Meet the Postman Center of Excellence

Pete Thornton 0:06
All right, welcome to the SAS rant podcast everyone, I often get asked about building an enablement team. So today we have special guests of an enablement team. This is the Postman enablement team on the new hire rapid ramp side that’s known as the center of excellence in the Postman organization. Center of Excellence actually reports up through the customer teams that’s been through customer success, but expand out to actually serve over 20 individual teams. So the motto for for for this particular team is day one to job done on new hire ramp. So super pleased to be bringing everybody on from the Center of Excellence side of the house today. We have Abhishek, Ben, Karen, Kirithika. But without me giving the individual intros, let’s pop around the horn real quick. Abhishek, tell us a little bit about yourself here.

Abhishek Humney 0:52
Excited to be here. I’m Abhishek. I’m based out of Bangalore, India and I offer project management support.

Pete Thornton 1:02
Awesome. Thanks, Abhishek. Ben, what about yourself?

We’re a remote team. Ben got frozen. Ben is in Idaho and he’s gathering Starlink as we speak, so there we go. Remote global challenges in action. We’ll loop back around to Ben Phillips there. Kirithika, how about you?

Kirithika S 1:22
Hey, everyone. My name is Kirithika. And I’m based out of Bangalore as well. So I work for the onboarding sites. So I work as an engaged nonart or Senior Associate here at Postman.

Pete Thornton 1:36
Awesome. Thanks, Kirithika. And then Karen, how about yourself?

Karen Perdomo 1:40
Hey, guys. I am based in Seattle, Washington. I am an e-learning developer and I helped create develop content and design for Postman.

Pete Thornton 1:53
Yeah. All right. That’s so fantastic. That was helpful for the sake of the audience. So I get often asked about job descriptions kind of helping out with various pieces, people that are solo enablement, managers, meaning they’re managing the processes and content, but not necessarily anyone. The Postman team has come from one member out to 10 members now. So we’re a team of nine. And we have somebody that’s sitting over on the sales side in particular. So we’ve scaled out over the last 18 months to include instructional design. And we actually structure that out into four sub-teams across both new hire ramp, that’s the center of excellence and continuous enablement. So in order to drive “day one to job done,” and also like provide tip-of-the-spear content and resources, we have launch, boost, orbit, and supernova. So we actually have members of each team here today, minus Ben, who will be joining us again. So what I wanted to do, aside from just walking you through kind of the context of what each role does is go from member to member, and then see if we can understand a little bit about how they ended up joining enablement. Knowing that enablement is not like a path you took out of college is probably not what a family member or friend told you to join into. Everybody has a bit of a unique enablement journey, whether it’s perfect, personal, or professional, we’re both so lucky to go around to each of you and just kind of like have you tell us a little bit about yourself, like what experiences led you to the Postman opportunity. Abhishek, would you kick us off?

Abhishek Humney 3:22
I started my career in customer support in 2016. And I joined Postman as a second member of sales for Intuit. And the sales support team is responsible for resolving internal and external reviews and also for the licensing and provisioning of post nova licenses. So I bought with the CDs for two years, were paying 10. Also them to grow the team to riechmann machine. And last year, I made the move to because it ties to my long-term goal of starting my own business and enablement gives me this unique opportunity to work with all the different teams in Boston, with all the marketing business as well as the engineering teams, and understand the pain points, help them achieve their goals by offering curated solutions.

Pete Thornton 4:13
So Abhishek is unique in the fact that that he came from an internal shift, like what he mentioned in sales support over so it’s really interesting to be able to hire out of some additional internal support team or sales team or customer success team because they’ll come with like the grandfathering in all of that knowledge that they come across. So we’re delighted to hear from Abhishek wanted to know maybe why enablement versus where he was then and then he just mentioned it like if you’re wanting to pursue a business future enablement allows you to interact with more especially go to market teams and leaders and go to market teams and you’re going to be able to otherwise. So that was extremely interesting to him and then for us, gathering some of that more like contextual knowledge from his background, Postman has been here so long, especially for hypergrowth organization like Postman really, really helpful? Thanks, Abhishek.

Ben, you got a bit of a different tale than Abhishek, not from inside of Postman. Tell us about yourself.

