A Path Forward in California!

Back in March I was proud to announce the launch of Path Forward, a nonprofit on a mission to get people back to work after they’ve taken time off to care for a loved one.  I’m even more thrilled today to announce the launch of a Path Forward program in California with six top tech companies — Go Daddy, Demandbase, CloudFlare, Coursera, Instacart and Zendesk. They are all accepting applications now for October start dates. Click on the links above to see all their opportunities.

As a CEO I know how hard it is to find great talent. The Center for Talent Innovation estimates that nearly 30% of college-educated women have taken away from their careers to serve as caregivers to children or aging family members. They have also found that while 90% of them try to return to work, only 40% are able to land full-time jobs. As an industry, we simply can’t afford to lose thousands of talented women who become frustrated by attempts to restart their professional careers.

Please join me in supporting this organization in fulfilling its mission. If you know people in California who might be looking for opportunities to restart their careers, send them to Your Path Forward in California where they can access all the job postings for the fall program.

And if you think Path Forward would be a great program for your company, email the fine folks at [email protected] to learn more.

Book Short:  Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general.  The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path.  The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods.  The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice?  It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details.  And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

• the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
• “to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
• one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
• another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
• “Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there.  My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts  for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process.

Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization (a few hundred people!) weren’t at all familiar with agile practices. Despite this, there were a few things that helped accelerate our transformation:

1. Strong executive buy-in
2. A clear vision
3. Agile-friendly company culture and values
4. A passionate project team
5. Resident agile experts

These 5 initial ingredients proved to be essential and enabled us to hit the ground running in Q1 2016. We started out by experimenting with non-technical pilot teams from all different offices, functions, and levels. After a couple months of experimentation, early qualitative results from pilot team members suggested that implementing agile principles was enhancing team communication and productivity. So we embarked on our next step, implementing agile practices across all non-technical teams at Return Path.

We are now 18 months into our transformation and the data shows us that the transformation is helping with our productivity:  we track a  metric that is comprised of many different measures of business performance that fall into 3 main themes–operating efficiency, planning effectiveness, and business success. So far we have already seen a 51% increase in the metric from Q4 2015 (before our Agile Everywhere initiative) to Q1 2017. We are emboldened by these promising results, but still have a lot of work to do to ensure that all teams at RP are taking full advantage of agile and reaping its benefits. Keep an eye out for Cathy Hawley’s posts for more information about our agile adventure, soon to be published the RP blog.

When the series is over, I’ll publish a summary with all the specific post links here as well.

We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now.  We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in.  One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market.  Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls.  It’s weird.  You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders.

During the normal course of business, one of sales reps might engage in selling against specific competitors — often times, they have to when asked specific questions by specific prospects — but one thing you’ll never see us do is publicly trash talk a single competitor by name as a company.  I’m sure there are a couple people at Return Path who would like us to have “sharper elbows” when it comes to this, but it’s just not who we are.  Our culture is definitely one that values kindness and a softer approach.  But good business sense also tells me that it’s just not smart for four reasons:

