Email is an amazing tool. It is flexible enough for long or short content. A growing amount — somewhere over half — of emails are read on phones. Lots of products out there cater to power-email users these days — Superhuman and Hey to name a few. They promise better user experiences and a more efficient way to manage your inbox. But what they don’t do is help you write better — you are just magically supposed to do that.

The reality is that email can be a dangerous tool. It tricks you into thinking that your personality comes through to your reader. You may think you’re being sarcastic but your recipient thinks you’re a dick. The truth is the lack of tone doesn’t matter unless your a professional writer — or a Product Manager (PM).

Product Managers must communicate complex ideas into a concise and understandable format. Balancing tone with the medium of choice is another challenge that the PM must address, choosing between email, Slack, or these days Zoom. Thus the PM is not only responsible for the content but also the media type itself.

When the decision lands on “email” as the best method there are six key things to consider as you write your prose:

1) Do not give feedback over email. I was the CEO/Co-founder of Swoopt and reviewing the designs of an updated layout to the website. This was 2011 before Figma and other collaborative tools proliferated the internet. Instead of waiting for the in-person meeting that was scheduled, I sent an email with 27 bullet points of what I liked, didn’t like, and what needed to change. I was hoping to speed up the feedback process. But this backfired almost immediately. Upon receipt my designer called me and demanded to know why a book-long email was sitting in his inbox. He was frustrated and threatened to quit. Luckily I was remorse and got him to agree to not re-read the email until tomorrow when we met in person. I’m forever grateful that he gave me a second chance to give feedback the proper way — in person. We continued working together for several years before successfully selling the company at the end of 2014. Lesson learned.

2) Do not manage over email. I’ve experienced both making this mistake and being the recipient of this mistake. The outcome is always the same: a reader on the thread is offended by the directness and tone of being instructed to do something in written form. For those of you that have subscribed to the Radical Candor approach the reason for this is clear. While email is great at direct communication it is not great at conveying compassion. The best approach is to list out the bullet points of what needs to get done, then suggest a meeting to review them and make sure everyone is aligned. The human touch is needed to avoid coming off like an asshole in written form.

3) Be concise. Mark Twain once said “I apologize for such a long letter — I didn’t have time to write a short one.” He understood that the extra work to tighten up your argument was much appreciated by the reader. This is even more true for emails as the world transitions to mobile-phone based inboxes. Your reader’s takeaway is the average of all your sentences. Thus write fewer, but better sentences and raise your average.

4) Know your audience. On emails it’s as simple as looking at the TO and CC fields to understand who you are writing for. As a PM you are forced to take complex topics and distill them down to the most basic principles. Weigh defining concepts for your audience against assuming understanding. Always spell out acronyms first before using repeatedly. One framework to use is “T-BAR” which stands for Take-away Background Action Result.

Take-away: What is the one-line take-away of what you are about to tell your reader?

Background: Set the scene for what/when/why of your story. Also include what happened to trigger or prompt the email.

Action: Lay out what you did to address the situation from the Background.

Result: End with either the impact of what you did or a clear understanding of the upcoming next steps.

5) Rewrite your email. Once you bang out your initial thoughts take a break and come back to it. Re-read your email with fresh eyes. Make sure you have placed the most pertinent information — the Take-away — up front. The “TL;DR” is a great nemonic to thrust the take-away into the top of email without feeling intrusive.

6) Send the email to yourself. Sometimes emails can be scary to send. You worry about the reaction, if there are any typos, or if you forgot to attach the file. Send it to yourself instead and get the worry out of the way. The act of sending the email will trigger your brain to say “oops I forgot this”. Oh and don’t send an attachment. Add the file as a Dropbox or Google Drive link into the body of the email and never worry about forgetting to attach a file again.

There’s a lot you can use email for. As a Product Manager it’s your job to understand if email is the correct medium. When it is, invest in your content so that your readers can have the the take-away you want.

Before proceeding, let’s confirm what we mean by a bug. For purposes of this discussion, the Wikipedia definition works sufficiently:

A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. … Bugs can trigger errors that may have ripple effects

Based on this definition we are excluding from this discussion some reported bugs, which are in reality feature requests. Prioritizing feature requests has different consideration factors so is its own discussion.

There are four questions that a Product Manager must consider before beginning the prioritization process:

1) Is this bug from a feature/product that recently launched?

2) What is the impact on feature/product value that the bug has?

These 2 questions should be addressed before proceeding. If the bug is for a pre-existing feature that is not impacted dramatically by the issue, it’s not likely worth your time as a PM with answering the next set of questions. However, if the bug is from a recent feature release OR impacts value significantly, you should proceed to the next set of questions.

3) Can you reproduce the bug?

4) Is there data or analytics tracking to indicate how widespread the issue is?

If you can’t reproduce the bug you’ll likely have to stop, since it’s pretty impossible to fix things if the team can’t identify the root cause.

At Wonolo, we had a bug in the signup funnel of our worker app which caused the “skip” button on a “enter your referral code” page to sometimes not appear. This was a known issue for a while but the team couldn’t consistently reproduce it. It wasn’t until the team tried to reproduce another bug that we uncovered the issue: displaying the navigation bar which contained the skip button could get into a race condition with the sending of analytics events. Now we could reproduce the bug. The root cause was the navigation bar not rendering and the analytics pageview events not firing.

Once you’ve been able to reproduce the bug, you should move onto question #4. Sometimes you’ll have the data and sometimes you’ll actually infer the impact from the absence of data. Either way, if you’ve made it through question 4 you’ve now identified the first part of the equation: the value of fixing the bug.

The next step is to ask your engineering team for a cost estimate. Cost in this sense the engineering effort needed to fix the bug. There are a variety of ways your team can do this, but what matters most is that the team uses the same process to cost the bug as it would any other issue.

Finally, we should use the Value/Cost framework to determine our next action:

High Value; Low Cost → Once you establish that it’s low effort for high value, you should disrupt workflow and have the team fix immediately.

