I led a collaborative project to define our team values, making them a real part of how we worked, gave feedback, and made decisions. I focused on building a culture of growth and ownership, and many team members were promoted internally.
How I kept the ❤️ as the team grew:
- Created a team onboarding process that ensured both product expertise, and customer empathy by experiencing all aspects of the product from both sides
- After involving the team in the team mission & values workshop, we created published versions to hang in our workspaces. For team members joining later, we kept highlights of the discussions to help them internalize.
- Gave high levels of ownership across the team, from encouraging peer-led training, to crafting policies that allowed team members to apply their own judgement to things like refund requests.
- Kept a monthly cadence of team meetings to provide updates from across the company and team, and opened the floor for anyone to “shout out” other team members.
- And of course – minimizing social distance by hosting team-building events and encouraging close communication through tools like Slack (even when we’re sharing memes!)