• We’re very focused and disciplined in our outbound communications — and there’s only so much air time you get as a company in your industry, even among your customers — on thought leadership, on showcasing the value of our data and our solutions, and on doing anything we can do to make our customers more successful.  Pieces like my colleague Dennis Dayman’s recent blog post on the evolution of the data-driven economy, or my colleague Guy Hanson’s amazingly accurate prediction of the UK’s “unpredictable” election results both represent the kind of writing that we think is productive to promote our company
• We’re fiercely protective of our brand (both our employer brand and our market-facing brand), and we’ve built a brand based on trust, reputation, longevity, and being helpful, in a business that depends on reputation and trust as its lifeblood — as I think about all the data we handle for clients and strategic partners, and all the trust mailbox providers place in us around our Certification program.  Clients and partners will only place trust in — and will ultimately only associate themselves with — good people.  To quote my long time friend and Board member Fred Wilson (who himself is quoting a long time friend and former colleague Bliss McCrum), if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.  If we suddenly turned into the kind of company that talked trash about competition, I bet we’d find that we had diminished our brand and our reputation among the people who matter most to us.  Our simple messaging and positioning showcases our people, our expertise, and our detailed knowledge of how email marketing works, with a collective 2,000 years of industry experience across our team
• Trash talking your competition can unwittingly expose your own weaknesses.  Think about Donald Trump’s memorable line from one of the debates against Hillary Clinton – “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet” – when talking about Russia.  That hasn’t turned out so well for him.  It’s actually a routine tactic of Trump, beyond that one example.  Accuse someone else of something to focus attention away from your own issues or weaknesses.  Don’t like the fact that your inauguration crowd was demonstrably smaller than your predecessor’s?  Just lie about it, and accuse the media of creating Fake News while you’re at it.  Disappointed that you lost the popular vote?  Accuse the other side of harvesting millions of illegal votes, even though it doesn’t matter since you won the electoral college!  Think about all these examples, regardless of your politics.  All of them draw attention to Trump’s weaknesses, even as he’s lashing out at others (and even if you think he’s right).  We don’t need to lash out at others because we have so much confidence in our company, our products, and our services.  We are an innovative, happy, stable, profitable, and growing vendor in our space, and that’s where our attention goes
• Publicly trash talking your competition just gives your competition extra air time.  As PT Barnum famously said, “You can say anything you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right!”

Don’t get me wrong.  Competition is healthy.  It makes businesses stronger and can serve as a good focal point for them to rally.  It can even be healthy sometimes to demonize a competitor *internally* to serve as that rallying cry.  But I am not a fan of doing that *externally.*  I think it makes you look weak and just gives your competitor free advertising.

Run, Brad, Run!

A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here).  While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:

1. We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) – and since then, two other members of the Return Path extended family have also been diagnosed with MS
2. We wanted to support an organization with a focused mission and one where our contributions could really make a difference
3. Accelerated Cure has a very entrepreneurial, innovative culture that’s consistent with our own – and a solution-oriented approach to their cause that resonates with our business philosophy

We got introduced to Accelerated Cure by Brad Feld, one of Return Path’s venture investors, who is a friend of Art Mellor, Accelerated Cure’s founder and CEO.  Brad’s an interesting guy for many reasons, but one reason is that he has a goal of running 50 marathons (one in each state) by the time he’s 50.  He has eight years and 40 marathons to go, and to make it a little more significant he decided to try and drum up some sponsorships for his quest and donate the money to Accelerated Cure. 

Return Path has decided to be one of Brad’s anchor tenant sponsors by pledging $1,000 for every race he completes.  This is half of Brad’s goal of $2,000 per race, and we hope it will inspire others to donate so he can beat his goal.  Of course, Brad wants to do more than just run these marathons – he wants to, well, accelerate his performance.  So, taking a page out of the VC handbook, we’re setting up an incentive program for Brad of an additional $500 donation for every race that he completes in less than four hours. 

Besides liking both Brad and Accelerated Cure, this particular vehicle for donating money is especially meaningful to us.  A good number of Return Path employees past and present have run marathons and even competed in triathlons and Ironman competitions (including yours truly, but in a way that certainly makes me want to keep my day job).  And Seth Matheson, Accelerated Cure’s new development director who has MS, is an avid marathoner who is contemplating an Ironman competition himself.  And as I always tell our team members, running a startup is a marathon, not a sprint!

You can follow Brad’s progress – and make a donation yourself – here.

Another Only Once Moment, Sort Of

I’ve never handed over the reins of a company before (no, I’m not leaving, and we aren’t selling Return Path).  But I did the other day, for the first time.  As many people know, last year we reorganized the company to focus entirely on deliverability and whitelisting and spun out Authentic Response, a company in the online market research business, into a completely separate entity. 

Since then, I have been CEO of both companies.  Although Return Path has had more of my focus — Authentic Response had excellent day-to-day leadership under Co-Presidents Jeff Mattes and Rob Mattes — I’ve still been working in both businesses.