Ben Phillips 5:10
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked with some of like the largest friends and in the past, I worked for Apple Retail I worked for Starbucks, I worked for bite X for a while. In every role I was ever in, I always enjoyed when we had new people join, I’d kind of take them under my wing or facilitate the onboarding process. And then a few years ago, I moved into SaaS and was working for an ad tech company and same story, I was a CSM, and we’d get new people and I would kind of take them under my wing, and just always enjoyed that. And then eventually, like in all of these cases like that, I became the onboarding guy. And so as I’ve just progressed, in my career, that’s always kind of what I’ve done. And most recently, the last couple of years, that’s just become my full-time job. So for me, it helps me really align with what my personal mission is. And it helps me fulfill like that, that desire to help people grow in their roles, and get gets them ready for what they’re here to do, and I’ve got a company, so as a CSM, at a SaaS company actually used Postman. So I would enable our team members on how to use Postman. And that’s kind of the reason I came here in many ways because it was a platform that I loved. I could tell that we were poised for growth, and the role just fit what I enjoy doing. And I feel fulfilled doing so that’s kind of a snapshot of why I’m here.

Pete Thornton 6:46
It’s awesome, that there are a couple of things that stuck out to me, whenever you were coming to interview, and that was, it was one you had, you had actually done a role at one of the roles that you would be supporting already. So it’s really nice when you have some role-based background, in customer success in particular there. The other thing was having used the product, so it’s great to have used the product before you get familiar with it. I mean, 20 million developers on Postman, but it’s not every time that you’re going to have somebody coming into a sales success or enablement role, who’s had day-to-day interactions with Postman, so that was really helpful. And then the third thing, and I don’t know if this is a challenge with other leaders, or not I have to suspect is when you use the term onboarding, it often brings up maybe like a human resources or like people ops type of onboarding, but what you had been doing at other organizations was driving to an end result, like day one to job done, trying to get them all the way to that minimum viable product of them being able to support and account or close a deal. And so that was very intriguing as well because not too many interviewees are coming in and doing things beyond like compliance-based or gathering tools for new hires all very important things, but things that are not as high value in our eyes on the customer teams. So yeah, that was a no-brainer to get Ben on the team.

Ben Phillips 8:05
Yeah, that’s probably the reason the happened that way is, I just always kind of started in one of those roles, where I was an individual contributor, or leading a team of individual contributors and just kind of did onboarding on the side as a side hustle. And midway. So I think I said that because there are likely people on every team that are good at onboarding, and probably enjoy onboarding more than you think they are. And so if you’re looking to build a team, there are certainly cases where external hires are, are great, but oftentimes, there are people on the inside, you already know your product already know your systems already know your people. And they might just have kind of a knack or desire to help people onboard. And those can be some of your, some of your best people as well.

Pete Thornton 8:54
It’s such a good point because somebody’s doing enablement. Like, just because you don’t you have not yet hired for enablement, or grown a team to 10 Because you had 400 new hires along the journey over 18 months, but somebody’s doing it. So either, as you mentioned, a subject matter expert, like if somebody just a champion in the field is actually taking people under their wing and helping them training them. Or it’s that management piece, like the manager becomes the manual bottleneck for all information and that manager becomes an enablement manager essentially. So, good point. I love finding people who’ve already done it in that regard to they kind of have like the subject matter expertise, but then the heart of a Coach and Trainer, and that combination, it won’t show up maybe on the resume. But once you start diving in and understanding maybe their background, and that’s where that’s come through. We can tell them about the crunch heard around the world during your interview process as well. But maybe that’s a different podcast.

Kirithika, how about yourself? What led you to enablement?

