Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution by Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

CEO context/twice context/best-of-the-best

“I've learned, one of the big lessons I've learned is that to drive excellence, you need to be incredibly judgmental. And most people, when push comes to shove, are afraid to make the decisions they need to make to be truly successful.” ocena i kontrola zadań dobra jakość

“They're not willing to hold people accountable that need to be held accountable. They're not willing to be extreme about the product decisions that need to be made, the way products are positioned, whether they're priced, and they're not also willing to be extreme about the go-to-market decisions. And what I find is most people fold with the pressure to make hard decisions.” podejmowanie decyzji

“And I think that's why there's a lot of very average and mediocre companies out there. And I think really confronting problems directly and dealing with them directly, most people are social animals. Most people don't want to have a painful conversation. rozwiązywanie problemów

Most people don't want to point out the flaws and what people are doing quality. And so in many cases, you have been these very passive aggressive meetings, everyone nods politely, but in the back of the mind they said, this is probably not gonna work. We work really hard to create a culture where we can be intellectually honest about what's working, what's not working, have fierce conversations about what to do, what not to do, who's performing, who's not performing, and then really focus on executing really well.” transparencja ocena i kontrola zadań

There wouldn't be any fierce debate. But then people leave the room and you know, you can see people's eyes rolling saying, that's never going to work. And to me, I view passive aggressiveness as a form of duplicity, because you have to create a culture where people are free to say what they think constructively about a particular idea or a particular decision.
Because I always believe all of us are smarter than any one of us. And one of our core values at MongoDB is intellectual honesty, because I abhor passive aggressive behaviors. That was one thing that I learned not to do.”

sprzedaż

“Then the certain interim steps in the sales process that tell you, are you on track to kind of getting a deal? Have you met with the economic buyer? Have you qualified how much budget's available?
Have you qualified even that this is a priority for them? And because you're not just competing with your own competitor, you're competing with other vendors and other spaces for budget dollars. And so how do you know, is this problem that you're solving for as important as another problem that another vendor might be trying to address?
And then obviously, what is the decision criteria? One rule of thumb we have is, you should never be answering an RFP.”
“That's not just a demo and a sale.

I hate deals where it's just a very long sales cycle because there's always chance of something going wrong. But if you think about any sales process, any sales process is essentially designed to address three core questions. Why does the customer wanna do anything?
what pain or problem do they have that's gonna force them to take action? So that's with the discovery part of the sales process. You try and discover what pain or problem customers have that are relevant to what you can solve for.
The second phase of that is why MongoDB? Why is MongoDB the best choice to solve that pain relative to all the alternatives and substitutes available? And then the third part of the sales process is why now?”
“Because you can do the first two things, but the customer can easily kick the can down the road. And in many cases, that's the struggle most salespeople have. It's not that they lose a deal, but the customer never makes a decision.
Can you create a manufacturer or is there a compelling event you can use to force a customer or induce a customer to make a decision sooner than later? So those three questions, I don't know how you can forecast a deal if you don't have answers to those three questions. So that's essentially how our sales process is broken down.
Then the certain interim steps in the sales process that tell you, are you on track to kind of getting a deal? Have you met with the economic buyer? Have you qualified how much budget's available?”
“Have you qualified even that this is a priority for them? And because you're not just competing with your own competitor, you're competing with other vendors and other spaces for budget dollars. And so how do you know, is this problem that you're solving for as important as another problem that another vendor might be trying to address?
And then obviously, what is the decision criteria? One rule of thumb we have is, you should never be answering an RFP. Because invariably, if you're getting an RFP that you've never worked on before, some other vendor has written the RFP.
So what that means is you have to set the table on the decision criteria. How is a customer going to make a decision? What features or capabilities are they going to weigh?”
“And how are they going to weight them relative to other things they can consider for them to make a decision? Have you educated the customer and built what we call champions who will understand the value of MongoDB and understand why for their own business, MongoDB is the best choice? And then building a champion, a champion we define as someone who's selling for you when you've left the building.
Obviously someone who's a change agent, has power and influence in an organization and is really selling for you after you're not there. There's a big difference, what we call between champions and coaches. Coaches wanting to see you win, but they're not gonna take either any personal risks themselves, or they just don't have the credibility or juice to kind of influence the decision.
But they can be helpful to kind of give you some insight or radar into what's happening in the account. But ultimately there's a champion for every deal that are closed. Sometimes you may not know who your champion is, but there's someone who's advocating for you when you're not alone in the room, or advocating frankly for someone else.”
“And you will gotta make sure your champion is more powerful than your enemy's champion. And that's all part of the sales process.
The champion idea reminds me of the first thing you said, which is that most people don't want to make hard decisions and confront trade-offs. And it makes me wonder what your first experience with this was from a personal standpoint that made you aware of or suited to or better wired to be decisive, have judgment, make decisions, make trade-offs.”

“But if you ask anyone, did you ever fire someone too quickly or too late, 99.9% of the time they'll say they fired people too late. Why? Because they introduced hope into the process. zwalnianie ludzi hope bias

And we still do that even at MongoDB. People say, oh, give that person more time. He or she just needs more time to get a sense of how we do things.

