It’s a simple Powerpoint deck — mostly black text on white slides, a few logos and photos scattered throughout — but Sheryl Sandberg said it “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.” Even leaving room for hyperbole, the Netflix culture deck, which first became public in 2009, has changed the way tech companies approach hiring and recruitment, especially in times of rapid scaling.
Lessons from the Netflix “Culture Deck”
- Hire and retain responsible adults that will do the right thing.
- Be honest about performance.
- Managers are responsible for team outcomes.
- Leaders own company culture.
- Talent professionals focus on innovation and strategy.
Created by CEO Reed Hastings and then-Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord, the deck has a few core tenets that have become common sense for tech organizations that want to expand their talented teams and establish cultures of innovation and excellence.
Nibble Health’s Co-Founder and CTO Phil Markunas is showing exactly how leaders can own company culture as he “leads from the front” and models how their teams operate at their best while providing clarity to leaders around possible pain points.
As Adam Leader grows his product team at Rho, a focus on team scope and effectiveness means using data and qualitative feedback to inform growth.
Meanwhile at Derivative Path, Director of Human Capital Pooja Amin is focused on the strategic planning that goes into team expansion. In addition to a sustainable hiring approach, regular feedback sessions and onboarding plans ensure clarity around performance.
All three of these companies are looking for the top-notch talent seeking roles in which they can excel and make great contributions to their teams.
Built In New York heard from Markunas, Amin and Leader about their plans for growth in 2023. With insight into the leadership, culture and the projects new hires can look forward to taking on, there is no better time to explore the opportunities on these expanding teams.
What do Nibble Health’s hiring plans look like in 2023?
Nibble Health is entering an exciting chapter of growth as we go live and bring our innovations to market. Right now, we’re singularly focused on providing a world-class experience to our first cohort of employers and employees. A huge part of that involves building infrastructure that supports our core payments technology.
For that reason, we’re hiring an operations lead to spearhead CX and support our enterprise partners, a founding sales hire to get our product in the right hands and full-stack engineers to join a fast-moving team building secure, scalable payments infrastructure. We also view our compliance program as a competitive advantage and will be adding dedicated folks to continue building processes that safeguard our users.
Take care of your people first, and the rest follows.”
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
My experience leading small combat teams in the Army taught me a lot, including a lesson I reference often: take care of your people first, and the rest follows. Taking care of people sometimes means providing cool perks, but often it means more. It means setting them up to have a real impact. Unfortunately, most companies don’t do this very well, and taking care of people is sabotaged by poor management and unclear roles and responsibilities.
We address that in a couple of different ways. The first is that we all lead from the front — anything we ask a member of the team to do, we do alongside them. It allows us to understand how things actually get done versus guessing and providing unclear guidance. We also don’t overhire — we hire for the here and now, with pain points that need solving today. This means new employees start with known targets, clear swim lanes and an experienced team to help them get there.
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
Both healthcare and finance are traditionally low, if not negative, net promoter score industries. Products in these areas are fundamentally difficult to understand, yet our lives depend on them. If we’re going to make a dent in U.S. healthcare, we must make healthcare financing easy to use. That’s our primary challenge.
I believe that digital products are like billboards on the highway that you buzz by at 90 mph. You won’t remember most of what you see, and what you do remember will be little more than headlines. To build meaningful products in this environment, I remind myself that complex ideas only survive in their simplest form. Nibble Health’s first tagline was a string of industry jargon which we boiled down to “Healthcare bills in small bites.” Turns out people generally like the second one more.
We’re designing an intuitive, welcoming healthcare payments platform with that same total focus on simplicity. Because easier is better. And also because simplicity just happens to be more beautiful.
What do Derivative Path’s hiring plans look like in 2023?
Derivative Path has always approached recruitment responsibly and strategically to ensure our growth plans are sustainable. We plan to expand our team by approximately 30 people in the upcoming year, with new hires spread across many business units.
Our people sit at the center of our business goals.”
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
As a company, we focus on ensuring that our people sit at the center of our business goals. We do this by providing all new hires with extensive onboarding and by encouraging managers to have 30- to 90-day plans in place to establish expectations and goals for new hires. We ask managers to schedule regular feedback sessions to ensure that each new hire can review how they are tracking toward these goals. These regular feedback sessions also help to increase engagement, employee and manager collaboration and clarity on outcomes. We host two monthly companywide sessions; an all-hands team meeting, where one or two business units give presentations on what their teams are working on; and an “ask us anything” session hosted by our technology leadership team.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
Further enhancing our company onboarding. At Derivative Path, onboarding starts when we have provided an offer to a candidate to join the firm. The window between offer, acceptance and the start date is a critical period for us to engage the new employee. Derivative Path already has a great onboarding process, but as we scale, we realize we need to provide an experience that is more structured and specific to each internal team as well as the company overall.
With this in mind, we are now launching a company pre-boarding and onboarding process for all incoming hires in the first quarter of 2023. This new pre-boarding step will occur during the weeks between offer acceptance and the start date. It will include short, five-minute or less introductory video presentations hosted by our team members on topics such as hedge accounting, trade status life cycle, our derivatives trading business and more. The new hires will focus much of their first week getting up to speed on our products and business, spend time connecting with various department leaders and own their onboarding along with their managers.
What do Rho’s hiring plans look like in 2023?
We passed the 200-employee mark this year and are actively recruiting several strategic roles that we feel will be critical to our growth. In 2023, the engineering, product and GTM functions will be our primary talent focus.
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
I’m focused on team scope and effectiveness. In order to remain confident we have the right operating procedures in place to support Rho’s next stage of rapid growth, I am asking some key questions: How well are the current team processes and culture working? Do they need evolutionary or revolutionary improvement?
For example, we’ve doubled our product development team bandwidth in the last few quarters. Team by team, product manager by product manager, engineer by engineer, we are assessing where process improvements can be made to facilitate maximum team impact. Is a new hire contributing fresh perspectives, techniques, or insights? Has the team outlived legacy team processes as our team size and client base have grown? We use qualitative feedback from peers and customers to help product managers evaluate existing processes, try new techniques from previous experience, and add new skills to support our customers.
The environment in which finance teams are operating presents an immense opportunity for our product team to solve real challenges.”
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
Our most interesting challenge in 2023 is to find new, high-value ways to help our customers make finance frictionless. There has never been more pressure on finance teams to operate more efficiently and make data-informed decisions. Next year, we will continue to focus on helping our customers achieve this. What improvements can we make to automate the time our customers spend on internal processes and tools so they can dedicate their attention to strategy and value-added activities? The environment in which finance teams are operating today and in 2023 presents an immense opportunity for our product team to solve real challenges.