Kirithika S 10:01
Yeah, so I’ve been this curious person who always wants to learn about new things. And when I deliver it, I want it to make it simple and easy for the other learners to take it up, right. So when I joined Postman into the enablement team, it was all fresh and new. And there were a couple of challenges that we had to solve. And we were just trying to figure out a lot of ways to solve those challenges. And that’s when I found the onboarding, or the Center of Excellence, as how we call it now as my area of specialization because there are new hires and my love for interacting with people and helping them get to their job done, or helping them in learning something very new, or about the process that we follow at Postman was like, my thing to do because like helping them in making it even more simpler for them to learn was something very interesting here because we were trying to break down all the complicated stuff to help or ramp some new person who joins the team, what like a challenge, and also I was able to solve it, and enablement, being another term for helping folks or like learning about them learning about the pain points, and resolving that has always made me curious to learn more. And it has given me a lot of opportunity and scope, to understand about various teams within the business side of sort of an organization and also the technical or the engineering side of the organization. So this has given me a great experience, and I love this, I love this enablement space in that aspect. So yeah, that’s why I’m here in the enablement space.

Pete Thornton 11:52
You bring up a couple of good points your channel talking about, about creating the content and making it interesting. And then, of course, like coming across a great number of teams as well. So maybe just one little aside, and it’s something that used to tell frequently, but it is relevant for what we’re talking about. So when Kirithika was coming in and being hired, there was a great number of applicants for that particular position. And so we had to like we had to scale up scale back on on the number that we could actually interview. So Kirithika kept on knocking on the door through social media via Twitter. And that was really interesting because we were starting to try to transition our programs into something that would be relevant to both TikTok as well as Twitter followers, meaning short, entertaining videos, as well as concise summaries, maybe 140 characters in the summaries of what new hires would be able to digest day by day as they work towards their job done, or their role based outcomes. And so she was in the Twitterverse, pinging us over and over, and I thought it was a great sales tactic. It was like a good business development tactic for one, and we would be helping those teams. And for two, it’s just little concise messaging. So yeah, that’s some of the reason we’re like, well, we need to look at Kirithika. Let’s definitely give her a shot. And when we met her it was obvious that that was going to be something we wanted to move forward with.

Kirithika S 13:10
Yeah, trying out new ways and not through LinkedIn search, or search for a job that I did a Twitter search for jobs. Just tried a different way and it worked.

Pete Thornton 13:20
It was different. It was unique. So that’s why we liked it. That’s awesome. Awesome. All right. So back over to the other side of world. I don’t know Krithika if you said you were located in Bangalore, India where the other Postman offices are, and then out to the West Coast with Karen Perdomo.

Karen Perdomo 13:40
I’ve been an Instructional Designer for a number of years now. And different companies. I’ve created training for oil and gas companies, waste management, and like energy, gas energy stuff with that included franchise, so I worked with Benjamin Franklin Plumbing when our AC and… Oh my goodness.

Pete Thornton 14:11
They pale in comparison to your Postman experience.

Karen Perdomo 14:15
Yeah. And Mr. Sparky Electric. That’s where I really did get a lot of the enablement ramp in. I learned how to do a lot of creative things with green screen and just making engaging content for ourselves. People there and transitioned over to finance and then I had the opportunity to choose between Amazon and Postman. And when I first got the two offers on my plate, I really took a look into Postman and I had no idea what it was at first. But the opportunity, the growth opportunity to build something here, really spoke To me, and I’ve really wanted the opportunity to come and be a part of something big and something moving fast. And I’m really glad that I made it here creating these interactive content for the enablement team here, it’s just been really fun and great team to work with.

Pete Thornton 15:21
Yeah, it’s been fantastic to have you. That’s probably the biggest challenge. It kind of leads into where we’re heading next on challenges we’ll take, we’ll take a lead straight into that next, but it was like if you’re coming from that corporate background, big companies, you’re going to have 20 people to do every single thing. And then at Postman, we get it done. We’re growing exceptionally fast, hyper growth company, 100% year over year revenue, about 150 to 225 new hires per year, coming in the front door, we’re trying to create and manage content for them. So folks probably don’t know quite yet mature, you do the graphic design, the up-leveling of the majority of the content we have come in. And so and then all of that also, some of the organization on the backside is what we call boost here. And we go from launch to boost to orbit to supernova, described in another podcast in depth, but Karen’s in charge of that piece. And so it’s been really, really nice to have her aid coming through that.

