The First 90 Days

Carmen: Hello and welcome to DevRel Book Club. Hi Carmen, how are you doing?

Tessa: I'm good, thank you Matt. And hi, everybody who's listening or joining in live. It's great to be back being with you today.

Carmen: Yeah, it is. It's been a little while. I'm Matthew Revell. I work at Hoopy as a DevRel consultant and I'm very excited to be back after a couple of months break with the DevRel Book Club. And Carmen, who have we got with us today?

Tessa: Yeah, today we're going to be joined by Tessa Mero who will be talking to us about her experiences with the book, the First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins. I'm very excited to have her on.

Carmen: Tessa, welcome to the DevRel Book Club.

Tessa: Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Carmen: Whereabouts are you joining us from?

Tessa: I am based in Seattle, Washington.

Carmen: So just tell us a little bit about your role in DevRel right now and what brought you to this point in your career.

Tessa: Sure. I am head of developer relations at appright. io. My previous position was director of developer relations at Cloudinary and I've worked my way from being a software engineer and then I was a programming teacher and then moved into being a developer advocate and then basically just climbed the ladder from there. And mostly because I was always fascinated of what growth looks like and what the next position is. And I've always moulded my responsibilities and things I work on based on what that looks like. I'm in the current position. I've always had this dream of working for a small startup, smaller company than my previous company and kind of going back into my open source roots as it's a fully free and open source software.

And in the past for five or six years, I contributed to an open source org, which contributed a lot to my success throughout my career.

Tessa: That's a brilliant history. Thank you so much for sharing Tessa. It's really inspiring to hear from folks who kind of undergo this journey and then sort of in a sense want to return to their roots as well. It kind of shows that there's a grounding there. And I'm curious, you recommended this book that we're talking about today, the first 90 days. And I'd love to know how this book played into that and how it's influenced your career, why you picked this book in general.

Tessa: For the last three and a half years I've been consistently meeting with an executive coach and an executive coach is not something I've ever heard of. When I first hired one, I actually reached out to an executive in 2016 and asked, Hey, can you mentor me? I just have random questions all the time. How did you get to your point in your career? What were small milestones that you worked towards? And then this person recommended, Hey, you know what? My executive coach doesn't take on new clients, but I think out of a strong recommendations, I think this person will be willing to meet with you. And had a two hour interview with this coach to determine whether I can be a client or not.

And the conversation went really well. And I would say part of my success is from being properly coached by a retired executive from Microsoft who was responsible of building a very large department there. And one of the conversations I had was, yeah, I'm starting in this new position. I know it's really risky and I'm leaving a really good position where I have even more opportunities to move up, but this is a different type of opportunity, an opportunity where I can build something rather than being at something that's already established. And he's like, have you read the book the first 90 days? I'm like, no, what's that? And then that's where that conversation came from and he recommended different videos to watch, but it was mostly this book and we kind of went over so many different topics and in depth in each topic. And so I really had a good understanding of, and he's worked with thousands and thousands of CEOs and executives and everything is just like he knows the answer to everything and just really understands and has a really good vision and it's helped a lot.

And this book was just the most magical book ever. After reading the book, I had my entire plan laid out in my head, and then I wrote my entire 90 day plan for myself to work towards. I didn't follow it exactly. I didn't present the plan to the team. Some companies require if you get hired as a head of developer relations or vp, they required some will ask for a 90 day plan.

Tessa: Oh wow.

Tessa: Or they ask for that during your job interview, but I kind of wrote one for myself so I can kind of guide myself. And it ended up changing quite a bit based on adapting to the current company and team. So I wrote out my plan based on just how I worked my first three months.

Carmen: Great. So let's dive in a little bit into the book itself. So Michael D. Watkins is a former, I think Harvard Business School professor who had been doing lots of research around what makes a good transition. And then this book is the distillation of all that work backed up by real stories by people that he's interviewed and done research with. I think even if you're not in a leadership position and it's aimed at leaders, I think even if you're not a leader, then it seems to be very relevant to developer relations generally. Because one of the key themes that I found in the book was one of, I guess managing risk and DevRel seems to be quite a risky role, quite a risky department in some ways because of the lack of institutional knowledge around developer relations. So looking at my notes here, I guess one of the things that struck me was this idea that, and I guess it's common sense, but this idea that when you start a new job, you have an unrepeatable moment where people's opinion of you isn't fixed.

