Top 5 Mistakes Building & Scaling Global Product Teams | HubSpot GM & VP, Products Poorvi Shrivastav

Foreign. My name is Porvi Srivastava. I am the General Manager and VP of products at HubSpot, the number one CRM platform for growing businesses. My job, in short, is bringing the right products home by the right people and systems to market and then help grow our customers and business. Prior to HubSpot, I have run product engineering and operations at Salesforce, Microsoft and my own startup Startup. My first real job, interestingly in the aftermath of financial crisis was in customer service. So I became a manager pretty early on in my career and found the path to leadership by failing at different junctures. Today I'm sharing those failure stories and learnings with you all in this amazing Saastra platform. I was also I also run a product leadership course specifically on this topic. I'm deeply passionate about investing in people before products and processes. Let's get started and move to the next slide Just to give you a preview of what I'm going to talk about today, we are going deep into the fabric of building a team all the way to an organization and how it involves a continuous reassessment of the zero state, whether it be people on the team, whether it be organizational hierarchy or the systems that are in place to scale. These five learnings reflect what I learned in the last 15 years leading cross functional and cross geographical teams in different companies at different levels. So lesson number one giving feedback but giving it at the right time for it to drive the desired behavioral changes. Lesson number two hiring specifically relevant in the crazy market we are in right now, but hiring for culture and values over smartness and raw intellect. Lesson number three Setting up an equitable and transparent performance system as you grow your team and as you grow your company. Lesson number four the marriage of accountability and empathy and how you can drive great people and business performance while still caring for your team. And finally lesson number five, Mentors and peers and how critical they are to building your team but building it in the right way. When I was thinking about structuring this talk, I wanted to do two things. Number one, I wanted to make it fun while providing some value from my leadership experience and number two, I did want to be vulnerable and transparent to admit the mistakes and failures and on such a broad forum because then I could acknowledge the learnings and how it has helped me grow as an individual and a leader and hopefully it can help you guys who are on the call today. So with that let's get into the next slide with the framework of how I see scaling an organization. What it takes the fundamental framework of what and how to scale an organization is really three parts, starting with building a team. Now, typically the way I build a team is hiring externally or through internal movement. I have acquired hired in the past, I've acquired a team and merged with an existing team. I've also inherited a team of peers who were peers at a point and then managed them. And all three ways of building a team come with their own unique set of challenges. For example, a big challenge with hiring is firstly finding a fit for a company culture and then finding the right leveling of that individual in an insanely competitive market. A typical challenge with acqui hiring is the culture fit, whether it be distinct geographies, language, time zones, and you could be a first time manager or you could be a very experienced manager, but the nuances of managing someone who's early on in their careers versus someone who's very experienced is just really different. And I have had to struggle in the past with getting that nuance right. So billing is the first part. From building we go to the second step, which is scaling a team through structuring or setting it up with an operating model where everyone is clear, not in agreement, but have clarity if decision making and their roles in that process are aligned. The other part is aligning to a set of team values, or shared values as I call it, so that globally diverse teams can understand each other's perspective and value drivers, which ultimately leads to better planning, better execution and really better business outcomes. And while one sets up these value systems and operating model, it is also critical to set up success posts for individuals on the team and constantly reassess them. And then finally evaluating the performance and growing the team. Growth is two dimensional. One needs to constantly evaluate promoting, but also letting go of people. And in the middle, it's coaching to have a successor. I've been in situations where I've gone from one meeting where I was promoting someone to a senior role, right to another meeting that I had to put someone on a performance improvement plan in the same day. And ultimately, the way in which leaders demonstrate respect, integrity while driving the right business outcome, outcomes and accountability is what makes an organization scale. So these three stages of scaling an organization are all interconnected. If you're growing a team, you'll need to hire and backfill. And with new individuals, you need to establish a new operating model and a value system. And in that process, some individuals will grow and they have expanded roles. So with that framework in mind, I want to go over top five mistakes I made throughout these years and the lessons I learned while scaling global product teams, but I'll take a pause here and ask if you have any questions before I go into my stories. I see there are not any questions coming out, but throughout this I would love to know that if you experience certain issues in the past with respect to managing and you've made