Let’s roll into some challenges because it is a difference coming from a previous role in a corporate setting. Like some pros, some cons into hyper growth, organization, product, lead growth, SaaS technology, is extremely fast growing because you have this big product adoption phase that happens. And for example, with Postman, we had, we currently have over 20 million developers. At the time I started, we had about 10 million developers. And what happens is, once you get gather that type of product adoption, and you want to stack a sales and customer success team on top, it just booms the headcount, because you have all this pent-up demand for it’s really good. It’s a really good business strategy, if you can be patient enough for it. So the question then starting with Abhishek, what are the challenges associated with Postman’s hypergrowth that affect your particular role. And if you need to expand on your role a little bit, feel free there.

Abhishek Humney 17:14
As Postman is expanding, it’s very important to create processes and pray, we’ll see. One of the big challenges is the go-to-market feeds speak the same language. And lastly, as we are creating so many content, you also need to focus on maintaining this content and improving this market over the period of time. We are very focused on building scalable and repeatable processes and also keeping processes asynchronous as we work.

Pete Thornton 17:47
Yeah, you mentioned a few things there. I think it’ll be a common thing that that shows up. But you talked about the sheer number of teams, especially when you’re trying to deliver a role-based rapid ramp program. So that is to take any individual team to their specific outcomes. It’s much more difficult. If you want to provide like a company type one to one, maybe express the mission, the vision, the values, that’s a good start. It’s a great start. And a lot of people arts organizations might even do that. We take that into our programs, but also moving into the role-based outcomes. So like I mentioned, we have over 20 teams that we service in that way. So pure, pure scale. As far as that goes, you mentioned maintenance and improvement. So nothing stays at Postman for longer and about a month we find so maintaining the content that you’ve created and even improving it over time. Here we have a cadence, it’s a monthly cadence to be able to do that. That’s what our check heads up in the sub-team we call orbit. Big, big, big job there. And then and then asynchronous insights. So as you can tell, we’re speaking from East Coast, West Coast, United States all the way globally into Bangalore, India. That’s because we have two headquarters, one in San Francisco, one in Bangalore, India. And that is very, very common in SAS startups, where you have engineering teams and maybe sales teams across the world. So we have to create things that are remotely delivered digitally delivered to all of our constituents. And it has to be clear, crisp, summarized, and it needs to be available while you’re sleeping. So it can’t necessarily be live or manual to be able to get by with doing that. So big challenges, indeed. Thanks, Abhishek.

Alright, Ben, what about from your side? What challenges at Postman here?

Ben Phillips 19:29
Absolutely. So a little bit of background on what I do. I have received the supernovas side, which in many ways I think of myself as a CSM for our onboard team members meaning that it’s my job to get them to do the job done for sure. But it’s it’s like removing blockers along the way and making sure they feel supported. And like they’ve got the answers that they need when they need it. And so, in a nutshell, that’s a lot of what I do. But that obviously brings along a lot of challenges. I think like, personally, I’ll start there. Like, the thing that I struggle with personally is sometimes the SP mentioned, things move quickly, and things are already out of date, by the time we publish, the awesome times it feels like. And oftentimes, it feels like the organization moves faster than I do. Because I’m a planner, I’m someone who kind of takes quality over quantity many times. So like, I want to slow down and like make sure that we’re considering every single little aspect that can potentially be considered. But, and that’s a personality thing for sure. But in any software company that moves quickly, or any company that moves quickly, there’s always going to be abrupt there. So I’m having to kind of reconcile that of, of figuring out what’s the point where it’s good to move on and not, not spend too much time in the planning process is, is important. And there’s always a balance there. So that’s something that I always find challenging. But beyond that, just organizationally, like there are a few things that come to mind. You like as you’ve got a company that is growing quickly, that is going from a couple 100 to several 100 or approaching 1,000. There are a lot of systems and processes outside of enablement that enablement relies on so when it comes to like it, how are we getting people in the pipeline? As far as like, how do we know who we’re going to be onboarding, like, that can always be a challenge that we’re trying to solve. And sometimes the solutions are outside of our power. So that’s, that’s one, that’s one challenge that kind of comes to mind. But as Abhishek mentioned, we got large amounts of teams like new teams, we’re approaching 20 different teams. And so a lot of what I do is creating learning environments, like via instructor-led training, and different types of learning environments that are designed to create social learning, meaning other people are learning from each other, and other people are learning alongside each other. But as you’ve got a large kind of spectrum of types of roles and personalities, and people like creating those environments can be difficult, because you might have someone that is very savvy with API’s on our space, whereas you have someone who doesn’t even know what that acronym means, or they can’t even really even explain what it is. And that’s okay, like, that’s what we’re here to help with. But teaching to both of those people within the same session is always a challenge. We were always up against that. And that’s a problem that I enjoy solving. But sometimes it can be challenging for sure. So that’s just based on the fact that we are supporting so many different teams, across so many different time zones, like creating those learning environments can be a challenge.

