Benjamin Encz

Culture

When the Ashby team met for the first time, we took a moment to reflect on and codify the attributes we value most in those we hire, and on the operating principles that guide our work. We'd like to share that with you here.

Ashby’s Operating Principles

aronow.io

Assured is a claims automation insurtech backed by leading Silicon Valley investors.

Assured

Astronomer

Attentive

Aurora Solar

Aven

Our camps give kids both a place to start and plenty of room to grow outdoors as they build skills in a wide range adventure sports, including mountain biking, hiking, kayaking, rock climbing and paddling.

Avid4 Adventure

Benchling

iPaaS integration platform with a worldwide reach

Boomi

Boulevard

Brightline brings virtual behavioral and mental health care to kids and teens, with a focus on also supporting families. 

Brightline

The Browser Company

Calm

Census

Character.AI

Clever

CloudTrucks

Coder is a remote infrastructure development platform that makes working with code easier than ever. Coder enables everyone from industry rookies to experts to develop code faster than ever before, using templatized starting points and ultra-secure workspaces.

Coder

Cohere

Cointracker

Color

Convictional uses technology to make logistics easier for retailers and their suppliers by automating supplier integration, onboarding, and merchandising.

Convictional

Costanoa Ventures

Enterprise-grade accounting, audit, and tax software for your digital assets

Cryptio

Decimal

Deel is payroll for modern business. No matter where you're hiring, Deel helps customers run payroll, supporting 150+ countries with hundreds of worldwide experts. Deel helps their customers know that hiring, paying, and managing stayed compliant and easy in their all-in-one platform.

Deel

Deepnote

Deliveroo

Docker

Dune

Duolingo

EightSleep is more than a mattress company - it's a suite of products devoted to sleep fitness. Their goal is to make sure that your sleep is as high-performing as you are, helping you meet and exceed the bar for excellence in your waking life. Athletes and scientists alike love their range of highly customizable sleep tech because it helps them live healthier.

EightSleep

Format One

FullStory is an insight platform that aims to create a more perfect web experience by capturing website data to give clients like GNC, Carvana, and Lowe’s greater insight into how users access their websites.

FullStory

Galileo

Gorgias

GrowthAssistant

HackerOne

Help Scout

Infinite Lambda

Ironclad

Juni

Kustomer

Leapsome

Lemonade

Linear

Linktree

Machinify

Marqeta is a modern card issuing platform dedicated to empowering innovators to launch their products to the world. They have over a decade of experience as a trusted, high-tech solution for builders who need simple, scalable payment solutions.

Marqeta

Mastodon

Mercury

Metaview

Modern Treasury

Monte Carlo is a Series D data observability company helping its customers accelerate the adoption of data to eliminate downtime. 

Monte Carlo

Multiverse

Notion is the go-to for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, blending everyday work apps into one. It serves as an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management. 

Notion

Compensation software that offers 5,000+ companies clarity for every pay decision.

OpenComp

Opendoor

Plato

PostHog

PostHog is an open source analytics platform. Their product is used by product, engineering, and marketing teams to understand user behavior, including product analytics, session recording, user paths, a/b testing, heatmaps, and more. The suite, founded through Y Combinator in 2020, has since been installed by over 10,000 companies.

Pragma Platform

ProAmpac

Pulley

QFinds

Quora

Ramp

Readme

Recruiting Pundit

Reddit

Replit

Retool

peer network for senior in-house resourcing leaders

RL100

Scratchpad

With over 2k clients and 20+ years of experience, Sequoia Consulting Group  is a services, tech, advisory business that provides clients with a platform for rich analytics.

Sequoia

Shelby Wolpa Consulting

Shopify

Sift

Snowflake

Snyk

Solana Foundation

Sourcegraph

Stytch

Syfon

Talentful

Democratizing stocks trading across Europe

Trading 212

Treasury Prime

TroopHR

VanMoof is a Dutch e-bike company creating stylish, feature-rich city bikes. They're the fastest growing bike company in the world, with an active community in over 50 cities worldwide.