Today, we officially announced the hiring of my replacement, Jim Follett.  Jim was formerly CEO of Survey Sampling, a larger company in the online market research business, and has over 20 years of prior experience as a senior executive in market research and information services companies.  While we still share the office in New York and I will stay on as Chairman, the percentage of time I can now devote to Return Path is now 100% — the first time it’s ever been that way (for the deliverability business).

I didn’t start Authentic Response, and I’ve never been deep in the bones of the business the way I am Return Path.  Even so, I definitely experienced a range of emotions at our all-hands meeting where we introduced Jim to the company that I don’t regularly experience at the same time:  mainly a mix of pride in the work the team has done on my watch, excitement for the business, and sadness at not working quite as closely with the nearly 100 people in Authentic Response going forward.

I’m sure someday, I will hand over the reins to Return Path.  No time soon, but that day eventually comes for every entrepreneur.  If this was a preview, it will be an emotional day.

But for now, I’m mainly happy to welcome Jim to the family, and I’m excited for the entire Authentic Response business as it embarks on the next chapter in the company’s journey.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part II

At Return Path, we feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways.  Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who I wrote about in part I of this series last year.  But many companies, including Return Path, aren’t inherently “save the world” in nature (although some people in online marketing would have you believe that we are!), and those companies can still make a difference in the world in a few ways:

1. Organize projects in the local community for their employees to help out/work at

2. Allow employees to take a limited amount of paid time off for community service work

3. Provide matching gift programs so employees’ donations are enhanced by the company

4. Donate money or services to charitable organizations they believe in

As a relatively small company, we have to pick our battles here.  We currently have a policy for #2 above that allows employees 3 days per year of paid time off for community service work.  And today, we are announcing a comprehensive program for #4 above in association with the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis.  This choice was inspired by our long-time employee and friend Sophie Miller, who was diagnosed almost two years ago now with MS (and is doing great)!

Read the details of what we’re doing with Accelerated Cure in the full press release here.

Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth

TouchPoints:  Creating Powerdul Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, by Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Corporation, and Mette Norgaard (book, kindle), is a very good nugget of an idea wrapped in lots of other good, though only loosely connected management advice around self awareness and communication — something I’m increasingly finding in business books these days.

It’s a very short book. I read it on the Kindle, so I don’t know how many pages it is or the size of the font, but it was only 2900 kindles (or whatever you call a unit on the device) and only took a few Metro North train rides to finish.  It’s probably worth a read just to get your head around the core concept a bit more, though it’s far from a great business book.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the book itself, but the concept echoes something I’ve been referring to a while here at Return Path as “Moments of Truth.”  Moments of Truth are very short interactions between you and an employee that are high impact and, once you get the hang of them, low effort.  At least, they’re low effort relative to long form meetings.

Here are a few thoughts about Moments of Truth:

• They are critical opportunities to get things both very right and very wrong with an employee
• They are more powerful than meets the eye – both for what they are and because they get amplified as employees mention them to other employees
• They can come to you (people popping into your office and the like), you can seek them out (management by walking around), and you can institutionalize them (for example, one of the things I do is call every employee on their Return Path anniversary to congratulate them on the milestone)
• They are no different than any other kind of interaction you have, just a lot shorter and therefore can be more intense (and numerous)
• Their use cases are as broad as any management interaction — coaching, positive or negative feedback, input, support, etc.

What can you as a manager or leader do to perfect your handling of Moments of Truth?

First, learn how to spot them when they come to you, and think about a typical employee’s day/week/month/year to think about when you can find opportunities to seek them out.  Their first day on the job.  When they get a promotion.  When they get a great performance review, or new stock options.  Maybe when they get a poor performance review or denied a promotion they were seeking.

Second, learn to appreciate them and leave space for them.  If you have zero free minutes in every single day, you not only won’t have time to create or seek out Moments of Truth, you’ll be rushed or blow them off when they come to you.