And invariably, the answer was staring at you in the face, but you just didn't want to acknowledge it. And so that was also another lesson I learned is deal with problems head on and quickly. And at PlayLogic, I went through multiple rounds of leaders. rozwiązywanie problemów agile, szybkość, tempo

And not that I was purposely looking to change leaders, but leaders can come and go because they're good for a certain stage of growth, but then they tap out. Even at MongoDB, the leadership team I inherited is no longer here. When a business scales, not everyone scales at the same rate.” zarządzanie menadżerami

“One of the things I've learned in life is that if you see a problem and don't act on it, that problem is no longer that person that think that problem is you. If you have the authority to solve that problem and not doing it, then you're the problem. I always feel like whenever I see something bad, if I don't act on it, then I'm actually accepting mediocrity or I'm accepting poor performance, and that's contrary to everything that we're trying to do. Ray Dalio rozwiązywanie problemów operating principles

In some ways, you're penalizing all the good people who are working really hard because you're accepting mediocre performance from the other person, and they're actually penalizing all the good people who have crowned the constraints or the limitations of this other person. dobra jakość kultura-firmy

One of the ideas of yours that I liked best when I was reviewing your history and your thinking was this idea that people perform to the level that you inspect, not that you expect. I love that idea. Can you just explain that philosophy and the mechanism of how you put it into practice?” zarządzanie system operacyjny organizacji excpectations ocena i kontrola zadań rozwiązywanie problemów inspection

“The short answer is that if grown adults were supposed to do what we asked them to do, you wouldn't need that many leaders or managers. You would have theoretically one leader and a bunch of individual contributors, but the reality is that human nature doesn't operate that way and you need people who can challenge and push you. When people know that there's a high degree of inspection, there was a joke at Blade Logic was that Blade Logic was placed where there's a lot of sunshine because there's no place to hide because we constantly inspect what's going on.
When people know that their performance will be inspected, that there'll be constant review of what's going well and what's not going well, which is healthy. It's not mean that the person is bad, but sometimes they're running into an issue. Sometimes that issue is bigger than they can solve.
It elevates up and saying, hey, we've got to figure out a way to respond to this issue because this person has it, we're going to see this with other people. That just creates a very healthy dynamic and it also creates a bias to action. People who thrive[…]”
“And then it slowly moves up the organization. In a typical organization, I may hear, Dave, we have a little problem with Acme company, but we're all over it. And if I operate in that way, I say, okay, no big deal. kultura-firmy They're on top of it. And then a month or two later, we found out that Acme company churned. My philosophy is different, is that if I hear bad news, I immediately start digging in and invariably, because I know when I hear bad news, I know two things.
“Don't ignore bad news. In your house, if your dog poops on the floor, are you gonna step over and keep walking? You're gonna get your pooper scooper and come clean it up.
Similarly, like if you see bad news, you can't just ignore it. Your responsibility is to investigate and really get at the root issue. And invariably, you always find out when you ask someone, hey, after you fired someone, you say, oh my God, I found out so many more problems.

One, I'm the last to know. And two, it's far worse than what people tell me because the filtration process of sending bad news up the organization dulls all the sharp edges of that bad information. So a holy crap moment with a customer, with a rep is now, hey, there's a small issue with Acme company.” inspection

“Are you comfortable being unconventional? Can you delay gratification? Do you have long-term orientation? zasady, cechy sukcesu

Those are keys to being really successful, but it's so hard to do because it's so contrary to human nature. How do you find someone who can really do those things and what drives them to do those things? I've heard some amazing stories about people.
I asked them the question, what's the most difficult thing you've ever endured? I keep it generally open-ended. Some of the stories you hear about what they had to deal with in their upbringing, they came from a broken home or they came with very few resources. zatrudnianie ludzi - rekrutacja

They're so driven about making sure that their family and their children never have to go through what they have to go through, just tells you this person is intrinsically motivated. We should joke at BladeLogic, if someone has some character flaws, the parents can fix their character flaws growing up. There's no way we're going to be”

“My motivation is to prove to people that I'm good enough, to prove to people that I'm just as good as people who graduated from an elite college and may have had a more, quote unquote, normal family childhood. Looking back, I think it really served me well. Objectively, you've proven that. I'm curious then if it persists as a source of motivation or if that has morphed into something different.”

“Love Andy Grove. I think he was truly one of the several leaders of our industry. The best thing I've learned from Andy was that there's only two reasons why people fail. zasady, cechy sukcesu

One, they failed because they didn't have the skills to do the job.
Or two, they failed because they didn't have the will or the drive to do the job. And if you net it out, that's the two reasons.
And invariably, we find that if you ask people on a two by two matrix to plot people, invariably, let's say they have high will, but they don't have necessarily all the skills to do the job. But then say someone who has a skill to do the job suddenly is not performing anymore and why did their will change? Well, maybe they felt they should have been promoted and they did it and they get demoralized.”

People overcomplicate things and all that. So we call that the skill will matrix. Do they have the skill to do the job and do they have the will? overcomplication