VanMoof

Vanta

Vantage

Veev

Verkada

WeTransfer

Zapier

Zinc

Zippin

Engineering

Recruiting

Product

Kat Fergerson

I watched Ashby come onto the HR tech scene out of nowhere. It was 2022, the market was starting to withdraw from hiring — and bam! Ashby hit the scene with momentum. They were: 

* thoughtful about culture (see [Thoughtful Communication](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication) practices and using [Operating Principles](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/ashbys-operating-principles) instead of values)
* had a highly differentiated product
* had a vision and founding story that resonated
* genuine brand fans

As head of marketing for a DEI tech company at the time, I watched them gain traction in the marketplace. We soon had overlapping customers, and it made sense to explore a more strategic partnership. Our meet cute: Transform 2023 (shout out to Samara Jaffe and team!). We strategized on integrations, mapped out event opportunities, and have been close partners ever since.

When the opportunity came up to work together more directly, it was an easy yes. Soon after, I joined as Head of Partnerships. 

While I have a relatively unconventional partnerships background as a previous head of marketing, I’ve worked with some of the best brands in the world to launch and scale their programs. And that’s the exciting opportunity here. From launching new revenue streams through digital innovation at adidas, to building Bird’s partner ecosystem marketing programs, to scaling Mathison’s Equity Index, I feel uniquely positioned for this new opportunity with Ashby.

## Why I’m Excited About Ashby: The Hiring Excellence Opportunity

Ashby has an impressive foundation:

**Clear Founding Vision**

[Benji and Abhik’s firsthand experiences](https://www.ashbyhq.com/story) with the limitations of traditional hiring processes and their drive to innovate resonates deeply with me. They've built something that not only addresses their pain points but also elevates the [hiring experience](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/hiring-excellence-framework) significantly.

**Exceptional Product**

Ashby's product isn't just functional – it’s setting the standard. Its ability to generate genuine enthusiasm from customers is indicative of its value and potential.

**Commitment to Talent Leaders**

Talent leaders are historically underserved and Ashby’s mission addresses that gap. They’re also committed to supporting the wider RecOps community who’ve been hit especially hard by layoffs ([1 in 2 recruiting professionals have been laid off](https://recruitment.com/recommendations/recruiter-layoffs)).

Through the hundreds of conversations I’ve already had with people leaders about how to build inclusive hiring practices, capture accurate reporting, and get a seat at the table for their Talent initiatives, I see a huge opportunity for Ashby to be the platform that operationalizes what hiring should be.

## What I’ll Be Focusing On: Partnerships at Ashby

My goal is to build a best-in-class partnership program that accelerates Ashby’s growth and amplifies our impact across the TA community. Partnerships is a gigantic discipline. There are about a hundred different ways I could run with this. To start, I’ll be focused on: 

1. **Making it incredibly easy to recommend Ashby**: This includes providing outsized value to startups in order to become the default ATS recommended by VCs & Accelerators.
2. **Helping experts close (and renew!) business**: This means enabling the growing ecosystem of consultants, recruitment agencies, and fractional talent leaders with the tools, benefits, and resources to be successful Ashby implementers.
3. **Giving our customers access to the tech stack they need**: This includes expanding our integration ecosystem and investing in strategic partnerships.

As I step into this role, I’m excited about the possibilities ahead. A lot of you will likely hear from me in the coming weeks as I look to deepen existing relationships and build new ones in the broader recruiting and talent communities. 

I’d love to hear from you if you're a:

* VC/Accelerator and interested in being part of our VC program
* consultant, recruiting agency, or fractional talent advisor interested in our referral program
* leader in the HR tech space interested in building best-in-class, mutually beneficial technical integrations

I have to give a huge thank you to the team, especially Harriet, Shannon, Lindsay, and Benji, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to an incredible mission and company.

Onwards,

Kat

P.S. LinkedIn connections are welcome!

Why Kat joined, what's exciting her about the opportunity, and how her focus on Partnerships will take shape. 