Pete Thornton 22:50
For sure. I heard you say a couple of things. I want to start with the CSM, that’s like, it’s really good, that customer success manager like referencing your job as a cohort lead, bringing these monthly cohorts, across from day one to job done across all those various roles. Considering yourself a customer success manager, like in charge of that account’s success, that new hire’s success. It’s a good way to look at that role, it kind of helps them visualize it as well, the rapid scale piece, like there’s no way we’re not just gonna hear this over and over and over. But it is. There’s a ready, fire, aim mentality in hypergrowth because you can’t do the typical cycle like you always have to balance the short-term results versus these long-term efficiencies. And if you aren’t in enablement, you are by your very nature, as an engineer, efficiency bound like you want to create processes that are scalable, and, and sometimes it’s just like, this needs to be prepared by this day at this time. And it’s maybe a one-off request, and they can come through Fast and Furious in that growth phase. So balancing the two so that we can make, we can create a better tomorrow, but still drive the results today. It certainly is a balance is a tough one. And another one, you mentioned various skill levels. In any program like trying to hit the people who’ve been in it for 25 years and are coming to deliver a like-for-like type of product, or at least in the same industry at a strategic sales level, versus somebody coming into an introductory role learning the product that people product process for the very first time. And maybe it’s their second role out of college or something like that. Those are two very different types of new hires that need different attributes that are having to be provided. So true, true challenges there for sure. Kirithika maybe a little bit more about your role since it’ll help for both yours and Karen’s discussion, and what challenges you see in you’ve been here long enough to know some of the challenges we see day to day.

Kirithika S 24:49
Yeah, yeah. So the thing is like being in the boost phase or currently, we just broke it down as like launch boost orbit and supernova. So previously, we didn’t have all these things. Since then we were just like having a lot of resources, a lot of field requests for everything. And we didn’t have like maintenance back then. And we were just updating based on requests. And there were a lot of changes every month or every quarter, there’ll be a huge shift in the Postman UI, if you’re trading on the product side, or there’ll be a huge shift in the process itself that they’re going through as like, like a team or so on. So currently working in the boost team, the challenge, so every team, like are interlinked, and the boost team, especially, we need a lot of communication from all the other things as well, from launch, when we start creating something new. Or we, we have that communication, even from the maintenance side, and the supernova side, we need to communicate a lot. And this is smooth right now. And the main challenge is that with a haiku growth where a lot of process gets updated, and where we’ll have to get back to something that we already recorded on the product, let’s say the platform itself, we just recorded a video in the last quarter, and we’ll have to update for the next quarter, or it can be a week also, because the UI team, the UX team, Schaik, are like, like updating a lot of new, they’re rolling out a lot of new updates in the personal platform, and all the teams are like working in a past motion ban, they can give the users a very smooth experience. So in such cases, what we try is on the creators and is that like, keeping a track of all the updates that have that’s happening, or on the product side, especially, and then on the process of each team. So these are the main two challenges. And we all always have to keep track of proper communication channels for everything and be trouble, as I mentioned earlier between the launch phase or like the supernova or the orbit, and everywhere. So our main goal, two main goals will be to always have a look on the product, what are the updates, and also maintain a clear communication so that we create quality resources, that would be helpful for everyone. And another challenge is that when the hypergrowth in a platform, there are a lot of resources that are documented and finding out what is the correct resource that’s required for anyone to go through? And if the resource will serve the purpose for the, for the people, or for the learner to go through? And what like keeping it straightforward and simple and not complicating it. So that would be another big challenge with the ample amount of resources we have currently.