High Value; High Cost → The trick for this scenario is to understand the quickest way to alleviate the impact to value, even if that means rolling back an update. If the root cause wasn’t due to a recent update then you’re likely entering firefighting mode with the goal of reducing the impact on value enough that you can break off remaining work into a scheduled cadence.

Low Value; Low Cost → Details matter to users. In fact, that is what they interact with the most, so addressing “minor” issues that are low cost is work that should be batched and scheduled, as the end result will be a lot of happy end-users.

Low Value; High Cost → Create the tickets and put them in the backlog. They will likely be there for a while until you can identify synergies with other projects that increases the value of the fix, at which time you can prioritize.

Hopefully, this post has given you a simple rubric to assess and prioritize bugs. Answering the 4 questions and then applying the Value/Cost framework can help every product manager prioritize a bug.

As the number of potential engineers increases globally, the shift away from co-location as the standard working environment will steadily increase. As a Principal Product Manager at Eventbrite, I’ve worked with co-located teams, dual-located teams and multi-distributed teams. Below I have laid out the structure, tips and tricks that my dual-located team has used to create a working structure between our two offices in San Francisco, CA USA and Mendoza, Argentina.

Originally published May 8 2019 on the Eventbrite Engineering Blog

The team location types

To produce great software requires a great engineering team. It’s evident that talent and experience leads to high-quality work, but there is a third factor which can significantly impact the teams’ ability to deliver: location. Since teammates have to work with one another to produce the highest quality outcome, the location of each member of the team directly impacts the workflow.

There are four types of location for teams:

1. Co-located (all in the same place) [1]
2. Dual-located (2 locations) [2]
3. Multi-distributed (multiple locations and at least 1 has 2 or more teammates) [3]
4. Fully-distributed (each teammate is in a different location) [4]

Co-location is widely considered the best option since having everyone in the same place enables more frequent collaboration with less friction. Dual-location is next since each of the two sites can still have friction-less interactions, and remember that they still have to share their local conversations with the other side. Although not intuitive, people see Fully-distributed as slightly better than Multi-distributed. In practice, a Fully-distributed team will always know who is in a meeting or not, since 100% of the communication is online whereas on a Multi-distributed team side conversations can happen in one location, and the rest of the team can start to lose context and knowledge transfer.

Streamlining our team meetings

With a remote team, the cadence of scheduled meetings is critical to establishing effective communication. Have a look at our team’s core Scrum meetings which ensure we always convene at least once per day:

1. 1st Monday: Sprint planning (1 hour) [5]
2. 1st Tuesday — 1st Friday: Standup (15 min) [6]
3. 2nd Monday: Backlog Refinement (1 hour) [7]
4. 2nd Tuesday — 2nd Thursday: Standup (15 min) [8]
5. 2nd Friday: Demo (30 min) & Retro (1 hour) [9]

Sprint Planning process

Getting into the Sprint Planning meeting without preparation could be a disaster. It is an expensive meeting, so to make the most of the team’s time, try our process:

1. Scrum master creates a new sprint [10]

2. Scrum master reviews the current sprint with the team and makes sure the status of the tickets are accurate [11]

3. Scrum master ends current sprint and rolls non-finished items into the new sprint [12]

4. Scrum master talks with eng team and determines how many points are already committed to in the new sprint from the tickets that rolled over [13]

5. Scrum master reviews Holidays/Time off of the development team [14]

6. Scrum master multiplies each eng’s working days x 0.75 to determine capacity by engineer and for the team [15]

7. Product owner confirms that backlog is ordered by priority [16]

8. Product owner lays out sprint goal and any specific needs [17]

9. Development team now takes over and moves tickets into the sprint based on priority [18]

10. Engineering team makes sure each engineer has work in the current sprint [19]

11. Engineering team removes any tickets that are above capacity [20]

12. Scrum master clicks start sprint and team agrees to measurable goals for the sprint. For example: “enroll 5 clients into early access”, or “feature part x is working in QA” [21]

Standup process

We run seven standups each sprint. We aim to not disrupt the work of the team, but also find out where we are and synchronize. Take into account the following steps to make it worth it:

1. The scrum master runs standup [22]
2. Standup is not a status meeting [23]
3. The purpose of standup is to align the entire team and identify blockers that the team needs to resolve. It should be more about what is coming next than what has already happened (but both are necessary sometimes) [24]
4. If the team needs a more detailed conversation on a specific topic/issue, then the necessary parties should either stay after standup or set up a separate meeting [25]

Backlog Refinement process

The Backlog Refinement meeting has become the best meeting to introduce new initiatives and refine tasks of existing ones. If done correctly, this meeting will result in pointed tasks that are ready for Sprint Planning –enabling your team to have more detailed discussions about what should be in or not in the sprint. Have a look at how we handle this meeting:

1. The purpose of Backlog Refinement is to introduce new concepts and break down work into pointable tasks [26]
2. It is essential that all team members are part of the meeting so that everyone knows what is coming and if an expert is needed they can assist (e.g., there is a discussion between Design and Frontend it’s crucial that Backend is present in case they are needed to offer potential alternative approaches to meet design needs) [27]
3. Given that, there is a spectrum of granularity of what the team could break down, types include: [28]

A) Estimating any tasks in the current sprint that the team has not pointed (violation of team agreement) (lead by Engineering)

B) Pointing tasks starting at the top of the backlog and going down. If a task can’t be estimated and a spike is needed, then create spike and point the spike (lead by Engineering)

C) Reviewing updated designs based on user testing results and updating any tasks and estimations that the team have already created (lead by Design & Engineering)

D) Evaluating new designs and looking at current user stories to create the initial Frontend and/or Backend tasks (pointing is optional but not likely) (lead by Design & Engineering)

E) Introducing new Initiatives and reviewing Produce Requirement Documents (PRDs) with the entire team that generally kicks off user research (lead by Product)