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

Jim Miller

Last week was my first as the VP of People and Talent at Ashby, and I’m humbled to have my first opportunity to lead a People function. The new role comes with input into the product roadmap and the interesting scope of both helping the internal team refine and deploy our hiring excellence framework, and also to help systematise and scale it for Ashby customers. This brings me into a thriving community of recruiters and TA professionals with whom I’m delighted to work.

  

For anybody that knows me – working with cutting edge technology and getting to help build and scale systems and processes is very much my bag of crisps. Needless to say, I’m excited to be here.

  

Usually I would stop here for a well-deserved series of thanks, but first I wanted to expand on why I joined and what I hope to achieve, so here we go. (You’ll find the thanks at the end instead.)

  

## Why I joined

  

As a little bit of context, I started my career like many recruiters – accidentally (thanks to a conversation with [Mike Fetters](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikefetters/)). I spent 15 years at Google, the last 5 of which involved leading the global online talent channels among other teams. I always wore a systems hat, and highlights of my Google time included helping to architect gHire, their internal ATS, and supporting LinkedIn’s advisory board for EMEA.

  

With Google’s scale and volume, it was easy to form hypotheses on how to test and improve the processes, though we always had to be careful how we implemented them due to the scale of change management required across roughly a hundred countries, and thousands of open requisitions at any one time.

  

Moving to Fullstory was my opportunity to implement what I had always thought would be an optimal recruiting strategy, leading with all the learning I had been gathering from previous roles and my teams’ own learnings. FullStory focused on helping the world have better digital experiences; thousands of companies build better and optimise their products accurately thanks to it. I’m proud of what we achieved, especially in the area of inbound-first hiring strategies.

  

Underpinning the talent side and all this growth and experimentation was Ashby.

  

We initially worked with Ashby’s Analytics product in 2021 – it was the most powerful and easy-to-use tool I had seen in the TA space. For the first time, my team could self-serve just about any data request. Without trying to be everything for everyone it, in so many ways, improved the day-to-day experience of my team. Without overstating, Ashby’s All-in-one is the best recruiting software I have worked with – data-driven, recruiter-built, and efficient, with a responsive support system that has everything I would want in an ATS.

  

While tools don’t shape the culture of a team, I believe they are either the enabler or barrier to realising the culture the team is trying to build. Ashby enabled us to start to realise the process excellence we knew the team was capable of – and the result was a focus on a more representative, higher quality way of hiring.

  

Suffice to say: I’m a fan. Ashby is a tool I’m genuinely so humbled and excited to get to help support now.

  

## Finding cultural excellence

  

One of the most significant reasons I joined the team was the people. After working at organisations like Google and Fullstory with so many smart, hard working, and passionate people, culture is always a critical consideration for me.

  

Working with [Benji](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminencz/), [Abhik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhikpramanik/) and [Kyra](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyra-vargas-739b03b1/) as a customer over the past 2 years has always been such a pleasure. They always listened to what our teams needed and helped us build the new dashboards, ship new features, and operate as a partner instead of a vendor. It’s the people that make a company what it is, and I truly believe that these people are making Ashby into the next greatest tool in recruiting.

  

## An honest reflection on the TA space today

  

While I’m so happy to be at Ashby I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that it wasn’t a seamless journey into this role. It’s damn tough out there right now. The realities of the macroeconomic environment is that many great people in TA are without a role and are on the job market.

  

My manager and I had an honest conversation in January about this potential reality before I went out on paternity leave for my son, Eric, and so over my paternity leave I applied for hundreds of jobs. 2 months in, I plucked up the courage to pitch myself to Benji. It took many hours of calls with many people around the team before we decided it was a good match, and the business needed someone with my skills and experience.

  

All to say, it is hard, I know it is hard, but keep knocking on doors, get creative, and one will open – I’m also always open to chat if you want to connect.

  

## What’s next

  

You’re going to hear a lot from me in helping the Ashby team and product to continue to scale. If you have any suggestions or want a soundboard anything TA – reach out.

