Building Diverse and Asynchronous Teams Scaling with Journey Foods CEO, Riana Lynn

That we also can provide a recommendation engine to these portfolio companies. And so today, because we are working largely with multinational food companies and startups that are growing very fast, selling their products around North America and shipping across the world, I actually decided very early on to create a team and get investors that looks like the end consumers that were consuming the millions of products that are manufactured every day and are in these places because it really matters, the data that we're bringing in. And so I felt it important to have investors also from Europe and Asia and partners in South America and Africa. Additionally, we have food scientists and data scientists and engineers in three different continents. And so the talk today is about building diverse asynchronous team flows and really trying to understand how we one, continue to have fun too, but have increased our productivity throughout the year, which has led to some strong revenue growth as well as good investment and also just overall product success, we've definitely had our failures and our roadblocks. You know, it's hard sometimes as a founder to have a 4am chat and be up until, you know, really late hours at night working with team members that are more local. But we found ways, and I found ways one, to remain productive, stay happy and healthy and energized throughout the day with these asynchronous teams. And I hope our chat today will be helpful for your growth. And yeah, let's get started. So again, should have centered this a little bit more, but feel free to jump in. I actually want to know, in this Covid year 2020, we're just 22 days out, 23 days out. I think I'm super excited for the year to end, but I want to know where everyone is sort of tuning in from. So our folks mostly like in the US Here. Are you on the west coast or some team members? Washington, D.C. hey, Jim over there. All right, who's managing crazy asynchronous teams? London. Awesome. Scotland. That's so cool. Thank you for chiming in. We have, I think, our biggest spread. Awesome places for sure. And my lights about to fall over. Vancouver. We're registered in Vancouver. We're launching a team and in Canada next month. I'm very excited for that. Sydney. Great. That blows us away. So our biggest range is we have an engineer in. We have an engineer in the Philippines and we have two team members in Switzerland and Paris that are also working with them closely. We have a team member in Nepal. We have a team member in South Africa. We have some partners in Canada and we're hiring in Vancouver next month. We also have team members that are in Nebraska. Our company is actually headquartered in Austin, Texas and we have investors in Shanghai, Louisiana, New York, London, all over the place. So you can imagine there's a lot of times, and I think we're about 13 hours in our biggest time gap. And so what was happening is one, some of our product leads were really running into a lot of barriers with communication when it came to managing weekly and daily tasks. We would have our product Demos somewhere between 10am to 2pm so that folks in our sales team and product team in Europe can still make it, but it wouldn't be too early. Doing a demo at 8am is not sort of the team culture that we built here. I think our optimal work hours are in the US and North America, like 10 to 6. And then some of our European team members get up a little bit later and then everyone in Asia is up pretty later, really early with us. And so when we were trying to scale up and really pay attention to our teams, we realized that we had to base a lot of this around our demos for our enterprise clients. They come first. Some of our customers include Dole, Unilever companies, Walmart, companies that are. And then we have really awesome startups that you've maybe heard of too, Soylent and all these other customers that are selling products around the world. And obviously when you're talking to a VP or manager and you're trying to sell a product into an organization that is billion dollar plus or even million dollars plus, we have to focus on their timelines over our teams when it comes to sales. And so our product and our engineering side, at least in terms of qa, is really starting to create a limitation of feedback loops in preparation for our sales teams and our demos. And so what was happening is there would be a bug in the system and essentially a lot of our engineers would be either asleep or front end person would be in North America and a back end person in Nepal. And essentially we were running into just major demo bugs. Being a team under 15, but also closing deals that range anywhere from 15k to 400k can be quite stressful and there's a lot to deliver. And so I had to make sure probably about six months ago, that we thought about our daily processes. I interviewed everyone on the team and I tried to create one an engaging environment, but also figured out how we could solve the asynchronous problem problems. And so first we had to go through the communication route and figure out the best communication tools. Obviously this almost goes up without saying but most organizations now are managing their communications through Slack and we even do a little bit of WhatsApp. But Slack is our go to for communication one. But we need to make sure that we figured out ways to have open, open pipelines for everyone to talk almost on a 24 hour basis. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of rundown on how communication focused solutions really helped us and also some other fun tips that helped our team connect and really become really close friends throughout all these various time zones. And so the problem that we were running into very early on was one short term thinking. We have customers that care a lot about the recommendations that we're giving them and our data really, really matters. And so because we're sort of teetering into the deep tech software, we were thinking about like how we could scale as fast as possible as a seed stage company and still meet the needs of a billion dollar enterprise. And so I was just, I'm going to be honest, I was thinking very short term about delivery and just making sure that we can make it the next couple weeks. And as we started to shift and grow, especially at the beginning of the year, I realized that we're thinking about our product roadmaps really on like a short sprint basis. So we're thinking two, four weeks out and in a macro level quarterly with a few KPIs and sort of OKRs that were going to help us communicate out to our investors or sort of get our enterprise clients excited. But we had to sit down and essentially plan out our product roadmaps for about four weeks. What this helped do was bring everyone into the team over about a 10 day process. Everyone was very collaborative, could communicate on how we could build out a 12 month roadmap for our product. And it helped get more like stakeholder, like more of a stakeholding environment and communication flow that excited a lot of team members. Another thing that was happening is we were having too many meetings with too many agendas. So I would check your calendars with your team members and really think about how many meetings you're having on a daily and weekly basis that are overly goal oriented. Now with COVID we found that some of our better meetings have just like a team theme. So we have now product meetings three times a week where the product team is literally like eating snacks and talking like as if we were sitting at a conference table together and just ideating. We are not rolling into the meeting nervous about agendas and what we need to accomplish. We're just sort of there to help each other out and answer questions. And so we continually just follow a four step communication process that I'm going to go through in an upcoming slide. Additionally, we found ways to solve what I think is called the low culture exchange problem for asynchronous teams that are working throughout multiple time zones. And what that means is the fact that most people don't have local regional understanding of how folks work like siestas and you know, different parts of the day being more challenging or more interesting or more culturally tied to how one can operate more locally. And of course Covid has changed that a little bit, but we still have to keep in mind that people are used to like maybe eating lunch at 2pm versus like 11am or we have team members that are in Switzerland in the Alps and they want to go hiking all the time. And what we found is that other team members were demanding of their time and resources and not really connecting back to understanding what maybe was driving their frustrations throughout the day and when they could be most valuable and most productive. And so getting a finding ways to engage your team members and help with like cultural exchange so you understand sort of like personally and locally what more of the daily trends are that helps someone operate at their best was quite interesting to us. And then flexible hours. Every team member that comes onto the company sort of sets their primary hours from the outset. So they basically tell me and their manager the eight hour timeline that they think is most optimal for their daily work. And so we have team members that have shifted from 11 to 7, from 8, 8 to 5, some are working 8 to 12 and then jumping back on from 4 to 8. And everyone at the company knows sort of their standard work hours. And this also doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, especially when you're asynchronous. So I'll dive into a little bit more of how we have solved some of these early problems that run into or really slow down how you scale a productive and a happy asynchronous team. One thing that we definitely had to do was think about our mental health earlier in the year, as many companies have. And so we started creating company playlists on Spotify. And this is just a preview of one that has helped us get through all these Covid times. And now with the sun going down much earlier in the day again, we're going to be jumping back into our company dance parties on Zoom. But we made themed Spotify playlists that we all play throughout the day and we sort of compete and see which Team members can jam to the best playlist, but this is our in the Mood for Food playlist that helped our mood throughout the year. Obviously we're a food focused company in our industry and this was an activity that we continually add into our regular engagement hours that has helped us one understand and learn team members better. We're not. No one really feels like they're a cog in the wheel based on feedback and surveys that we've taken. But we also sort of learn more about people's tastes and interests and that's helped us really work through all these various timelines. And so let's go into one of the problems that I mentioned earlier and this is setting agendas here. And let me jump back over to our participant slide here. Does anyone have any sort of fun activities or actually now that we're gonna talk about agendas, can we get some raised hands or some chime ins on if folks think that you have too many meetings with too many agendas throughout the day? And also, are you managers or founders? I wanna know a little bit more about that as well. And I should have asked this question earlier before I jump into the final stretch here for tips. Let's see the chat over here. But yeah, you can chime in. Yeah. So too many meetings. This was happening for us. I started blocking out my calendar for about four hour chunks three days a week. At first it was just my time to build strategy, to work on doing my own QA of our systems, to have quality meditation time before I jumped in with teams. And then I was loading our calendar with a ton of agenda driven meetings. We use this tool