F) Discussing potential initiatives that the team might see PRDs for (lead by Product

4. After each task or story is created or updated, the Engineering team (lead by QA) should update the JIRA issue with the agreed upon Acceptance Criteria [29]

5. The Scum master should work with Product before the meeting to understand which types (a — f) should be included in the meeting and agree on the order ( a → f ? or f→ a? ) of the agenda [30]

6. During the actual meeting, if a single discussion point is taking too long, the scrum master should ask the group if it makes sense to have a separate conversation or if they would like to finalize the discussion right there. It is up to the people in the conversation to decide [31]

7. Refinement is never done, so it is vital to be efficient with the time and also start and end the meeting on time [32]

Demo process

The Demo is a crucial meeting to keep your team members accountable and get direct feedback from stakeholders. This process makes it easy to record and distribute for your remote colleagues:

1. The scrum master should discuss with the development team what they can present [33]
2. The scrum master should email the attendees of demo in the morning with the list of items the team will present [34]
3. When the demo starts, the scrum master should record the demo with sound [35]
4. The scrum master should say at the beginning of the demo what the priorities for the sprint were [36]
5. Product owner should say why these items were the priority and speak on any challenges outside of Engineering that occurred [37]
6. The engineering team should present their work so that they can get feedback from demo participants directly [38]
7. At the end of the demo, Product should let attendees know what the current thinking for priority for the next sprint is [39]
8. After the demo, the scrum master should share a link to the video recording to everyone on the calendar invite so that those participants who couldn’t make it can watch [40]
9. The scrum master may decide to include the video link in the overall sprint report as well, which is sent on the upcoming Monday [41]

Retro process

It is essential to look back at the end of the sprint and discuss what went right, what didn’t and how the team can improve. Try our plan to make your team better constantly:

1. The scrum master is in charge of facilitating the meeting. Based on the most significant events of the sprint, the team must decide which technique to use [42]
2. The scrum master should meet the day before retro with the engineering manager to confirm the techniques to use [43]
3. It is optional to make an icebreaker to disperse the members [44]
4. Review the aspects identified in the previous section and its compliance [45]
5. The scrum master explains the selected retrospective technique and the participants have 5 to 10 minutes to write their notes [46]
6. The notes are analyzed and grouped by categories [47]
7. We proceed to vote those we want to discuss in detail [48]
8. Each voted topic is analyzed and discussed. The team extracts action items for the future and assigns an owner [49]
9. The retrospective is closed [50]

JIRA tricks

JIRA is one of the most common workflow tools for engineering teams. It is a powerful tool but can also be cumbersome since it has many features. Have a look at the JIRA tricks the team uses to streamline our process and produce quality software at scale:

1. JIRA stories should follow the format “As a user, I can do X.” The product owner should write the stories [51]
2. JIRA stories should be pointed 0 and assigned to the product owner. The team brings the story into the sprint at the same time as the first task of the story. The story should be marked as done once the last task for a story is done. This allows for easy analysis of how long a story took since Sprint names are appended to tickets as they move from one sprint to the next. [52]
3. The team tried sub-tasks and found them problematic visually and from a velocity reporting standpoint. As such, the team simply creates JIRA tasks for each story and references the parent JIRA story issue. [53]
4. JIRA tasks should start with either FRONTEND or BACKEND as the team has several filters set up in JIRA that are powered by this text. Engineers are encouraged to assign themselves tasks that they feel they can complete, regardless of this label and their specialty. [54]
5. Engineers should write the JIRA tasks [55]
6. JIRA design issues should be created and assigned to Design to give transparency to the team about what Design is working on. This should not be granular workflow but rather high-level issues like “Explore EPIC NAME.” The product owner should manage the design issue. [56]
7. JIRA tasks should be assigned by engineers to themselves and then moved through the swim lanes. A task in RESOLVED means that the code has landed on QA and is ready to be verified. The Engineer who performed the task should include “Steps to Reproduce” in the ticket and assign a “QA owner” [57]
8. The “QA owner” of a task either moves it to DONE or leaves feedback. If feedback is minor, it is okay to leave the task in RESOLVED. However, if it is more extensive or will take more time, the task should be moved back to TO DO [58]

One-on-Ones (1:1)

It’s important to remember that with remote teams, there is no opportunity for catching up on one’s lives throughout the day. As such it’s critical that the first part of recurring 1:1s between the remote team members start with general life-catch up items as simple as “how was your weekend?” or “what are you doing Friday night?”. Reinforcing the human connection between team members lays the groundwork to have more direct and critical discussions about actual work.

1:1s should repeatedly happen to ensure that there is dedicated time set aside to catch up with each team member, including:

1. Weekly 1:1s with the engineering tech lead [59]
2. Every-Other-Week 1:1s with engineering team members [60]
3. Every-Other-Week 1:1s with QA [61]
4. Every-Other-Week 1:1s with the scrum master [62]
5. Every-Other-Week 1:1s with the engineering manager [63]

Wrapping Up

Working with remote teams is hard. In this post, we have seen tips to streamline the main scrum meetings, including sprint planning, standup, backlog refinement, demo, and retrospective. We also discussed some tips to work with JIRA, and reviewed best practices when running your remote one-on-ones.

Do you work on a remote team? Is it Dual-located, Multi-distributed or Fully-distributed? Please write into the comments any additional tricks and or structures you’ve adopted to make your workflow process more smooth –and please share with your colleagues if you find any of this helpful. And if you’re interested in more from me, check out my previous blog post How to Make Your Next Event App Remarkable with these 4 Mobile Navigation Gestures.

Originally posted on the Eventbrite Engineering blog 10/23/18

Raquel was mindlessly browsing Instagram on her Pixel 3. Her thumb repeating the same gesture over and over again — until she found an image that intrigued her and then tapped the hashtag #octoberfest in the comments. Three polka videos and 15 images of lederhosen later she typed in “octoberfest in sf” and found a pic of her friend drinking out of a 2-liter glass boot.

