Quotient

Wow...what a day! Thank you QCon for hosting me as a conference keynote speaker to discuss the four social drivers (TAPPs) behind the highest performing engineering teams. These factors are all things we capture and analyze at Quotient to make engineering teams more performant. It was such an engaging audience, including some of the lead authors behind the studies that power this work. (Like Emerson Murphy-Hill - thanks for your great research in this space!). If you want to know more about what we covered, we recapped the TAPPs framework in this week's RDEL. Enjoy: https://lnkd.in/ed__nF45

This week I had the honor of revisiting Harvard Business School for the Quotient case discussion. I will never get over the surreal experience of having an HBS class spotlight a company that was once only an idea in my head. This year's discussion was uniquely rich, and these were my favorite topics: 1?? Founder-led sales The most valuable way to know if you are solving a real problem is by getting customers to pay for it. In the early days this should be entirely founder led, which means you'll be prioritizing sales alongside many other (important) things. It's hard! Also, as a founder of a new company with no reputation, you need to be ready for a lot of chaos, rejection, and creativity to find your ideal customers. Keep going. 2?? Building a clear customer value proposition (CVP) Use any potential customer interaction to understand pain points, and whether your solution clearly communicate a solution to those pain points. This is an evolving process as you learn more about the problem and align your solution to match it. Thanks again to Thomas Eisenmann for the opportunity and fantastic discussion. And thanks Boston for giving me both fall foliage and a 75 degree day!

Last month, I got to share a stage at SheTO summit with Kathryn Koehler and Hersh Tapadia to talk about about engineering metrics and how to use them (the good, bad, and ugly). It was a very candid conversation, and most importantly, an amazing audience. So often in my engineering career I've been the only woman in the room, and had to seek out my own community to find women who enjoy the art and science of engineering like I do. So as you can imagine, sharing this deeply technical topic to a room of 400+ women in engineering leadership was a very special feeling. I feel so energized about the direction engineering leadership is heading in - both because of the transformation in how we understand and improve team productivity (thanks Quotient!), and because of the amazing women leading the way. Cheers to the future!