Pete Thornton 27:48
Yeah, definitely. So boost team—and again, this is unpacked in another podcast—but it’s essentially the role-based content creation phase of the entire cycle launch is the where we get together with leadership, we unpack the challenges that they’re specifically having within their team and find out the usually three to five outcomes that we’re trying to drive towards a single Northstar goal. For example, in sales, that would be Sales Lead annual recurring revenue, just as an example there. So what the boosting does is they are the instructional designers that create this moving forward. They’re also the blood learning management system administrators and the graphic creators, so they kind of like host a wide number of roles. But at a place like Postman in hypergrowth, the number of total teams—as well as the number of brand new teams that pop up at any given quarter—is quite substantial. So that’s what growth was referencing, as well as the maintenance and improvement of each thing created. So it’s not when you create something, it’s done. It’s like your grass growing, but it’s like spring has sprung. There’s fertilizer being thrown down and it’s raining every day. It just keeps growing over and over and you’re going to have 20 lawns to move to, as just a silly analogy. But that’s the way it feels. The last thing I heard Krithika say was a trying to drive simplicity out of the resources is not just good enough to have documentation and data, we have data spilling out of our ears. In a company like a Postman. It’s a very fortunate thing. However, you have to get down to actionable insights. And actions are taken when things were simple, social and successful. That’s our kind of like mantra simple social successful, because we want it to be simplistic. So it’s understood what the actionable piece of that information is. We want it to be social so that it can be discussed amongst each other especially in a remote organization. We like to drive social interactions between team members. We like to have mentorship programs, we have to have leadership insights, one on ones we have to we’d like to put them into a cohort that then leads to what we call supernova loop leads them through like we’ve said, from day one to job done. And then the successful piece is the fact we’re actually driving them to role-based outcomes. So we take them all the way to the Finish line where they have closed their first deal, for example, or created pipeline, or been able to uplevel and account and create additional value for customer success managers, for example. So those are huge challenges. And Kirithika’s been after it for quite a while, knows a lot of what we do on a day-to-day as far as the backend systems LMS administration, etc. So if anybody’s spending some, some plates around here, it’s correct, because appreciate you Kirithika.

Okay, Karen. Boost team insight number two coming up. What do you think? What are the challenges at Postman, especially coming from your background in a more corporate larger scale company?

Karen Perdomo 30:42
Yeah, it is definitely trying to make the content scalable, making sure that you’re not spinning those wheels constantly, make sure you’re not adding dates and name dropping because people are constantly moving rolls. Dates are constantly moving, I’m trying to make sure that you don’t include anything that can tie to anything in particular. So you can scale and you can focus more on new content that’s coming in, instead of going back and doing these updates constantly. And the content is always coming hypergrowth that is one of the major problems that we are having because there’s so much to do, and not enough time. And it’s just the constant growth, and then trying to make things as quickly as possible. So one of the programs that we’re using right now is articulate rise. And it just it templatized us things to kind of create the content in a user-friendly kind of way user experience, to break out those chunks of content and bite sizes. And it helps us create the content at a faster rate as well. Because it’s constantly coming in. And we have to make sure that we are getting this content out to our customers.

Pete Thornton 32:09
Yeah, that was your thing from day one: content scalability. You’re like, I know where these organizations end up, they end up in these megalith enterprises. And that is everyone’s goal. Everybody wants to grow and get bigger, bigger, bigger. But with it comes the inability to go back and set foundations for scalability again. So remember, as soon as you got here, you’re like, we need to remove this name, we need to not have this date on this video, if it is applicable over and over and over, we need to have like maintenance improvements. So we can come through and see it over and over again. So it sounds like there’s a whole list a laundry list for another podcast of things to do things not to do, things to do. We’re templatizing systems. Anything that we can take and create in a replicable fashion. On the backside utilizing the software. Fantastic. You were referencing the example of articulate and then things not to do some of the things I had kind of like made mention of just before that, that’s a there’s a whole top 10 in there somewhere. I know there is.

