Report card - My first 90 days at Interview Mocha
Dealing with a pandemic, WFH and dull sales, all while trying to start a marketing engine
The week before I joined Interview Mocha’s Pune office, I started reading Michael Watkins’ classic business tome, The First 90 Days. This was in March, earlier this year. It’s an invaluable resource, and rereading it now would remind me of all I needed to do as I started here, I thought.
Needless to say, my plans didn’t go as I had hoped.
The world threw a black swan at me.
I shelved the book. I knew that the old rules didn’t apply anymore.
In the uncertainty, lack of credible information, and inability to forecast, our usual business tools and models were taken away. But as a professional, I had to find a way to respond, and find a framework to do so. That’s the job, isn’t it?
I knew business was going to be slow for a while, and I couldn’t rekindle demand that was non-existent. I also couldn’t suddenly introduce a slew of changes that would surprise and destabilise my new team, who had just been given a new manager.
Focusing on the ‘things that don’t change’
The question I chose to answer as a way to respond, was to address ‘the things that don’t change’. And to me in March, what would not change anytime in the future, were three things.
My team’s trust and support
My relationships with the rest of the leadership, and
The marketing basics.
These were what I set out to work on and tighten in my first 90 days, because I knew that whatever happened in the next year, I would need these three things figured out to do my job.
Cultivating trust
I worked hard to gain my own team’s support, letting them know that I was here to help them be better at what they were already good at. They responded, and today they are producing almost double the results than they were before, and I’ve made sure the crests and troughs of working from home don’t affect them.
One way to make your teams feel like they are in good hands is by actually showing them what you are good at and what you can do. When you come in, they are watching, and want to know if they can trust you with their careers. It’s important that you win their confidence. I got an opportunity to do that as soon as I came in, when within 10 days we launched a campaign that is helping us win leads even now.
They’ve relaxed into a great rhythm, and are doing very well. I have always believed that only good things can come from a happy team, and they’ve proved me right. You’ll hear a lot more about their work soon. We are Interview Mocha, remember the name.
[I’ve been told in earlier roles that I’m too nice and that my team was too happy, which I think is indisputably nonsense; a happy team is a productive team]
Building communication channels
I also put in a lot of time and effort in getting a great professional and personal relationship with my leadership, and the rest of my peers. It has helped me that they are a cheerful, hard-working bunch who inspire me everyday. In building communication channels with them based on trust and a common goal, I’m able to take better decisions, and convey better what marketing is doing for the organisation. Good communication is paramount in situations like these, where there is a lot less F2F interaction because of the pandemic.
[I have a pro-tip for CMOs and VPs of marketing on this, but they’ll have to ask me themselves, not giving it away so easy!]
The Marketing MVP
In these three months, I have spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on the questions that are the most fundamental. What is our brand? Have we defined that yet? What is our positioning? Have we written that out yet? I’ve said this before, but setting out to do marketing without answering these questions is like facing up to Brett Lee without knowing how to hold a bat: You could, with luck, edge one to the boundary, but you are also going to break something very soon.
And broken bones takes months to mend.
So this is what we worked on, as well as the processes that needed to be put in place for my team to be able to scale without pressure, and with enough space for them to learn, cultivate, and enjoy the craftsmanship that is essential for growth.
[Sometimes the job of a senior marketing hire at an early stage company is just to ask the right questions]
The good, the bad, and the feedback I needed
All of this is what I talked about on a call with my CEO and CTO that lasted more than 90 minutes. I was also told all of what they had to say: What I was doing well, what I needed to focus on, and what were the things that still needed a lot more work. I had actually initiated and insisted on this conversation with both of them, because nothing can come close to this kind of conversation in helping you grow.
I also received some feedback that I really needed. I was taking on a bit of pressure early in my stint: I was trying to do too much, and with the kind of high quality that takes time to achieve.
My CEO saw that, stepped in, and asked me to slow down, advising me that though he knew what I was aiming for, ‘we don’t have to be the Freshworks of 2020 rightaway, we have to be how Freshworks was in 2013’.
This is important. Because my standards come from larger, much more settled marketing teams I’ve been part of, I was benchmarking incorrectly, and trying to do too much. I needed to understand where Interview Mocha was, and do the best for this stage of our growth.
This is a classic example of why you need this kind of feedback. In fast-paced work cultures, we can lose perspective very easily. Making sure you talk like this often is one way to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing.
PS - I want to make this a once-a-quarter exercise with my CEO and CTO, and document it so that it’s really easy to sum up my own performance. This is what I’m instituting for my own team as well, so that when their appraisals come due, I have a sheaf of pages where I have a clear, already-agreed-upon assessment of work.
Imagine how much of a time-saver this can be if your team is on the larger side.