And in that short, precious period of time, you can either give people a bad opinion or a good opinion. And obviously there's way more to the book than that. But that was kind of one of the things that struck me was that old adage of first impressions matter. So Tessa, I'm wondering how do you go into a new role or what's your advice for people going into a new role and not coming off as someone who's too bruss or a know it all, but also not going in and being almost too humble?

Tessa: This is the mistake that a lot of executives would make when they jump into a new role. They feel like the expectations are so high that they just go straight into saying, this is what we need to do. This is the plan we need to get started. These are the deadlines. And the rest of the team is like, who is this person? Why are they acting like this? Why should I listen to them? And we're humans, so we just have a natural way of just start questioning things.

You have to take time to learn to listen first, listen, learn who you're working with, learn the best ways to communicate with each individual and let them learn about you and get the buy-in from individuals with talking about your previous experience and your education, or usually education doesn't always matter, but if you have that and have your team understand the value you are here to bring with the knowledge that you have, rather than just jumping straight into seeing what needs to happen and if you earn respect from others, you'll be surprised how much people will listen to you.

Tessa: That was something that really, it's one of those things where you've got some thoughts in your head, but seeing them printed out in word form really solidifies. It says, oh yeah, this is something people do and understand and are good decent strategies for being able to be a successful leader. And this is something that struck me a lot reading this book. I've had a head of position, but I've never really led a team before. And I found that as someone who's never led a team, I still found this book extremely helpful for me as somebody maybe who wants to someday lead a team. And one part that particularly stood out to me that really I'd never thought about was how to handle, for example, that transitionary period where for example, you've been promoted over someone in your team who was going for the same position, how to handle that, right. That's the exact sound I made when I read that point.

Tessa: I've been in that situation before and it was the most scariest, especially being a woman and the exact same situation, but I just took the time to have the conversations in private with the individual and acknowledging the feelings, acknowledging the emotions that are happening because we're humans and it's okay to have emotions and feel certain things. And just giving them the understanding that you can see their perspective and just letting people kind of soak the situation in. And it takes time, I think, and things work out over time. It's a tough one. I don't have a perfect answer, but I've been in the situation and my situation worked out, but it is the most uncomfortable situation you can probably experience.

Tessa: Yeah, and I'm sorry to bring that up. I didn't mean to cause any discomfort there. No, it was more like how, sorry,

Tessa: It's going to happen in a lot of different teams where people are working towards a promotion or towards a role and then someone else will get it. And understanding how to deal with that situation in advance would be a really good thing to have. Good skill to have.

Tessa: Yeah, and I think it's a good reminder, oh, sorry.

Carmen: No, go ahead, Carmen.

Tessa: No, sorry. I think it speaks well to what you were saying before, Tessa, about the importance of acknowledging that we are all human beings and we're all trying to navigate these different situations. And the first 90 days it's a period of change and because when somebody joins a team, when somebody starts leading a team, it is a fundamental change for everybody involved.

Tessa: Sorry, I just realised you were talking about a new position at a different company. So I was talking about an existing company, but jumping into a leadership role to an existing team, if that's what you mean. That's definitely a different situation.

Tessa: I think I meant both really. But yeah,

Tessa: So my new role, I report to the CEO and he hired four developer advocates before bringing on a head of and the head of is not something. I don't think that was originally planned until they realised that that's something that was necessary for someone to kind of build, where is this going? We're doing all these things, but why and where is this leading up to? And there's just so much more to leading and building a developer relations team. And the goal with our team is to build a department and deciding on the department name is, I couldn't think of anything that's fitting because we don't know what the future is going to look like with all the sub-teams. So that's something I'm going, one of my next strategies I'm going to be working on is what does our department look like because of more hires coming in and because I'm expanding teams and as of next quarter we're going to have another subteam within the department. And another thing is an understanding of DevRel being the most important team at the company and prioritising hires for that. A big selling point for me to join the company.

By the way, it's nothing better than that.

Carmen: I mean, it might be useful context just to hear from you. What it is does

Tessa: They are a backend as a service, fully open source software, and everyone they've hired has an open source background or was a contributor of AppRight. They're like a fire base alternative and has multiple services like databases and authentication and just kind of like everything for your backend needs.