mistakes, keep them dropping in the chat. Let's start with the first lesson, the Importance of Timely feedback early in my management years, and this was more than a decade ago now, I was promoted and inherited a small team of tenured employees. This was a support operations role. I also hired a couple of more junior employees. We had a mix of experienced teammates as well as more more college grads. One of my team members, let's call him Sam, who had been in the time for a while, had been experiencing some performance issues and my manager had briefed me on them before they transferred Sam under me. The issues were related to some condescending comments against relatively junior members around lack of collaboration on cross functional projects and the need to be the sole decision maker and driver in multidisciplinary projects. As a new manager and someone who worked with Sam as a peer before, I acknowledged the feedback but did not address it immediately, for lack of a better word, I was very scared given I was still early in my career and resorted to ignoring the feedback till I saw the issues in action myself. Slowly I started seeing the same issues in the daily team meetings or group presentations. In one of these instances, which I can clearly recall, Sam made a remark around how we need to raise the hiring bar technically because the people that we'd been hiring, we just keep on dropping the ball on the right technical aptitude every year. It was one of the first meetings that a couple of these junior folks that we'd hired were attending. Given Sam was on the interview loop for all of these individuals, I felt it was pretty inappropriate for him to bring this concern broadly in that meeting before discussing it with the recruiting team or even discussing it with me. This was a concerning situation. In my next one on one I gave that feedback to Sam. However, what I did is I wrapped that feedback around how great he was technically and how he contributed to complex problem solving. If he felt that his teammates were not technically competent, he should help them grow and I will help them grow. The effect was that Sam took the feedback very lightly and did not make any changes. The long term effect of giving this kind of feedback compliments around constructive criticism, aka the shit feedback sandwich was that 50% of the team attributed in less than nine months and ultimately I got critical feedback of not having managed Sam properly, which was, which was very right in that moment. Sam ultimately left the team, but not before disrupting the fabric of our culture and the speed to deliver business value. My main learnings were number one, addressing the feedback in the moment with context and number two, not really letting the lack of experience or management years in any role deter me from having those hard conversations Today. As a leader who has led multiple disciplines and larger teams, I share that right leadership maturity expectations. When someone joins my team, I also believe in providing timely feedback with examples to support our team to grow better. So that was the first lesson. Moving on. Lesson number two, Hiring for culture and team fit over raw intellect. Now this one can be a little controversial, but as you scale the right, you need the right kind of ambition on the team which is company over business over team over yourself. And that's an indicator of people who will ride the wave with you as you scale. So when I was at Salesforce and even at Microsoft, I interviewed a lot of candidates from undergrad and MBAs coming into structured programs which were designed for high potential, high performing hires that were slated to fill the next level of leadership slate for the companies. Over the years I've hired these individuals on my own team either as part of a rotation or a full time role. One of the nuances of hiring high potential employees is assessing if their ambition for self growth can be counterproductive to the team and the company growth. In this specific case I hired a super smart individual from an elite MBA program. Let's, let's call her Sheila. Sheila was intelligent, she worked hard and she had this unique capability to be able to connect the data and insight across businesses or business lines which was very valuable because we were developing a platform product at the time. Over the next few months she delivered few product features and I was pretty impressed with her dedication that far. In her 96 months check in 360 degree review she mentioned that she was ready for the next level and to get promoted. And although she'd been performing really well with tactical deliveries, she had yet to prove other aspects of her role like creating a go to market plan, spearheading a full feature launch. We discussed career orders and competencies required for next level and the fact that she was trending in the right direction. But I needed her to master those skills as well. Some of it comes from spending time in the level to gain maturity across these skills. That is generally a guideline for promoting someone to the next level. Now it got To a point that she started optimizing for spending time on external visibility rather than getting the work done, which led to dropping the ball on some critical design and product decisions. She would come to one on ones for at least a six to eight one on ones and she would bring in a specific skills of that checklist that we had discussed and how she was mastering it and now that she was ready to get promoted. She also discussed her desire to lead multiple side projects, but her core products suffer from a lack of strategic direction. Slowly her performance started to degrade and we had to put her on a performance improvement plan. She ultimately left the company to go to a startup. In retrospect, Sheila was not a