Finally, like everything else, you have to develop a formula for handling them and then practice that formula.  The book does talk about a formula of “head, heart, hand” (e.g., being logical, authentic, and competent) that’s not bad.  Although I’d never thought about it systematically before writing this post, I have a few different kinds of Moments of Truth, and each one has its own rhythm to it, and its own regular ending.

But regardless of how you handle them, once you think about your day through this lens, you’ll start seeing them all over the place.  Recognize their power, and dive in!

Agile Marketing

As I wrote about last week, Return Path has been using the Agile Development methodology and Rally Software as our product development framework for about a year now.  It’s worked so well for us, that the concepts, and even the tools, have started to spread virally to other parts of our business.

About two months ago, I took over our marketing department as interim CMO.  Our marketing efforts have become increasingly complex in the last year or so as we’ve grown and added multiple new product lines, and as a result, the demands on our relatively small department were becoming unmanageable.  As I wrote about a couple years ago, Marketing is like French Fries — you can always consume just a little bit more of it — and we were really feeling the strain on our marketing team.

As I thought about the challenges that faced our marketing efforts, they reminded me a lot of the challenges that faced our product development efforts before we implemented Agile/Rally for those teams.  Multiple external and internal stakeholders with competing priorities.  Poor communication.  Needing to be nimble and agile in a process that has some inherent long lead-time items.

So we tried an experiment — we tried implementing Agile Marketing.  We have learned a lot in the past couple of months and have adapted the processes a little bit to the needs of marketing, but our marketing planning, execution, and feedback cycles now look an awful lot like our engineering ones.  After one week struggling with an Excel spreadsheet, macros, and conditional formatting, we even decided to try using Rally to run our process, even though some if its terms and functionality are really designed for software development.

We now plan marketing in six-week “releases,” each of which has 1-2 core themes and a planning session up front with our head of sales and business GMs.  Each release has two, three-week “iterations” where we do mid-course corrections and track our marketing team members’ utilization on projects very deliberately in Rally.  Stakeholders can always go into Rally at any time and enter a “feature request” for a new marketing project, which we will schedule in at the next iteration.  The marketing team has a daily stand-up to review progress and identify roadblocks.  And we still have enough slack in the system that we can handle a couple of last-minute opportunistic items (love those French Fries) which invariably come up.

So far, so good.  Our marketing team has a much more solid plan of attack for its work, and we have been able to regain control of our marketing agenda, getting input and feedback from stakeholders to help shape it along the way.  Cross-group communication and transparency are way up, productivity is up, noise and friction are down.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good system, and we’ll continue to refine it along the way.  But it’s catching on…last time I checked, a third group at Return Path was about to dive in and try it as well — Agile Sales Operations and Business Analytics, here we come!

ReturnShip Program

Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.)

Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments.  To this end, I’m very excited to share progress on our ReturnShip program: after a small pilot last year, our inaugural group of six female returnees will join Return Path in a variety of roles across the company as of today.

The ReturnShip is designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 1 year to re-enter and  build credible and relevant experience, and to feed our funnel of prospective employees.

The ReturnShip is 14-weeks long, during which each Returnee will own a project deliverable, learn about Return Path and get support from us in how to navigate today’s work environment.  We’re planning to hire 2-3 as employees at the end of the program (though as a practical matter, we will hire anyone who is great!), and for those who aren’t a match here, we plan to assist with connections and resume/interview reviews to find help them find a role externally.

We had an amazing response from applicants who hadn’t seen anything like this before.  We hope this program enables us to help the community and also find some hidden talent.  It will be a great learning experience for us, and we are very excited to get started.

On a personal note, although I cannot in any way take credit for dreaming up this program, I have felt the need for something like this a lot in the past 10-12 years in particular since getting married, having kids, and having a lot of friends and employees have kids for the first time. The number of immensely talented women who drop out of the workforce, or who struggle greatly with balancing work and home, is huge. Hopefully this program scales up and becomes a role model for other companies to make it easier for women who do take time off the work treadmill with their families to return to work either full time or part time. Reducing the hurdle of “I’ve been out of the workforce, so how do I get back into it?” feels like an important step.