Carmen: Cool. Great. So the book starts off, as I say with this first impressions matter idea, and I'm doing it an injustice by summing it up in such a simple phrase. But one thing that I really appreciated was it talks about reaching a breakeven point as quickly as possible. And so that's this idea that there's a point up until which you are taking more out of the company than you are giving back. And whether you're a leader or an individual contributor, that's something we all go through those early days. But in order to be effective, the first thing you need to do is get to the point where you are contributing more than you're taking out. And I think for developer relations, that's really crucial because, well, it's crucial in any role, but it is particularly difficult in developer relations because the learning curve isn't just about, oh, you're in a new company.

There are new personalities, there are new procedures, but you have to learn a whole new technology as well. So my observation is that as people work their way up the hierarchy in devel, they become less with the technology of the company, but nonetheless, for your own credibility, you need to be somewhat hands-on with it. So how have you dealt with that as you've moved from role to role and company to company of staying in touch with what's happening with the product while also having enough room to do all of the other stuff in your role?

Tessa: So this position specifically makes it, it's a lot easier. We work very close to the software engineering team and all of our developer advocates have strong software engineering skills. So the collaboration is better than I've ever experienced before. It's not the best. There's always room for improvement in every area, especially with collaboration. But we're able to keep up with features and changes and bugs and we keep up with GitHub issues, GitHub discussions, developer feedback, and on the personal side of things, trying to stay technical, being able to find time, especially in this role is extremely difficult because I have a backlog of priorities and more work than the hours of the day provides. I did spend an entire Saturday on building a Netflix clone following tutorials, and I did it on Dart, and I've never done anything on that before. I just went straight to the biggest challenge.

I mean, it was not intentional. I went through the wrong blog post. I meant to go through the view and I was already halfway through reading the content part. I'm like, I already committed to this one. I guess I'm going to set up and make a mobile app. So that was probably the coolest thing ever. Probably the first few hours was not fun trying to set everything up that I have never set up on my computer. That was the one that took the longest, but setting up the whole backend infrastructure for a Netflix clone was the coolest thing ever.

I'm like, oh wow, here it is and it works and it looks like Netflix. This is amazing. This is what this company does. And I did this at the very beginning of my position. I wanted to just get that same feeling that other new developers that are trying the product or the software out, and I want to experience that so I can be somewhat on the same wavelength. It'd be nice for me to take time to do more tutorials and build more things, but then I will have to set aside other things and that can play a big impact on the team doing a lot. We're a startup, so we're doing a lot in a very short period of time, more than any company and anything I've ever seen or experienced before.

Carmen: Well, it is interesting. The book says that according to a study, and forgive me if I don't quote exactly which study the average time for, I think middle management people to reach their breakeven point is 6.2 months. And I wonder what that is for DevRel people because on the one hand, in a company like yours where everything's working at super speed, I'm guessing you make quick wins early on, but whether you reach breakeven within 6.2 months or within the average, let's say, I don't know, because you have that additional burden of learning the tech.

Tessa: One thing that stood out to what you were both speaking about is that providing value, am I understand correctly that breaking even in this context means being fully onboarded and providing value? Is that correct?

Carmen: I think from the book's point of view, it's the idea that the value you are delivering is essentially higher than your salary and the cost of other people having answer all your questions and onboard you and all of that.

Tessa: Got it. Because

Tessa: I think,

Tessa: Sorry,

Tessa: That depends on the type of company you're at, and I think that's what you meant by there's five different business types and then the first one being startup.

Carmen: Yeah, so the book talks about stars framework. I've got it written down here somewhere,

Tessa: Star framework. When you're at a startup, you're going to be moving a lot faster. I think that a larger company takes more time because there's more people to collaborate, more teams to work with, more people to meet. So I would cut that time in half for a startup by three months you should be providing more value than your salary. But that's my opinion and based on everything that's happened in the last three, four months.

Carmen: So let's talk about how you get there then, because I'm sure that one of the unspoken things in developer relations is, no, let me scratch that. One of the things we speak about a lot in developer relations, now that I think about it, one of the spoken about things in developer relations is that we don't always know how to report the value that we see in a context that makes sense to the rest of the organisation. So I wonder if, what's your experience then of not just knowing yourself that you've reached breakeven, but being able to demonstrate that around the company?