Does Raquel’s Instagram browsing experience remind you of how you navigate your favorite app? There’s a reason for that. As Principal Product Manager for Eventbrite’s mobile app my team and I mapped out the primary navigation gestures used to discover events on mobile, and created a remarkable event app. Read on to learn how we did it.

It all starts with data

At Eventbrite, we have two sides to our marketplace-based business: the business (organizer) side and the consumer (attendee) side. With 3 million events published in 2017, there is a huge user experience problem with trying to show an increasing amount of events onto your mobile screen — all at the same time. So my team and set out to improve the event discovery experience, which started with our home screen — a simple feed of upcoming events.

Our initial approach to the feed was to create a list of horizontal category buckets of events but limit that list to the number of categories, creating a “bottom” to the list view. However, with the task being to improve event discovery my team asked, “why limit consumer’s vertical experience subjectively?” So we ran an A/B test of the initial horizontal bucket feed against a (now) more traditional vertical feed with infinite scroll –so the user would never hit the “bottom.” To maintain as much of a control as possible, we kept the backend response to the client the same so that we would be able to understand the impact to engagement and retention in our analytics tracking throughout the month-long test.

The analysis showed a clear winner:

Event Clicks saw an increase of 3+% for the test group (B) compared to the control (A), as well as a 3% lift in users selecting/tapping “Get Tickets”. This lift was mainly due to the exposure of the “See More Events Like This” suggested search jump off. The “See More” search saw an increase of 57% during the test, suggesting that prompting the user to search after exposing them to different topics may help users further consider events under suggested topics.

As the team paired this A/B test with qualitative user research a funny thing happened — we mapped out the event discovery funnel and the key gestures and influences that interact to make consumers attend an event.

Attendance Probability

One reason we were so intrigued with understanding how users used different navigation gestures in the funnel was due to our internal research that referred to the event discovery experience as “a serendipitous moment.” This was understandable as the focus of that research was to identify the decision-making process of attending an event once it has moved into the consideration state, but my team and I found the analysis extremely vague in regards to the discovery rituals.

With a need to understand how people physically wanted to explore events the team first needed to understand the consideration process for attending the event. Luckily I was able to pair our search patterns with the output of the qualitative research to create three core influences that impact event purchase consideration:

• Availability (time & location of the event)
• Inventory (the main act or headliner, the type of event)
• Attributes (friend’s availability, the venue, dress code, weather on event day, transportation logistics, price, etc.)

Understanding these three core influences is necessary to power the backend response and put the app in a position to show a high-possible conversion event. While seemingly straightforward, the three influences are relational to each other in that if one of the influences is problematic (in regards to attendance), then the others can overcome the adverse effect of it. To illustrate the above let’s run through some examples:

Example #1: Friday night show at The Independent (San Francisco music venue)

Let’s assume that we are showing recommendations at noon on Friday, and there is an event that evening which starts at 9 pm. If I work or live near The Independent, it’s a lot easier to attend the event vs. if I worked on the edge of the city and commuted to San Jose. Still, even if I’m physically close to the location, I’m not set on attending until I validate who is performing (inventory) and then which of my friends can go (attributes).

Example #2: Burningman

Let’s assume I’m living in Europe, but it’s October (i.e., the next Burningman is 10 months in the future). Although the event is physically far-away, the fact that it’s also far-out in time is helpful (complementing location). The event itself is the draw (inventory), but the level of commitment needed to travel to Burningman means that I need lots of good friends going to make it happen (attributes).

While it’s apparent how each influence impacts the other two, what’s more interesting is that the combination of the influences for each event produces a different outcome in regards to a person’s probability to attend it.

As the team’s understanding of attendance probability became grounded in our qualitative research results, we began to re-look at the initial data from the A/B test. With an experienced perspective what the team and I now found more interesting was the consumer’s transition from swiping in the vertical browse experience to tapping in the suggested search experience, rather than the actual metrics themselves. We wondered if the transition between the two mobile gestures (swiping and tapping) was fluid (back-and-forth) or if it was funnel-based (goes one-way) and if these gestures correlate with intent to attend an event.

Just Gestures?

When we talk about navigating or exploring on an app, what we’re doing is using our fingers to steer the app to the response we want. Qualitative assessments showed that the Home Feed (with its vertical-infinite scroll) was highly used with a swiping gesture. As users would find events or canned searches that interested them, they would move to a tapping gesture to dive deeper. Moreover, once a user wanted to find a specific event they would leverage the keyword input for search and begin typing. Interacting with push notifications complemented this discovery experience. Top-level user interactions with push notifications also complemented this discovery experience.

Mapping these interactions to the level of involvement from the user results in a clear arc of effort to interaction:

• Notifying: the user receives a push notification and is notified of an upcoming event. This is the least amount of effort a user can provide since it is virtually none and corresponds with zero intent.
• Swiping: the user has opened the app and is browsing through the feed with one finger. This browse experience is a simple repetitive action that the user can do even if they are bored and looking for something to do (an everyday use case) and corresponds with a low level of intent.
• Tapping: the user’s consideration has been triggered and is now partaking in a tapping action. It could be from a `see more events like this` link or a suggestion in another screen — but the suggestion is congruent enough with their consideration set that it results in the user tapping it, displaying a medium level of intent.
• Typing: the user either knows what he/she wants or has a perfect sense of trying to steer the app towards their consideration criteria. They take out their second hand and enable the keyboard with the maximum amount of physical effort that can with the highest level of intent.

These four gestures map back to the physical patterns expressed during the serendipitous event discovery moments — without all four any product is missing a fundamental discovery use case needed to be successful.

What does this mean for me?

If you’re a Product Manager or UX-specialist, it’s easy to take on a project and carve out an MVP that doesn’t include all of the elements laid out in this post since your users can do the core task. However, once you look to improve upon that initial output make sure to design the navigation elements of your user experience to correspond to the intent of the user — then pair with qualitative research to understand the variables in decision making for users and how they compliment each other.