We like to keep this one short. We passed 30 minutes. It’s A-okay, just fine. But I’ll take our last question. And I’ll just kind of come around the horn. And so we’ve done a little bit of like get to know you, then a little bit of the current and past challenges, the challenges we’re seeking to overcome. So instead of diving into solutions, and exactly how we do it today, I’d like to get like a 30-second vision for scaling your area of expertise. So again, we have the launch boost orbit, supernova phases are represented here. I’ll skip launch since that usually sits with me. But let’s move into the other organizations and just get a quick snapshot. What would be a vision of being able to scale this thing knowing that our ultimate vision is to be able to onboard 1000 Postman knots, as we call them, Postman new hires, and we’re working rapidly towards that goal. But how are we going to get their team? What’s it going to look like? Let’s go in order on this. Since it goes launch, when we have the role-based outcomes, we moved to boost in content creation orbit for the maintenance and improvement and Supernova for Ben to lead them through the cohorts. Let’s start back with the boost team starting with you, Karen. What’s the vision? How do we get there?

Karen Perdomo 34:16
An assembly. Build down the assembly line. Make sure that passes are passed off seamlessly. So from one team to the next. We have to make sure that all of that is communicated and passed along really fast and easy to do even templatized seeing what we’re passing along so that we can just hit the ground running.

Pete Thornton 34:42
Oo. Henry Ford would be pleased to have had you in the early 1900s. You build the machine building an assembly line is it’s extremely applicable. Like it’s like software engineering, building it and shipping it and building it and shipping it having a template to go by. Perfect. Okay, what do you think, Kirithika?

Kirithika S 35:03
Yeah, I agree with Karen. And another thing that I have in mind is to create quality content. And also keep it simple and interactive and make it really interesting for any LoRa to go through it and not like, oh my god, it’s like training not and not making them feel like that. And instead, they have to be energized, because they’re all new hires will come into a new organization with lots of energy, and to help them keep their energy high. So we ought to create more net. So in order to keep that energy high, we can create more interactive and interesting content, and also to create like quality ones. Oh, that’s, that’s something we really focus on doing.

Pete Thornton 35:47
Yeah, wonderful point. We have great new hires, we hire exceptionally well, we hire super talented people. And like doctors, their main thing, when they pass their boards, is to do no harm. That’s actually the Hippocratic Oath. So that’s kind of like the new hire ramp. At least do no harm through something that is more akin to some kind of corporate onboarding, sluggish, slow, compliance base. No, like, we want to go to role-based outcomes, we want to help them succeed and be successful. So keeping it simple, keeping it interactive or social, would be the way forward. Love it. Okay, over to Abhishek in orbit. So Abhishek is leading the maintenance and improvement cadence that we call orbit, what’s the vision hub check?

Abhishek Humney 36:29
What was in his two binder, scalable and repeatable processes, and also curators based on make it team specific to elaborate more on that everybody will have their own set of communication channels, and the communication, how their engineering teams communicate, will be very different than all other business teams. So before providing a free work or onboarding solution to any team, we should really understand how they’re communicating, interacting, or how we can track the pace on their existing communication channels, and what introduce new channels or methods of tracking. So yes, sir, curating your team-specific courses is the way forward, but also need to ensure that the same time that the framework is scalable.

Pete Thornton 37:21
I would expect nothing less from automation, Abhishek. He’s wearing a t-shirt the other day, I think we’re making nicknames. We’ll keep you informed about that one. So you’re saying and scalable and repeatable processes. Not surprised to hear you say that at all. The other thing I heard you say was meeting teams where they are a lot of teams across an organization communicating in different formats. I don’t know if our listeners have experienced this, but sales teams might prefer to communicate in Slack, a lot of teams like to communicate in Slack, they do it in a separate way, though, it used to be G chat a long time ago, in a different world. And that was how the sales team communicated versus engineering and slack. And here at Postman, heavy Atlassian shop really love Confluence and JIRA, on the engineering teams, versus something a little bit like faster and to the point like Slack for the perhaps the customer facing team so on projects, and let’s just go to where they are, and meet our customers there. So good call on that one as well. Okay, Ben, for supernova, taking all of this and trying to create it in individual packages, and actually meet the new hires face to face, lead virtual instructor-led trainings and move the cohorts from day one to job done. How do we do that with 1,000 new hires?