great cultural fit for the scale of the company and the value system. Her expectations of rapid growth hustle were probably more suitable for a startup. My biggest failure as a leader was not being able to identify these signals during the hiring process and delving deep into examples of how she portrayed our company values in her past experience. I also realized how critical 90 days success plan is when someone new onboards your team today, whether it be a senior director or a senior PM, I encourage my teams to always have a 90 day success plan. I want to take a pause here and I want to go through the questions and just read them out if there are any experiences that you guys have left in the chat. So in USA teams firing the term that many managers try to avoid, how are you using this very important action in your operations? That's a really interesting question. I'm going to part that one because I do want to discuss it in the Q and A. But keep your questions and your comments around the issues you have faced or the challenges you have faced as a manager. All right, so going into the next lesson which is closely connected to what we are discussing, establishing a performance and progression framework early on I started my career with my own small venture and over the years have hired and grown teams across roles. One simple practice that is always underestimated is having a well defined performance management framework, especially in the early stages of running a company. I run into this issue at my own startup when we started hiring engineers and did not have a framework for growth or leveling. We'd anchor on basic interview questions and years of experience to designate someone as an engineer or a senior engineer. There was a situation when we had someone who had been at the company for six months and was threatening to leave and and he was crucial to be there for the MVP that we are going to release. So we promoted him. Not the Right thing to do, but we did promote him and he was doing well. And then we hired someone else from outside at the principal levels because we had to match their titles. So we had someone who'd been in the system at senior and someone who's coming from outside at principal, kind of the same experience level. And ultimately that caused a lot of chaos within that team. My learning was number one, having a clear performance leveling, competency and growth path. And that can never come too early. You can never be too early for establishing those guidelines. Number two is really avoiding out of cycle promotions and raises because they signal deficiency in the performance system as opposed to growth. So spend the time building those systems to scale. Of course there will be exceptions, but they shouldn't be the norm. With that, let's move to our next lesson. One of the most rewarding, but also the most challenging avenues of growth is acquisition and integration. A big part of that product and growth opportunity comes from people and their ability to work together productively for long enough to produce a desired impact. Back in 2019, we integrated teams from Israel and us to form a product team for an emerging business line. This was right before the pandemic, so we'd actually only met both the teams together once before. Travel restrictions came into existence. Over the next few months as a leadership and I personally ran into so many different issues right from miscommunication to alignment to scoping decisions, structuring processes that were inclusive, driving the business forward by establishing clear accountability. And I distinctly remember what my SVP of engineering at that time advised me and other leaders. He said, when you're leading remote or distributed teams, always assume best intentions on either side. I'll never forget that advice because it changed the way I structured meetings. It changed the way I communicated and made decisions. We did three things. Number one, we established a shared value system where each of us documented the values that we couldn't compromise on. Through that we developed an understanding of each other's strengths, each other's skills and how we can establish operating principles on the team. So if a change was made, we knew where to go back to what is a driving memo. The other change was around communication and documentation. We not only documented the decisions, but also the context and the rationale behind it. I distinctly remember deliberating building horizontally versus building vertically. And we discussed three options. And we literally followed a comms plan to roll out the decision across job group fees and lastly running meetings. Given the time between both locations, we structured dedicated daytime for one on one and group meetings which we Alternated every quarter, so no one team had to work too early or too late throughout the year. Today, those learnings are valuable in the way I structure a team, which is understanding individual values and setting up people for success first and then setting up processes and product to follow second. With that, we are reaching our last lesson. When you are in a hyperscale mode, and especially in this market, internal transfers are a good medium, especially if you know someone is still looking for a new role. On the screen on the left side, you see a screenshot of one of my conversations with another leader. And this might be me being my most vulnerable. But I wanted to put it out there that different companies have different culture around internal movement and learning. And respecting that context is very, very important. In this particular case, I had a critical senior role open in my org, and so I reached out to the candidate first to gauge interest before reaching out to their manager. My rationale was if the candidate wasn't interested, there is no point in