I’ve written a few times over the years about our Sabbatical policy at Return Path, including this post and this post about my experience as CEO when one of my direct reports was on his sabbatical, and this post about my own sabbatical.

People ask me this all the time, so I thought I’d write the policy out here.  This is the language in our employee handbook about them:

You have big dreams. We know. This is your chance to cross something off your life list. Whether it’s climbing Mt. Everest, learning Russian or taking your kids across the country in a Winnebago, we believe in rewarding longevity at Return Path and know that a good long break will leave you refreshed and energized!  As such, you are eligible for a sabbatical after your first seven (7) years of employment; then again after every five (5) years incremental employment. The sabbatical provides you with up to six (6) weeks of consecutive time off provided you have that time off approved by your manager at least two months prior to the start of your sabbatical.

You will be requested to sign an Agreement before your sabbatical: if you do not return to work after your sabbatical or if you leave employment within twelve (12) months of returning to work, you will be required to reimburse all amounts received while on sabbatical.  If a holiday occurs on any of of the days of absence, you will not receive holiday pay in addition to your sabbatical pay.  During your sabbatical, your benefits will continue and you will be responsible for making payments for the employee portion of insurance costs if applicable. The period you are on leave will be counted as employment for the purposes of determining your applicable level of benefits.  If you are eligible and have not taken your sabbatical and your employment with Return Path ends (for any reason), you will not be paid out for sabbatical time not taken.

I also wrote an email recently to someone internally that is worth reprinting here, which is How to Prepare for Your Sabbatical, which is aimed at both the person taking the sabbatical, and the person’s manager:

As the employee:

–          Prepare your team

• Make sure their goals and metrics for your time out are super clear
• Make sure they know who to go to for what
• Set their expectations of management coverage (see below). 
• Remember that your manager has a day job so you should look to see how your team members can take over some of the responsibilities.
• Give them stretch goals while you’re out

–          Prepare your individual contributor work

• Hand off all loose ends with extra details. 
• Make introductions via email if your manager/team member  is going to have to work with external parties
• Can be to your team, to your manager, to someone else

–          Prepare your manager

• Brief your manager thoroughly on everything going on with your team, its work, your individual contributor work
• Good topics to cover with your manager:Discuss specifics of team and 1:1 check-ins and agree on a plan for coverage.
  • What are the big initiatives that you’ll need coverage on
  • Which team members would you like the manager to spend a little extra time with?  Are there any work you would like the manager to help a particular EE with?

–          Prepare yourself

• Plan any personal travel early so you get good rates!
• Figure out how to keep your work and personal communications separate – your email (autoresponder, routing, disabling from your smartphone), your voicemail if you use Google Voice or Simulscribe, etc.
• Block out two full days immediately when you return to catch up on email and catch up with your manager and team

As the manager:

–          Prepare your team

• Make sure the rest of your team knows your time will be compromised while you’re covering
• Figure out what kind of coverage you need (either internal or external) while you’re covering

–          Rearrange your calendar/travel

• Add new team meetings or 1:1s as it makes sense.  You don’t have to do exactly what your employee did, but some portions of it will make sense to pick up
• If your employee works in another office with members of his/her team, you might want to plan some travel there to cover in person
• It’s ok to cut back on some other things a bit while you’re covering – just remember to undo everything when the employee’s sabbatical is over

–          While you’re in charge

• Surprise your employee with how much you were able to keep things running in his/her absence!
• Learn as much as you can by doing bits and pieces of his/her job.  This is a great opportunity of the employee to get some value from a fresh perspective.

–          Prepare for your employee’s return

• Keep a running tab of everything that goes on at the company, critical industry news (if appropriate), and with your employee’s function or team and prepare a well-organized briefing document so your employee can hit the ground running when he/she returns
• Block out an hour or two each of the employee’s first two days back to review your briefing document

My main takeaway from this post?  I am overdue my second sabbatical, and it’s time to start thinking about that!