called Fellow Fellow App, which is amazing for tracking meetings and agendas. I would recommend that to you all. If you're not using it, I'll add it into the chat channel for tools. But what was happening is not enough of the team members felt like they could get through smaller problems by going directly into the agendas. And we were discovering that we had a lot more productivity by just having these open meetings that anyone at any time zone could jump into. And so we have them at 8am U.S. time. And so that's, you know, people jumping in to have just open talks about their day if they're in Asia or you know, even if we don't have any team members in Australia. But I can imagine that be pretty quite late. But even having sort of three trunks, one first thing in the morning for one group, afternoon or evening for another group and evenings or mornings for the next group, essentially having these three open Working meetings without agendas helps our team chime in, say hi, have a little food and sort of have that kitchen hour, if you will, if we were working back in offices. And so the only thing that we make sure that happens in this, in these meetings are to outline four quick quality questions. And that's really what's been taking place today or throughout the week for you. What direction are you trying to head in for the day? Like where do you need guidance? What are some of your overall goals for yourself, your team, projects for the customers? Is there any feedback that you need on anything that you're working on? Very open ended questions. And then finally we leave and track all of our questions and open action items in our fellow app. I try to get our team to ask as many questions as possible. There are team members that are very open and engaged, that are very outspoken, extroverted on our calls and there are other team members that are scared to sort of address their problems, especially if it's holding up the rest of the team. And so we have this environment of questions that really helps sort of break the ice for all team members depending on sort of what their backgrounds or interests or personalities are. And these questions have really been quite helpful. And this can range from anything of like, what are you eating today? To is there anything that is frustrating you or sort of limiting you in regard to the company or the team? And it helps create this sort of one on one environment, this managerial environment where everyone feels like they're a manager and a learner at the company. And I'm happy to connect and share more of these questions with the group. Now this is like a continual theme for us because again, mental health is so key to a company's success. Every single person in the company and one thing that we found is we've been able to create really awesome ideas for new products through our fun environment and some of the things that we do on a weekly basis. So every Monday we have a brunch hour where essentially anyone at the company is open on a zoom call. Everyone is sort of cooking and eating and talking about what they want to accomplish throughout the week. And I will leave that to any of you if you want to adopt that into your organizations. But this is just a no agenda brunch product hour and we call it the Product Team Brunch hour. As I mentioned earlier, the Spotify jam sessions, it helps increase cultural change. We talk about music and concerts that we used to be able to go to, concerts that we want to go into the future. We music as well to work from. And we just sort of talk about our needs and ideas and even things that are going on in our lives. And then every two weeks, DoorDash or you know, Zomato, any of the local we have various delivery Deliveroo, we have various delivery apps. Uber Eats that we have a company account with and I send out gift cards to the entire company every two weeks. And on Friday after Friday, early in the morning, afternoon and evening for some folks, if they don't have any date plans, we all sit down and have a Doordash happy hour where we're eating and just chatting and talking about anything. And so that's helped on a remote team basis because these are things that happen in the office all the time. And then finally we're using amazing tools which I call Peanut Butter and Jelly for asynchronous team management. And we are tracking literally everything we do every meeting, every working session between three main apps. And that's with Loom Video. L O O M. If no one's using that, I call that our PB and J. Miro Whiteboarding. So we're creating collaborative whiteboards for almost every session that we have on miro.com and then Google Slides sometime as well. We're throwing the Looms and the Miro right back into the Google Slides to track every day we have an open meeting even without agendas. And sort of my top takeaways from here as we close out in this quick session and I want to leave a couple minutes open for questions again. Tools Confluence Mural Slack Loom Google Slides Low Agenda Work. Find more chunks throughout your week that you can bring on this fun, more collaborative environment for your team. Also, keep checking on the tools that are not working. You're asking your teams for feedback here. We're finding new tools every month that we don't always want to introduce because of friction into the organization. But some of these tools are just super fun and better than others that we've used in the past. And so if it's not like Q Jira or Sprint Planning or something, I would always collaborate your tools anywhere from every 6 to 12 weeks to see if there's a new solution that can help bring more engagement or more ease. But these are some of the PB&J tools that I call that are super easy and fun and just have been incredibly helpful with team management and remote engagement. And then finally track your communication even if it's a low agenda meeting or no agenda meeting, and find ways to ask questions and catalog the questions that's going to keep your.