reaching out to the manager and create a doubt in their mind. And this particular candidate just told us no. So I did not follow further. And that was in my mind at that point, the right thing to do. However, the manager somehow got to know and this is actually a conversation between this leader and me and he explained to me the usual process followed at this specific company. One of the bigger learnings was understanding the internal reshuffle playbook, as opposed to following a playbook from my last companies when it comes to internal hiring. Another big learning was valuing and investing in these partner relationships. So when I do end up making mistakes, which I will in the future, also I can get valuable feedback to learn and grow. So now when I'm doing such a change, I always first understand the recruiting playbook and then accordingly align and communicate with different stakeholders. So with that, those were the top five mistakes. We'll just move on to wrap a little bit around the structure that we first discussed. I learned by failing, by building the teams, by setting them up, and by growing them. But failing at each of these junctures, I candidly share the stories going back to that framework that we put in the starting of the session. The mistakes I made at each one of these stages had impact on the other stages as well. And hence having gone through these experiences now, I think across the whole ecosystem, when making an organizational change or bringing in a new leader on the team, just recapping in the last slide those lessons, Importance of timely feedback can never be underestimated. Hire for culture fit over raw intellect. Establish Performance framework early on in your journey, lead with accountability and empathy and finally valuing and learning from your peers. I'm super grateful to Sastra for this platform and hoping that sharing my experiences helps all of you leaders in some way in taking your own decisions tomorrow. Thank you. And now we are open for Q and A. So I'm going to look at the Q and A tab. Recruiting and building the right team is part of your framework. Can you share one of the questions you ask candidates? Who to screen for better fit and what's your general approach to recruiting in this market? That's a great question. So my primary area around culture fit is getting examples from candidates where they've displayed these value systems and they failed and learned something about these values. For example, at HubSpot our value system is around heart and one of my favorite values in that heart is being humble. So I would ask about someone's experience of a conflict and how they resolved it. And how they resolved it is the part when you can get to know if you are humble about your accomplishments and are you open to learning from others. So that's how I usually gauge candidates. The general approach to recruiting is there are three factors. Someone wants to work for your company, the people, the products or the business and what you're making. And just financially it's lucrative to be there. Your financial obligations are being met. So these are the three factors very transparently. I think I try to bank on the fact if you're paying fair value, if you're paying market value, we have the best people. Is it a fit for what they want to learn and where they want to grow versus where we are? And if that's a good fit, that's how I make a pitch for recruiting. So going through the next question in lesson number one of giving feedback. Lost that word. In lesson number one of giving feedback, you shared an example of a toxic teammate who eventually caused others to leave and not being able to give them feedback or action on it early what you do now in that situation. So just to correct, I don't think this person was toxic. What I would say is there was a big lack of awareness and on my part I failed to give them that perspective. Clearly with examples in a timely fashion. What I do now is, let's say I'm in a meeting and I would see someone. If someone is presenting and they did not give a good customer example or they did not do a good job at presenting for whatever reason, I would just come back and given we are still remote, I generally like Being on Slack and discuss what they did was okay, but this is something else that they could do and the reason it would be a better thing to do as opposed to what they were doing. I give it in the moment and then I kind of follow up in my one on one on why I give that feedback and how it's important, important. So I've tried to lessen protecting feedback with compliments and gimmick it in the moment, but giving it respectfully and the fact that I am going to work on this, I am going to work with this individual on the feedback. We have one minute left. Curious. Okay, I'm going to go back to Sergey's question because I did read it. In usa, teams firing is a term that many managers try to avoid. How are you using this very important action in your operations? I know in a lot of places you would say the role has been impacted or the role has been eliminated. I went through some similar challenges in the aftermath of the O8 crisis. Again, I work with our recruiting teams and in the moment when you're doing, you have to take such hard decisions in a company. The thing to remember is if someone is leaving the company, let them leave with pride and respect and don't take that away from them. So I always have that in the back of my mind that this person provided huge value when they were there in the company and because of whatever reasons this role has been impacted, I have to let go of the individual with pride and respect and remember all their good work. So that's something I always calculate or always have in the back of my mind. I actually even write stickies before going into some of those hard conversations.