  

I want to thank the incredible team at Fullstory for an amazing 2 years and the opportunity to lead their talent function, and then thank [Ian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/isharp/), [Eric](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericthomas99/), [Kristina](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-graci-deluna-a0b335/), [Darcy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcy-casarella-39300a1/), [Peter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterclarkee/), [Dan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkagdis/), [Ashley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-dutra-2944301b/), [Lena McAfee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-mcafee/), [Luke Anderton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeanderton/), [Greg Garrison](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gdgarrison/), and, of course, [Gabby](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielle-sirner-cohen-1896015/) & [Scott](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmvoigt/) at FullStory for their incredible support and advice on job search journey I’ve had.
I’d also like to thank you for reading! I’m looking forward to saying more soon.

Jim
    
P.S. [Request an Ashby demo!](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo)

Ashby welcomes the incomparable Jim Miller as our new VP of People & Talent -- here's his thoughts on joining the team.

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Mike Clapson

At many organizations the definition of a top performer in a sales team can be somewhat ambiguous. While sales performance tends to be measurable in terms of closed deals and revenue contribution, there are other meaningful measures that lead to sales excellence. This post aims to demystify how we think about sales performance, and ultimately excellence on the sales team at Ashby.

First off, it’s helpful to think of sales performance as a two-layer system. Layer one is foundational and consists of raw attributes and characteristics that most great salespeople possess. These attributes tend to be innate or habits learned early in one’s life and career. In this foundational layer, you could score highly in any of the criteria even if you haven’t done sales. Conversely, since these tend to be personality traits and values, they tend to be a bit more static in nature, and so primarily need to be assessed during the hiring process. That said, it is up to the individual how quickly and how meaningfully they might improve their foundational abilities to improve as a seller.

Layer two of the system is built upon that foundation and consists of the functional skills and abilities that great sellers have developed over time. In this functional layer, skills are honed over many years, and the best sellers pursue continuous improvement decades into their sales career. In this layer, it’s extremely uncommon that someone would be great at any, never mind all, of the key functional areas of sales without both the practice of experience and a growth mindset.

![the sales excellence model](/images/sales-excellence-chart.png)

## Layer 1: Foundation

### Theme 1: Diligence (Work Ethic, Grit, Persistence)

Sales is a numbers game. You can literally out-work other sellers to produce greater results. If you’re smart and lazy, don’t go into sales! There are other professions much better suited to that profile.

Diligence means continuously prospecting when you’ve got a good pipeline. It means thoughtfully drafting and sending same-day follow-up emails after doing six demos in one day. It means proofreading an important email one more time before clicking send.

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for the consistency of doing high quality work in sales. Quite often a grinder is the most consistent top performer, outperforming an intellectual.

### Theme 2: Intelligence (Curiosity, Learning, Adaptability)

Great salespeople are smart and insatiably curious. They love learning new things and embrace the unknown. After all, you have to love learning about companies and their problems and creatively positioning your solution to meet their specific needs. Excellence in this area means expressing genuine interest in new topic areas and new initiatives. It also means that you’re a self-starter that will actively seek out the information you require rather than wait for it to be perfectly served up to you. A great rep frequently develops new domain expertise and uses that to build credibility with their buyers.

Selling is a dynamic process; as we learn more, we must be willing to try new things. Markets also shift and we must adjust with the market. Great salespeople are highly adaptable. They enjoy refining and adjusting their approach to maximize their impact.

Because the great salesperson is intelligent, they learn new material quickly, and consistently pick up on new details and nuance from customer conversations. They also prioritize revenue-generating activities by identifying which accounts and activities are high-yield, and focus on those.

### Theme 3: Communication (Listening, Clarity, Energy)

A core competency of every great seller is that they are exceptional in their communication skills. They are incredibly precise with their words and can distill a complex idea down to its essence to convey rich meaning in a few words. The ability to bring clarity to a conversation helps create understanding and alignment.

Great sellers are equally strong at asking questions and listening. They ask questions like a surgeon uses a scalpel—adeptly. Listening is a strength of sellers because they’re genuinely curious about what the other person’s perspective is, and they understand that by listening they can learn, and use that information later. The best sellers are often more excellent listeners than skilled speakers. Buyers tend to highly rate sales conversations in which they spoke much more than the salesperson. In my experience this is most often achieved by salespeople who are precise and effective communicators.