What’s next?

We’re trying to push the limit of how can we apply the four navigation gestures (notifying, swiping, tapping and typing) into the mobile experiences at Eventbrite. If you have our iOS or Android apps, don’t be surprised if you get enrolled in an A/B test and are exposed to unique ways to explore more events! Also, if you don’t have our app now’s a great time to check it out: Android or iOS available.

So what do you think? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments below and make sure to pass this article along to any Product Managers or UX-specialists you know. Also feel free to read about my previous effort to create the best ticket scanning experience for our fans.

How to Make Your Next Event App Remarkable with these 4 Mobile Navigation Gestures was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Patrick Purcell-Jones has spent the last 10-years building his sales acumen. He has experience selling for media companies like Meltwater News as well as sports marketing companies like Learfield Sports and IMG. I caught up with Patrick via email this past week to learn more about his experience disrupting consumer communication platforms and his thoughts on where technology is taking the tools we use to converse.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2018/04/17/IMG-National-Sales-Director-explains-how-his-Tenacity-made-him-Fearless

MH: IMG is a powerhouse in the sports marketing world — What is your role there and how are you impacting the business at a high level? Why did you choose to do this at IMG?

PPJ: I’m the national sales director for IMG, and I work with brands interested in entering the college landscape at scale. Unsure how much you know about IMG College — but we have the exclusive marketing, digital and licensing rights to over 80 college I universities nationwide. I’m impacting brands by aligning them with a target demo and they are using school IP to forge that deep association that drives consideration and conversion.

Of your past professional experiences, which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?

Working at Cintas — received World Class training and have a strong understanding on how to generate interest on a cold call and close deals.

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

Losing my mom and 11 really hit me hard. Learned quickly that tomorrow is not promised and you need to make each day count. Think her death created in me a tenacity for life and when adversity hits — I blow that shit down.

What is your team currently using for your CRM platform? One of the main options like Salesforce? Or a custom solution? What have you found good & bad about IMG’s solution?

We use Winmo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and KORE. They are all fine. Winmo and Linkedin is what I mostly utilize.

How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?

Not really sure so I’d rather not say.

What do you wish you had learned when you were younger that you didn’t, and had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?

Simply be fearless and don’t let society or anyone else tell you can’t do something and take on all challenges especially the ones that are to big for you to handle. Think most of us don’t really know he depth of our spirits.

Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for you personally or your next company idea, or it could be your thoughts on what you think is your secret to continued to success!

Thank you — Matthew.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey from Cintas to IMG! To our readers, if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

IMG National Sales Director Patrick Purcell-Jones explains how his Tenacity made him Fearless was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Biz Stone co-founded Twitter, Medium and then Jelly in his quest to develop large scale systems that facilitate the open exchange of information. Biz has been honoured with the International Center for Journalism Innovation Award, INC Magazine named him Entrepreneur of the Decade, TIME listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and GQ named him Nerd of the Year. I caught up with Biz via email this past week to learn more about his experience disrupting consumer communication platforms and his thoughts on where technology is taking the tools we use to converse.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2018/03/27/Twitter-Co-founder-Biz-Stone-shares-how-he-Secretly-Delivers-the-Truth

MH: You’ve helped build Twitter, Medium and now Jelly. It seems your expertise is in digital communication. What sent you on to this journey to disrupt how people communicate and interact online? What part of it is interesting to you?

Biz: I started out wanting to be an artist. In fact, I got a full ride to UMass for “Excellence in the Arts.” It’s a long and funny story but the short version is that about one year into UMass, I was offered a job designing book covers at Little Brown, and Co. in Boston. The other designers all had MFA’s so I figured taking the job would be like fast-forwarding my life — plus I would be working directly with the Art Director which I considered to be learning through apprenticeship.

I did well as a graphic designer and won some awards. When Little, Brown and Co. decided to move to NYC, I opted to stay in Boston and start my own studio. When I was offered $5k to design and build a website in the late nineties, I said yes even though I had no clue how to code even simple HTML. So, I got a book and muddled my way through which lead to more web design gigs.

When my best friend graduated from Dartmouth College, went into consulting, and hated it, he suggested we start a web company since I was now designing and building sites. So we created and launched Xanga.com in 1999–2000. This made me into an accidental technologist. I was still very much interested in design, illustration, and writing. All of which came in handy developing the social blogging community that was Xanga.

I fell in love with giving others the power to express themselves online without having to learn HTML. I was extremely excited about this idea that I could play a part in the democratization of information.

The most interesting part of all of this journey has been the never ending amazement at how people use these tools in such creative and innovative ways. I’ve long been saying that people are inherently good and if you give them the right tools, they will prove it every day. I still believe, for the most part, that this is true.

What’s a hard lesson you learned early on in your career that helped you navigate tough decisions later on? Did a decision that had a good outcome at Twitter not have the same outcome at, say Medium? Why?

I learned early that the absence of transparency and communication breeds a kind of fear. Not fear in the traditional sense, but fear in the world of business. In other words, a company and board that doesn’t hear from it’s CEO fears the worst. So communication is everything. Even if the communication is, “We’re doing very badly right now but we’re working on it.”

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

I was born poor with a mother and three sisters. I started working at the age of eight to contribute to the family. However, my mother had been adopted by people who left her their home in the affluent town of Wellesley, MA when they passed. So, despite being poor, I had the advantage of going to a very good public school system. And I had to develop a good sense of humor about things like why I wore the same shirt every day, or why my lunch tickets were colored differently than those who paid. Humor has helped me immensely in my career. I’m fond of saying that humor is a secret delivery mechanism for truth.

You’ve re-written the rule book for how consumers interact with one another with software — have you ever considered attacking this problem in the B2B space? Do you see any opportunity to disrupt business communication as well?