Tessa: This is an area that I spent a lot of time thinking of, and I've seen an issue where several companies will lay off developer advocates or they'll cut off their developer relations team because of the rest of the internal company not really understanding the value they're giving. You can be a super hyped up team, being involved in all these presentations talks, getting crazy amounts of views on your blog posts. You can do a lot of great things, but none of that matters if you don't have internal buy-in. So I've accomplished this area by, I have a set process and I feel like I wonder if there's, I kind of want to write a blog post on just this topic alone now on internal talk. I can definitely do that. Number one of the first things I did was meet with all the teams at the company and understand what is your perspective on developer relations? What do you think developer advocates do? What are your expectations of the team?

What kind of help are you expecting for any kind of cross team collaboration and trying to see how they see things before I even take action on doing anything. Because I think it's so important to be able to work with other teams. If you get every team to respect your team, then you're going to get hyped up for everything that you're working on and doing and have respect from other teams. Even our web design team is excited about all of our work and really involved in everything that we're doing because they have a good understanding of all of our activities and getting other teams involved in some way. And another accomplishment with getting internal buy-in is look at objectives or major objectives or KPIs of other teams and align one or some of your developer relation KPIs with things that they're trying to accomplish. If you tie into other teams or departments or even company level objectives, your team is going to be there forever. There's just no way it'll, it's going to be an important team if you become that team that kind of sits off on the side doing your own thing, I just can't guarantee to how long your team is going to last or if you're going to even get more resources for bigger budgets or more resources for major projects or more hires. I don't expect that to just magically be handed to you unless you just have a really great nice CEOs or executives that just, oh, here's a bunch of money.

Here you go.

Carmen: But Carmen, you've recently joined a new company as an ic, I think, right? Yeah. I mean, when I say recently in the past few months, have you seen something similar where you've done that managing sideways job of going around and establishing those relationships?

Tessa: Yes, especially at a company that's small enough. I joined Suborbital back in February at the time of recording now, and what I found is that the company made up of around Tenish people, I was able to go and make one-on-ones with everybody in the team and just get to know everybody briefly. Yes, we had our internal documentation that told us a little bit about ourselves, but still I made a point of going in and saying hello and seeing where we could collaborate on things. And actually one thing, speaking, especially as an IC that I found really helpful to be able to do in my first 90 ish days was to be able to go into our open source products and just try them at first time without having previously looked at them, just go in and see how they work. And I thought that perspective was super valuable because there's a term I learned from Mr. Stewart language, the curse of knowledge. And I love this because it's this concept of where you've been working on something for really long and you sort of forgotten or lost perspective of what those pitfalls are when you're onboarding onto a new product. So as a new team member, especially in developer relations, somebody who works a lot with developers, being able to come in and be like, what is this term that y'all are using?

I don't know it, stuff like that. I find that really valuable. I was thinking of that about that when we were talking about value. It's kind of like becoming, what is it breaking even? I find that at the beginning you're providing lots of value but different value at the beginning. And that was kind of cool to think about.

Carmen: The books divided into chapters that are based around one key area of achievement in your first 90 days. The first one is prepare yourself. So this is basically about aligning yourself with the organisation, identify what the culture of the organisation is. So one thing it talks about is to get buy-in. Do you need to find one key champion in the organisation or is it more a peer to peer kind of thing? And I think that when you've been in a role for a long time in one company and then you move elsewhere, it's easy to take with you the clothing that you've been inhabiting all that time and expect everything to work the same way.

Tessa: I would say that's the number one thing not to do on your first 90 days is you think you want to, people are excited to take all their experience and all the things they learned and then move it to the next company. It doesn't work the same way. What worked really, really well and made something successful in the last company might create failure in the next company. So you have to take that time to learn and soak in

Carmen: Information. And that's really interesting to me is that this book gives you a practical framework for doing that learning work. And that's why I kind of feel so enthusiastic about the book as a source of actual actionable advice, unlike most of the business books I've read, because basically it talks about the strategy for learning. And let me look, there's a couple of things that it mentions. Well, the first thing is that stood out to me was the idea that learning is an investment and not a chore. And I know that sounds so obvious, but if I think back to my own career where I remember times when I've been thinking I can't go and learn that thing whenever it is, or I feel guilty about investing in self-improvement because I've got all these deadlines I need to meet, all these goals have got to meet. But I think it's really crucial and the book goes into good detail about why to realise that that investment in learning actually makes you better, makes you more valuable.