### Theme 4: Empathy (Understanding, Tailoring, Solution-seeking)

Perhaps adjacent to curiosity is empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from their frame of reference. It’s the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Exceptional sales people aim to understand the nuances of their customer’s context because, by gathering a full understanding, they can better craft or position their solution for that specific customer.

An excellent sales rep can uncover the relevant facts and tailor their solution to address the buyer’s most pressing priorities. To do this, they are skilled at working in teams, especially with internal stakeholders to seek out or create new solutions for the customer if the organization can provide it. They can navigate complex situations to identify mutually agreeable options.

## Layer 2: Functional

I’ve broken down this second layer into two component areas:

1. Territory Development
2. Deal Management

These two areas within the functional layer form the basis of what all great salespeople consistently do well: finding and closing deals.

Top salespeople take all of their fundamental attributes and values and develop those over time into the following functional skills:

## 2A: Territory Development

### Pillar 1: Territory Planning

All great reps create a plan of attack for their territory. This is true whether they own five Fortune 100 accounts and need to whitespace the myriad product offerings and services those accounts own or whether they have a geographic territory that has over 10,000 companies in it. All great reps take the time to analyze and prioritize their territory.

The territory planning process typically takes place infrequently (usually annually) and involves analyzing all available data to:

1. Rank and prioritize accounts
2. Identify specific plays or “bets” to place early
3. Create a coverage model and action plan for remainder

A rep without a plan, or a rep not following their territory plan, will chase shiny new leads rather than focusing on the accounts with the highest potential and propensity. Reps who build and follow a territory plan outperform because their conviction and focus drive results where the scale of those results can be meaningful.

### Pillar 2: Pipeline Generation Activities

With a plan in place, top reps start putting the wheels in motion quickly and do so consistently. They only focus on what they can control—the inputs—and trust that the results will come.

Great reps are innately persistent in their pursuit of pipeline. They combine their acumen, creativity and diligence to create new campaigns and approaches and then adapt and iterate based on changing market conditions.

Top reps strike a balance between highly personalized outreach to their top accounts and tailored but programmatic outreach to Tier 2 or 3 accounts. If partnered with an Associate or BDR, a top AE will create clarity for ownership and activity accountability.

An excellent salesperson enjoys the hunt and loves nothing more than creating new deals to fill the top of the funnel. The reps that overachieve goals most consistently are always the ones who are great at filling the top of the funnel and don’t primarily rely on other sources of leads such as inbound and partners.

## 2B: Deal Management

### Pillar 3: Discovery

Top reps show up to every call with an informed perspective on their solution and the account. They don’t use discovery as a substitute for preparation—a cardinal sales sin. Instead, excellent salespeople will often present or discuss a bit of their perspective on the market first, to rapidly build credibility. Then, with the implicit permission earned, they’ll ask a handful of questions with surgical precision.

Many sales reps ask lots of questions because they've been taught that more discovery = better. That's wrong. You want to get as much useful information in as few questions as possible. Instead, as the deal progresses, ask more questions based on the context of the current discussion. Discovery is not a first call, but rather a theme carried on throughout the entire deal.

Top reps also understand that an effective sales motion is about a consistently mutual exchange of information (and power) and they use questions as a tool to reframe the evaluation, or to engage additional stakeholders. (“What reports are most important to your VP of Engineering or CTO?”)

Excellent sales people also use discovery to qualify out an opportunity. Because they’re ruthless with their allocation of time, they don’t want to work on a deal that will ultimately waste it. If a deal is not viable for any number of reasons, they’ll quickly point the buyer in the direction of a different company. That said, if a little bit of creativity could help them design a unique solution, they’ll vet that out first!

### Pillar 4: Stakeholder Engagement

The rigor of account planning and stakeholder mapping will vary between a salesperson covering Startups and a one covering Fortune 500 accounts, but some amount of account-level planning & research are always required to be well prepared and identify all of the stakeholders. Great reps can quickly gather all of the right information from both public and internal data sources to create a complete view of an account and its stakeholders.