Sure, I’ve thought about it. I invested in a company called Intercom which was initially built on the idea of providing businesses a simple way to communicate with their customers. I thought it was brilliant given my early learnings about the power of communication. At Jelly, we talked frequently about building “Jelly@Work” which would have been the same app but designed only for folks whose email ended in @apple.com, for example. We thought it would be great because no question would ever need to be answered twice. I’m convinced the future of work is all about decentralization and there is a lot of room for innovation to make a disperse team feel like one tight team.

You’ve mentioned in the past you believe artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize how we interact with computers. Will this change be bigger shift than mobile’s impact on society?

Absolutely. Machines learning from humans, machines building machines, our ability to speak to machines and have them understand us and for them to speak to us and have us understand them is incredible. In the best case scenario, this impact is far bigger than that of mobile and we enter a new age of enlightenment. However, there is a very real potential of a darker version of the future when it comes to AI.

When you break down AI into it’s buckets of Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision (CV), which do you think will be the biggest driver of disruption? Do achievements in only one matter without complementary advancements in another?

When it comes to AI, I don’t think achievements in specific verticals like ML, NLP, or CV make a difference. There is overlap between all of them. At a high level we’re talking about maths and algorithms that can recognize patterns and learn from each other at an incredible speed — human length generations in minutes. And these AI, are beginning to learn at a level that our best and brightest minds don’t even understand.

Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for you personally or your next company idea, or it could be your thoughts on what you think is your secret to continued to success!

My secret to success has been to find good people that are also great people and then stick with those people. I never chased money, or power, or a particular institution. I found amazing people and stuck with them through thick and thin. It just happens that one side effect was financial success beyond my wildest dreams. But I’ve learned so much and continue to learn but sticking with good people.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey from Wellesley to Jelly! To our readers, if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone shares how he Secretly Delivers the Truth was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bruce Greenberg ran Carter/MacKay, a national search firm specializing in sales and scientific positions for firms such as General Electric Medical Systems and Johnson & Johnson. Following 30 years of success, Bruce retired from operating the business and now focuses his time on his investment portfolio which includes angel funding of startups and small businesses. I caught up with Bruce via email this past week to learn more about his operating experience in the recruiting industry and his investing interests.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2018/03/20/Bruce-Greenberg-discusses-the-Path-to-Placement-for-Recruiters-and-Investors-alike

MH: You had an extensive career as a business operator and now an angel investor. Prior to your retirement, why did you get into the recruitment business? What did you find challenging about the business and why did you eventually sell it?

BG: My brother in law left a career as a CPA to become a headhunter and discussed the ins and outs of the business with me. It made sense and sounded like a career move that would fit my background and put a smile on my face for a long time.

Recruiting is an industry with a lot of moving parts; on both the candidate and client side. Then there is the body chemistry component when both parties are introduced and interact. So, needless to say, the path to a placement is complex and potential issues need to be thought out in advance in order to address any problems that could crop up during the courtship and prevent an offer being made or accepted. There is never a dull day in the working life of a successful headhunter.

I sold the business when the managerial aspect became more time consuming, less satisfying and the day to day client activity stopped being fun. I also saw that the future of the search industry was headed towards less expensive and time consuming alternatives. All in all, it was a good run for 30+ years.

How did your experiences operating your business impact your decision to become an angel investor?

Having learned how to run a business through on the job training and by trial and error, I thought I could offer an expertise and funding to early stage startups with interesting and unique concepts. Kind of a what to do and not to do based on my past successes and mistakes. There are some basic business tenets that are useful in any industry.

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

When I was looking for my first job in medical sales a year out of college I met with overwhelming resistance based on my age and lack of related experience. I looked in the mirror and then at my resume and came to the realization that I was going to have to man up and overcome these objections. By thoroughly researching the companies I was interviewing with and turning up my drive and ambition, I was better able to convince potential employers that I could meet and exceed their expectations.

The rejection I faced early on served to strengthen my resolve and help me realize that if I could turn no into yes and sell myself into a job, then I could most certainly be a successful sales person.

You’ve worn many hats in the past as a business owner and as an investor — what have you found good and bad about each?

Being a business owner has many upsides if you’re a visionary because you don’t need approval to implement new concepts. However, it is a true dual edged sword in that you can only blame yourself if you screw up. And if you screw up royally, you can bankrupt a business and put a lot of people on unemployment insurance. Because of this, I always sought out input from my partners, trusted colleagues and friends to help me with mission critical business decisions.

As an investor, I surrender the ability to make unilateral decisions in favor of offering suggestions which may or may not get implemented. This is fine as most of the folks I’m working with are very bright and have much more knowledge of their offerings than me. However, it can be frustrating at times when my advice falls on deaf ears.

How has software changed and impacted your professions since you started your career? Is there another shift in how software will impact your work that you see coming?

Automation was nonexistent when I first started out in the recruiting industry. Everything was based on phone calls and a paper trail. Through the years site licensed software then SAAS became more and more prevalent. The technology kept improving and the programs became much more user friendly. Software is a great organizational and administrative tool for the busy recruiter, but human involvement is definitely required. The big limitation with recruiting software is that a sizable percentage of hiring decisions are made based on body chemistry between company and candidate that is difficult, if not impossible, for a software program to assess. AI, while extremely helpful in the screening process, cannot determine if a candidate will be a cultural fit within a company. At least not yet.

I think the future of the recruiting industry might lie in a web based version of itself where companies and candidates sign up and get matched based on a list of mutual qualifications. Enjoy the benefits of working with a headhunter, but do it online and save time and money. In order to maintain its relevance, the recruiting industry has to embrace the internet and launch itself into the 21st century.

What do you wish you had learned when you were younger that you didn’t, and had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?

Never think that you know it all because you don’t. Humility is a great personality trait to embrace and ego a somewhat negative trait to minimize.

Embrace change. It is not only good for the soul, but a great way to keep your brain functioning at its highest level. Never sit still in a boring job out of convenience because you will regret not reaching for a position that would have maximized your true potential.