Tessa: In order to move very fast, you have to start out very slow and the slower that you do things, which is when I say slow, it means taking the time to soak in information and learn, and then you can execute so much faster. And I'm at the stage of my position where things can be executed very quickly and very effectively because we're at that stage.

Carmen: So that, as I think of it managing sideways, but those conversations you've had with different people within the company, those conversations you've had with the CEO and so on, that gives you the context that you're operating within. What would you say is your practical advice or your practical takeaway from that process of if someone's approaching that for the first time, what non-obvious thing do you now know about that process?

Tessa: Which process exactly?

Carmen: Oh, sorry. That idea of embedding yourself into the culture of the organisation and making those foundational learnings for want of a better way of phrasing it that enable you then to execute faster later on.

Tessa: I'm trying to think of the biggest thing I've done wrong or right. When someone asks a question or say, how should we do this? I automatically respond with an answer thinking I need to give immediate answers, and I'm learning to take a step back and taking each situation and putting some thought around it and giving more appropriate responses. And the more I wait on responding for any kind of answer, I give a better, more impactful response because I have time to think of pros and cons and maybe additional ideas to add to what I have to say. And people respect you a lot more for that.

Tessa: Yeah, what an important point to make because I think I can very much relate with that need to respond quickly to think what is more important for me. Previously I felt like what is more important? I answer. I used to prioritise answering quickly. But yeah, giving something thoughtful, and I mean that's what makes you a leader, right? You consider all the options and all of that. And Sorry,

Tessa: I was going to add one more item, but you're welcome to finish.

Tessa: No, no, go ahead.

Tessa: Another thing that I've learned is showing if you're adopting a team or have a new team or have a bunch of new hires and letting them know the best way to work with you. Because if you let them know the best way to work with you, they're going to be less scared or afraid to send you a message. For example, I let the team know you can message me. The discord is our main tool. You can message me any day, anytime on weekends. It doesn't bother me. I will respond when I'm available to respond. It doesn't bother me at all.

I'm not going to feel obligated to respond in the middle of family time at dinner because you're messaging me. I know that I can wait to respond back on my time off. It's not a big deal. So that way they're comfortable asking me questions rather than waiting and then forgetting about it. Another thing is I let people know if you're uncomfortable turning on your webcam or you just don't want to turn on, I don't care for all of our meetings. You can have it on or off. You don't have to provide an excuse. You don't have to provide or say anything.

Just that's something you choose to do. And just establishing just how you work and how you see things and what my expectations are of them just provides more transparency between each individual and more comfort and more trust. You really have to build all the transparency and trust and respect establishing that before you start doing anything else.

Tessa: Yeah, that's really well put. Thank you. And I think that's something that the book kind of touched on as well. It's this importance of transparency and it kind of suggests how important that in order to lead well, one has to be well as well. And there is something that towards the end of the book that really stood out to me, and I actually have it quoted, which is no leader, no matter how capable or energetic can do it all, how important that is to bear in mind because especially as something that we hear about endeavour a lot is people overexerting themselves and to build a team of advisors. And I think this reminds me of what you were talking about at the beginning of this recording session, Tessa, about having a coach. So not just internal advisors, but also external advisors around your role. That really stood out to me.

And I'm wondering, is that something that you've implemented as well?

Tessa: Just for my personal side of things and my personal spending with working with an executive coach.

Tessa: Gotcha.

Tessa: But I would recommend that to everyone 100%. I always go over my weakest skills and every weakest skills I've worked with with my coach is now my strongest skillset and nothing I've ever thought would ever become my strongest skillset. So it's just a very fast pace of personal growth, leadership, growth.

Tessa: It's really inspiring. Thank you.

Tessa: Of course.

Tessa: Yeah.

Tessa: And I can keep adding to your last question of non-obvious things that I didn't know and now I know they keep just popping up in my head.