Ben Phillips 38:37
Absolutely. So when I think of what the vision for the future is, there are a few things that come to mind. Abhishek kind of touched on one of the major ones. And that’s just like, creating all the systems and processes and automation around those. So that I know who’s coming in, I know how to get people through the programs in a way that takes less administrative time and work. So that’s always a work in progress, and will probably always continue to be a work in progress, because we can always up-level the automation. But there are two other things that come to mind. One of them being measurement if we’re going to test anything, if we’re going to improve anything, we have to have something to measure against, and the challenge that we’re up against with if we’re looking to drive outcomes, we’ve got 18 different teams, 17, different teams, and yellow, each team has maybe three, three outcomes that they’re looking to drive to, like, do the math, that’s a lot of outcomes, right? And so, if we’re going to, if we’re going to test things, if we’re going to improve things, we got to measure them, we got to be able to measure them before we do an improvement so that we can compare them after. And you’re right now like we have, we have outcomes established for a lot of our teams. They’re still outcomes that we’re looking to establish which is like a full-time job and to celebrate They’re, and we need to be able to measure them objectively to be able to do that. So we’re making some big strides right now. But that obviously takes a lot of alignment across a lot of different teams. And so I’m excited to see where that goes. And I think the last thing that I’d say is part of the vision for the future for this part of the organization is just up leveling, all of our virtual instructor-led trainings, like I really enjoy that part of my job like, those, those moments where you see like the light bulb turned on above someone’s head, like, those are the moments that I kind of, that I look for. And so creating environments where that’s happening more and more like we, on average, a monthly cohort will do like anywhere between 12 to 15, different instructor led trainings, some of them I’m hosting, some of them I’m facilitating with other stakeholders and teams, and making sure that every single one of those is has something to take away for every single person on that call. And that, depending on learning styles, and where someone’s that, everybody’s taking away something that’s meaningful to their role is important. And the way in which we present ideas and the way in which we facilitate these discussions, is really what makes that happen. So yeah, that’s it. The last thing is just making our virtual instructor-led trainings that are really the last line.

Pete Thornton 41:26
Yeah, okay, if I had to summarize that, we’re talking in anything that’s other than what you mentioned, like maybe some others that said on scalability and processes is measurements and meaning. And those both are derived from kind of like the outcomes management that we do with leadership, meaning we have to get with leaders understand what their goals are, what the outcomes that would be the stairsteps to those goals be, and then actually be able to provide context for all levels of new hires that would give them meaning. And you’re looking for those, those coaching moments, those little places where, like you said, the light bulb goes off, and you get that, that, that feeling that they now understand something that didn’t have a prior for that eureka moment. And so that gives you that good feeling, it also takes that new hire, and gets them to their job done that much faster.

I’ll wrap up by saying this, we mentioned the vision of 1,000 new hires here, there’s also something else that we absolutely care about. And it’s I guess it’s more like along the lines of our Center of Excellence mission. And that is simply to bring people from day one to job done. Because until somebody actually experiences that first success in their role, they’re very nervous and pinned up. If you’ve ever changed jobs before yourself, and every listener has, you’ve changed grades, you change classes, you change jobs in the workforce, then you understand that you do not feel successful until you’ve actually physically attain that success in a new role. And no amount of niceness from your manager or the culture of the organization can really help you feel better until you feel like you’re providing value. So we like to get new hires to that feeling of providing value as quickly as possible. That’s what gives us that feeling. That personal feeling. Ben’s talking about coachable moments, teachable moments have a background in education as well. So there’s another piece of that when Ben mentions measurements, and it is that if you are hiring and ramping people that are touching revenue, and that revenue is standard, between 1 million and $2 million, us, let’s use it at $1.3 million than every 30 days you can get them to their role based outcomes faster, is worth $108,000 per new hire. If you’re hiring in 10, then you added zero to the end of that number. If you’re hiring 20 new hires 30 new hires, if the quote is higher, if you can get them there faster, 45 days faster, that’s 162,000. So this adds up for the companies as well. And so that’s why we take such a data-driven approach to this. It’s in our hearts. It’s in our minds. It’s in the company’s best interests. So we have a vested interest. So if you have any questions, please reach out. This is the Postman Center of Excellence team. Thanks, everybody for coming on and sharing your insights. I learned something today as well. Thanks all.