If you have an entrepreneurial desire, follow your dream and make it happen. But always look before you leap and make sure you have the support of your family and friends. Also, make sure that you have thought out the financial requirements needed to chase the dream.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey from operator to investor! If you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

Bruce Greenberg discusses the Path to Placement for Recruiters and Investors alike was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jim Sinai is currently VP Product Marketing for the Salesforce Einstein product, which helps all Salesforce companies get smarter about their sales efforts. Jim has risen the ranks of Salesforce after years in Business Development and Sales at Bloomberg, Eventbrite and TurnHere. He is responsible for the full marketing stack of Salesforce’s AI products: brand narrative, product marketing, and demand generation. I caught up with Jim via email this past week to learn more about his experience rising the ranks of Salesforce and developing one of the leading AI technologies in the sales industry.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2018/02/08/Salesforce-VP-Jim-Sinai-shares-how-Einstein-makes-Companies-Smart

MH: Most folks know about Salesforce but perhaps you could give a brief overview of the company and what you’re trying to achieve? What is your role and how are you impacting the business at a high level? Why did you choose to do this?

JS: Salesforce is all about helping companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. We deliver best in class software for sales reps, service agents, marketers, and retailers. And we have this awesome platform that lets anyone, regardless of tech skills, build apps. I run the product marketing team for Salesforce Einstein which is the AI capabilities that sit throughout our products.

You’ve been at Salesforce for about 7 years now. Did any of your pre-Salesforce experiences help you prepare for life at Salesforce? Which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?

Prior to Salesforce, I was an account executive at Bloomberg and spent some time in startups. Selling at a large company taught me the importance of process and collaboration, while being at a startup taught me invaluable skills around how to self-start those projects and processes.

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

Prior to being at Salesforce, I was running business development at a startup. One day the founder called me in and told me my role was being eliminated. Looking back, it was probably the best decision not only for the company, but also for me. What I learned in that moment is resiliency. It also motivated me to never rest on my laurels. I jointed Salesforce after that, so needless to say, letting me go was the best gift that CEO could’ve given me.

What features of the Salesforce product does the Einstein team use the most? How has the release of the Einstein product impacted your own team’s workflow?

We use Einstein to improve how salespeople, marketers, service agents and retailers get their jobs done. Our sales reps use Einstein to score all inbound leads and help identify where to focus their efforts, and our marketers are using Einstein to help target the right offers to the right audiences. We are also using Einstein to predict our sales forecast based on past sales data.

How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?

The whole sales process is changing. Buyers are self-servicing more information on their own and through their communities before engaging a company. And more buyers insist on a trial period with a software before they purchase. That means that, first and foremost, sales and marketing need to ensure existing customers are happy and advocating for your product. Then you can be sure the right information is out in the ecosystem. And finally, it’s more important than ever that sales reps spend more time listening and consulting rather than selling. As AI becomes a bigger part of the sales cycle and reduces buyer friction, the softer skills of selling will become even more paramount than before.

What do you wish you had learned before you were 30 that you didn’t, and had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about getting into a career in sales, marketing or business development?

Two things: I wish I learned to actually code (and not just hack around) and I wish I spoke more languages. Working at a global tech company, both of those skills would serve me better in my career.

Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for your Salesforce Einstein team or you personally, or it could be your thoughts about how college/grad school or your first job impacted your journey to success!

We’re really excited about what’s coming with Einstein in 2018 as more of our capabilities come online for customers — especially our tools that make AI available to any business analyst. Personally, I’m also very excited to see where voice is headed. It’s changing how we interact with technology and it will be fun to watch our industry evolve. And of course, I’m excited to have Follow-up as part of our Salesforce ecosystem!

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey up the ranks of Salesforce! If our readers are interested in getting smarter with their sales check out Salesforce Einstein. And if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

Salesforce VP Jim Sinai shares how Einstein makes Companies Smart was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Conor Lee is currently CEO & Co-Founder for Hiplead, helping companies scale their outbound marketing and sales efforts. Conor is a serial entrepreneur and Hiplead is the third company he founded after ResidentC and TellFi. He is responsible for all aspects of the company’s health and credits his unique education of Y Combinator as the basis for his success. I caught up with Conor via email this past week to learn more about his experience growing Hiplead into a juggernaut in the sales automation space.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2017/12/13/Hiplead-CEO-Conor-Lee-automates-sales-for-B2B-juggernauts

MH: What’s the “elevator pitch” for your company? What is your role and how are you impacting the business at a high level? Why did you choose to do this?

CL: At Hiplead, we help companies scale their outbound sales, with high-quality lead generation and sales operations automation. We’ve helped more than 200+ leading companies (including Lyft, Udemy and Import.io) setup their outbound sales process and make it into a profitable channel.

I’m HipLead’s CEO and Co-Founder. We run a lean business, with 4 full-time staff in our office in SF and a few more around the world. As you can imagine, I wear a lot of hats. I’m closely involved with all aspects of the business, including product, sales, marketing, success and hiring. Most of my time is spent on product strategy, marketing and sales.

I started Hiplead as a soloprenour in 2013, and have been lucky enough to be able to hire and build a great team and bring on a great co-founder. I feel like the entrepreneur life choose me — I’ve never had a “regular” job, I started out working in political campaigns and moved into tech later. At this point, I’ve started three companies over the last 9 years — I’m not sure if I can do anything else!

Of your past professional experiences, which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?

My experience is a bit different than most tech founders. I started out working in politics for former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, then took a job for a small political consultancy when I ran campaigns across California and the West Coast (and dabbled in lobbying), then I made my move into technology.

As a political consultant, I learned two really important things that have stuck with me as a tech founder. One, that the message and how you frame it matters considerably. If you want people to follow you into a early-stage company, or you want an early client to sign with you when your product is new, you have to correctly position what you’re doing and control the message. As part of that, you have to be able to stand in the shoes of your different audiences and see things from their perspective.