Carmen: Yeah,

Matthew: Great.

Tessa: Another thing that leaders don't realise throughout your job, not at the very, very, very beginning, messaging your team members or messaging anyone internally and just going straight to talking about work and tasks and hey, can you do this? Hey, can you help with this? If you only have those conversations, you can naturally lose respect over time and people start seeing you in a different way because of human nature, not because of that's just how they are intentionally. It's good to just catch up with individuals, see how they're doing. If it's your team, if it's people working on your team, check on their mental health, see if they need any time off. I feel because I've burnt out once before and it made me go crazy and it affected my health and went to the hospital from just doing too much. I have to take the time to analyse the workload of each individual and how much travelling they're doing. And I also push them that it's okay to tell me no.

I make that very clear. I don't want people, I know when you're in a leadership position, people naturally feel like they have to agree and say yes. Like, Hey, can you go to event? Okay, I can do that. Do they want to? It's a leader's job to figure out that information out. If you have something else going on, let me know. It's not super urgent.

And if it's something that's really important, I'll let you know. And another thing is when I'm messaging people, if I don't expect an instant response, I just say, non-urgent respond anytime or tomorrow, and then I'll put my message down. Because in a leadership role, people think they have to respond to you immediately. So I let them know before my message every message if it's non-urgent.

Carmen: And I think that's one of the key things that someone transitioning from individual contributor to leader might not believe to be obvious. Because once you take on that mantle, the way that people see you and the things that you say change, I was speaking to an executive recently who said, if I ask something in the company, it comes with a certain amount of weight. And I have to be careful how I use my capital within the company because everything I request is seen as urgent or important. And I might be making an offhand comment, but then find that people will have then behind the scenes scrambled to do something that maybe I've forgotten about by the time they deliver it. And I think that's something that I learned when I first went into management was that even though I didn't see myself differently, how others perceive me was different.

Tessa: That's another thing I'm also learning. So I can really relate to that. I've noticed when I'm asking things from other individuals or other team members, they stop everything they're doing and they respond and they start working on it. And I'm like, I've never experienced that before. And I came from another company where my whole team were all senior in senior higher level roles. So it was eye opening and it changed my perspective on things. And now I'm taking the time to have a conversation about things rather than asking too quickly and kind of understanding what they're working on. And if they have time to work on this, let's talk about a timeline.

Let me sync with my boss and make sure things are okay between us working on this and just more transparency. Otherwise things can get very messy and we will decrease team flow rather than create impact.

Carmen: So we are coming to the end of probably our time together because we're about 45 minutes in now. And so I was wondering, and Carmen, obviously anything you want to ask as well, but one thing I wanted to ask was you hit the 91st day. What's different qualitatively about 91 to 180 days from the first 90 days

Tessa: When you're at your 90th day, you have a very solid understanding of how your team works, how other team works, and you should be looking into how can you make your team more efficient? How can you make things more efficient between different teams and be working on improving that before you just start mass hiring people. You should be, if you do hire someone one at a time, and then work on building that flow cover and understanding where the gaps are and what is missing before adding more to your team. And between 90 and 180 days, you should be in execution stage. This is the plan, this is what we're doing. And you're at the point where everyone internally is aligned with your plan on your 90 days and you should be executing and launching initiatives, launching project building, your developer relations programme. Basically

Tessa: What a solid answer to a solid question. I'm super impressed. Thank you both. This has been really cool. I'm really grateful for both of your time doing this. And before we go, Tessa, if I may, how can folks get in touch with you if they want to talk about their first 90 days?

Tessa: Twitter is the number one thing I check often. Tessa Mero, LinkedIn is okay as well, which is Tessa Mero, Tessa Mero, and everything on Discord. Tessa with a capital T hashtag 1 3 3 7 like lead. Nice.

Carmen: You mentioned you'd written some blog posts and so on. Where can people find your blog?

Tessa: On my dev two account Dev two slash Tessa Mero, and it is my most recent blog post.

Carmen: Great. Well thank you very much for joining us. Well, it flew by, I had so much more I wanted to ask and talk about, but I am personally looking forward to the blog posts that you mentioned about writing and maybe the dev recon talk as well. Yeah, really, thank you so much for joining us.

Tessa: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.