least, that intuitively makes a ton of sense, right? If I am in a place, if I'm in an organization or with a group where I feel like I am safe being myself, and I'm safe being honest, then that means that I don't have to take up a lot of my emotional energy and a lot of my intellectual energy spending that time trying to pretend to be someone that I'm not, or trying to sort of live up to a set of standards or behave in this way that I feel like I'm supposed to behave all the time. And that ends up being a huge drain on my psychological resources. So, and this is something that a number of studies since then have sort of reinforced this idea that the most important thing that you can provide to a team is a place where folks feel psychologically safe. And that— the sort of definition of psychologically safe teams are these characteristics on the slide right now. The idea of interpersonal trust and respect. The idea that you can speak up safely without being rejected. Going back to the previous slide, that doesn't mean that people don't have respectful disagreements. It doesn't mean that a team can't talk through hard ideas and— You know, it doesn't mean that everybody always wins every conversation or gets everything they want, but it means that folks aren't in danger. This idea that you're safe to be your whole self. And there are two pieces that psychologists use to sort of decide if a team is psychologically safe or not. And it is this idea of both conversational turn-taking, So in a group of people, am I listening roughly as much as I am talking? Because if everybody is doing those things in equal measure, then it means that you've got a relatively sort of balanced group in terms of people's participation. And then the last piece is social sensitivity, which is, you know, to what extent is there sort of like a baseline of empathy among the group. You know, is the group able to look around the room and get a sense of how people are doing and then respond accordingly? So if somebody is having a, you know, a great day or a horrible day, there's the sense that the group sees that and acknowledges that and is able to support them in that. And I think that this idea of psychological safety You know, for me, when I encountered this idea, it resonated so deeply with my own experiences as an employee, and so much, you know, resonated very, very well with what I wanted to create for my team. But I think that for leaders, this creates a real sort of change in maybe the way that we traditionally think about what it means to lead an organization, because all of a sudden, I am now responsible for trying to fig— trying to figure out how to support my teammates in learning how to have hard conversations. How do I teach an employee, or how do I encourage an employee to be more empathetic? How do I teach my employees how to have hard conversations and be honest? I think traditionally, you know, it's much more comfortable to think about, about roles as leaders as teaching skills or providing tools and the right software and the right, you know, hey, I'll give you a computer and I'll give you access to Jira and tell you what I need you to do. And, you know, making that switch from thinking about how do I guide someone's work to how do I help my teammates develop their interpersonal skills, that is a different place for a leader to be. I think that increasingly it is the most important, maybe the most important role for leaders is thinking about what is our responsibility for teaching our teams how to interact and how to have those interpersonal interactions. So that's a space where for us, we've started doing things like, the book Crucial Conversations. I don't know if folks are familiar with that book. We've started— we've created an onboarding module, basically, that we have all of our employees go through when we first hire them to, from the very start, getting folks thinking about what it means when you need to have a hard conversation because you need to sort of tell somebody a piece of news that you know that they're not going to want to hear in a work context. And, and so that has been really helpful for us, just sort of as one example. But I challenge folks to think about how to make this sort of interpersonal support and this sort of setting expectations about interpersonal dynamics on your team part of, part of what you do during your onboarding and part of the ongoing support that you provide provide to teams. And then finally, just, I guess, to take us back to the beginning, the title of the whole talk was this idea of hustling and comfort. And for us at Encino, we use that phrase to really talk about the midpoint between being in a very results-oriented, fast-moving, startup sort of culture where we are really focused on continuous improvement. We are very much focused on getting incredible product out to our customers all of the time. It is work that never stops. But making sure that we balance those high expectations for productivity and quality with the psychological safety and with those very, with those diverse supportive teams, that that for us is the balance. That you can't have an exceptional team without both of those things. You have to attend to both of them at the same time in order to really have those incredible teams. So we've got just a minute left, so I I apologize for not leaving more time for Q&A, but if folks have any questions, I'm happy to try to answer them.

I have a question.

Yeah, Larissa.

Where to find diversity? Like, sometimes we can't like make a job application that is specifically for a group, but I've been looking for people to hire and it's— I don't see diversity there. So it's hard to find.

Yeah, that is a really good— that's a great question. I think that the hard but real answer is that it is something that takes an ongoing commitment. So there are, in the short term, there are companies, there are agencies that you can work with that sort of specialize in trying to get you access to specific communities, specialized job boards, specialized professional conferences, those sorts of engagements that can help you get sort of exposure for a specific position or two that you are hiring for, but there is also a sort of longer-term commitment, I think. So for us, we've made— we have built long-term relationships with colleges and universities that are nearby. So, you know, we've gone to some of the historically Black colleges and universities within like a 2 or 3 state radius, and we've built relationships with their you know, with their engineering departments, and we, we try to go see those, visit those schools, you know, at least once a year, ideally once a semester, although COVID has sort of thrown a wrench in all of that, in order to build those relationships. We created relationships with, like, the Women in Engineering groups at NC State and those sorts of things, but, but those are longer-term investments So I think that it is a balance of, of things that you can do in the short term for a specific role, but also building relationships with the communities that you would like to hire from.

Great, thank you.

You're welcome. Thank you very much for joining me this morning. I— when the slides are available after the fact, when the recording is available, just wanted to share some resources with you based on what I've talked about today. So hopefully, I know that this was a lot for 30 minutes first thing in the morning, but hopefully you found it valuable. Thank you so much for letting me start my day with you. Thanks, Dory. It was helpful.

Excellent.

Thank you, Dory.

This was nice.

Thank you, Dory.

That was nice. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye, everyone. Bye.