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

Sure, my second startup (TellFi, backed by Y Combinator) failed pretty miserably because my former co-founder and I were not honest with each other about our respective goals. We both said we wanted the same thing because it felt like the right thing to say, but in the end, we both wanted very different things.

From that, I learned that you need to lay out very defined internal goals first, and be honest with yourself about those goals. When things don’t go according to the plan, you have something to look back to.

Setting clear goals and being very honest with myself has helped tremendously in the path to becoming a better manager. It’s much easier to make hard decisions when you have an internal backstop.

What is your team currently using for your sales stack? A major CRM platform? anything else? What have you found good & bad about each?

We use Salesforce for our CRM, Outreach.io for sales automation, Cirrus Insights for syncing Google Apps with Salesforce, and HipLead (of course) for lead generation. We also run ads on LinkedIn.

As many people can tell you, Salesforce setup can be daunting, but once you get your reports up and running it’s pretty valuable.

We’re big fans of Outreach at HipLead, and we use it to manage campaigns for our clients and for ourselves internally. It’s great if you have Salesforce, but less useful if you’re on another CRM.

How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?

I believe that the growth and popularity of the Sales Development Rep (SDR) role has had a pretty large impact on B2B sales. The idea started with Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue, and since then, a number of sales automation tools have launched, automating things related to or being done by SDRs.

The next big thing to hit mainstream sales teams will be Account-Based Sales (ABS) & Marketing automation. It’s difficult for one or multiple sales reps to coordinate their interactions with companies who have multiple personas — so it’s ripe for innovation. The benefit of the ABS approach is that it works!

What do you wish you had learned in your first endeavor that you had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?

I’d tell a younger self and younger founders to focus on problems that people are willing to pay for at that moment. Once you have found something that people are willing to pay for then focus on automating the solution.

Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for your company or you personally, or it could be your thoughts about how college/grad school or your first job impacted your journey to success!

If you’re interested in running outbound email campaigns, or getting high-quality leads, please reach my team at info@hiplead.com or sign up at Hiplead.com. Mention this blog post and we’ll give you 20% off all of our plans.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your serial entrepreneur journey from political pundit to three-time founder at a rising B2B juggernaut! If our readers are interested in automating their sales funnel check out Hiplead. And if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

Hiplead CEO Conor Lee automates sales for B2B juggernauts was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Follow-Up Blog highlights industry trends, insights and keys to success from today’s top sales leaders and executives. Today we caught up with Scott Shouse, Salesforce Admin at Eventbrite, which powers ticketing and registration for more than two million live event experiences each year, making it the world’s largest online selection of events.

Scott Shouse is currently the Salesforce Administrator for Eventbrite working on setting up the Salesforce integration for the world’s largest provider of online events. He is charged with gathering requirements, business process mapping, and implementing the designed Salesforce integrations. Scott has a unique background with an MPA in Drama from Oklahoma City University and a BA in Music & Theatre from College of the Ozarks. I caught up with Scott via email this past week to learn more about his experience using mapping business processes into Salesforce.

Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: https://www.follow-up.io/single-post/2017/12/05/Salesforce-Admin-Scott-Shouse-helps-develop-business-processes-for-the-largest-event-provider-in-the-world

MH: What is your role at Eventbrite and how are you impacting the business at a high level? Why did you choose to do this?

SS: My title at Eventbrite is Salesforce Administrator. My primary focus is to manage the migration of the Ticketfly Salesforce instance to the Eventbrite Salesforce instance as well as providing senior level advisement on new feature/package creation/installation.

Of your past professional experiences, which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?

My prior job at Zenefits probably set me up for the best success. There I learned how a large team needs to be set-up to function and work correctly. What the organization structure needs to look like, what things you need to consider when building on the Salesforce platform and what processes you need in place to handle a multi-admin/developer organization.

Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?

Zenefits again is a great example. Often we would get requests from people that had no idea what they were asking for and why we had to say no. Dealing with those rejections became a sticky point with some departments and it really set up me on how to phrase and deal with difficult internal customers.

What Salesforce add-ons is Eventbrite currently using? What have you found good & bad about each? What other add-ons are you thinking about integrating?

We have a LOT of Salesforce add-ons. Too many to review in one sitting. I would say the biggest learning is to really investigate any 3rd party integration and do your due diligence, regardless if the integration is a fully-fledged installed package or just an oauth-level integration. You really need to understand the burden the add-on will put on the system, what objects they touch, and how this affects your overall architecture. Some departments add new programs willy nilly without asking the Salesforce team and these add-ons occasionally have to be removed because they are consuming too many API calls, or they are causing a burden on a particular object. The most important thing is to research and ask questions — and check it all out before installing on the live production org.

How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?

I would say that the most notable change is the migration of applications from being on-premises to the cloud, as well as opening up the app eco-system to allow robust 3rd party integrations. I think broad tools will eventually fade away and add-ons will become more and more specialized, allowing 3rd party integrations that specialize in other areas to work seamlessly together.

What do you wish you had learned before you were 30 that you didn’t, and had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?

I would have started saving more money for retirement at an earlier age :)
As for career change, I would say, never stop learning and being open to change. I started my career in store retail, moved to real estate appraisal, did some construction project management, tech project management and business systems — and then landed at my current gig of being a Salesforce Admin. Enjoy the journey!

Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for your company or you personally, or it could be your thoughts about how college/grad school or your first job impacted your journey to success!

Learn as much as you can, whenever you can. Teach yourself if you can’t find someone to teach you. Alway have initiative. Don’t wait for someone to hand you something, you’ll never get anywhere waiting on someone else. Your career is ultimately in your hands, even when you feel like it’s not, so make the most of both the good times and bad.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey from a store retailer to a Salesforce Admin at one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley Scott! If our readers are interested in the leader in online events check out Eventbrite. And if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!

Salesforce Admin Scott Shouse helps develop business processes for the largest event provider in… was originally published in The Follow-Up Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.