Top reps also consistently re-assess the full set of stakeholders, both influencers and decision makers in their accounts and use the account mapping exercise to create a plan for peer-level engagement. They understand that sales in a team sport and they lead an internal team including senior management as part of their sales campaign to minimize risk for the buying committee.

### Pillar 5: Solution Presentation

Top reps have a voracious appetite for knowledge about their solution, and their buyer’s challenges that drive them towards it. When it comes time to present their solution, the rep can clearly articulate the situation their customers most often find themselves in and logically explain the reasons buyers specifically chose their solution. They’re also quick to point out why you might choose a competing solution if necessary.

A strong rep consistently takes the time to learn about the competition so as to be highly knowledgeable and not at all dismissive of the technology landscape. By being intimately versed in competitive knowledge, the best reps can have a constructive conversation with buyers about differences, and what downstream impacts those might have on a workflow.

Excellent reps will consistently tie the features and capabilities they present to the ways in which users create new value for their business. Great reps do this without overusing the word “value,” which is wildly overused in sales conversations.

### Pillar 6: Project Management

There’s no shortage of research on the increasing size of buying committees. Bigger buying committees makes the task of reaching a consensus decision ever harder for the buyer, never mind the seller. Top sales reps are exceptional project managers. They present a compelling series of steps for the evaluation of their solution and can clearly articulate the need for the right set of stakeholders at each step of the process.

For deals of any materiality strong sales people will continuously share and update the project plan so that no surprises show up at the end and derail the timeline or add unnecessary risk (InfoSec reviewed this, right?)

In the largest deals, the top rep acts as the main coordinator of resources and activities taking place on both sides of the table. They shepherd the process forward and address risks and issues throughout. They see around corners and proactively prevent issues from happening before they arise.

### Pillar 7: Negotiation

Top sellers understand that negotiation doesn’t just take place at the end of an opportunity, once your solution has been selected, but that the entire cycle is an extended negotiation. They’ve refined their ability over the years to negotiate the process of the evaluation such that they tilt it in their favor. They’re very comfortable navigating creative quid pro quo exchanges. (“I’d be happy to fill in your security questionnaire if we can set up our CEO with your VP of People for 20 minutes next week.”)

When it comes to commercial conversations, top reps draw on their desire to create a win-win solution for both parties. They are confident that they’ve established substantial and quantifiable value during the presentation process, so they have a solid platform to stand on.

Excellent sales people seek to understand the specific desires (ie “reduce OpEx this year”), and not just the generalities (ie “lower price”) when negotiating. And they never, ever, negotiate against themselves. (“Here’s a discount you didn’t ask for.”)

While negotiations can sometimes get contentious with each party trying to act in their own best interests, top reps consistently exercise empathy and intellect to seek out mutually beneficial scenarios. They also acknowledge that sales is a team sport, and will negotiate to loop in leadership on both sides to expedite the process as needed.

## Sales Excellence

Being excellent at sales is a combination of foundational characteristics and attributes as well as the execution of complex functional competencies learned over hundreds of sales cycles. We use this framework here at Ashby to discuss both performance and career development.

This model provides a rubric by which salespeople can aim to objectively assess the skills that ultimately lead to their performance. I highly recommend doing a self assessment.

Excellence means always trying to do better and aim higher - and that requires careful quantification of even the most invisible attributes. When it comes to Sales, it's clear to see what makes a great team member - here's why.

Sales Excellence | Approaching Sales As A Quantifiable Skillset For Assessment


<Hint>This article was adapted from an internal post I wrote to the team.</Hint>

It's almost that time of the year for reflection and long form thoughts (I'm actually hoping to be able to do this much more frequently soon)!

In our internal post "The Year(s) Ahead", I focused heavily on product and execution. While these areas remain critical, my recent reflections are more focused on scaling the Ashby team, which is the natural next focus area after initial product-market fit.

How do we maintain what has made us special so far? And what will need to change in the coming months?

## Quick Personal Reflection on Time

About two weeks ago, I took a Friday off. Even though I wasn't working that day, I passively generated some of the best long term thinking in weeks.

It is a bit cliché, but I have generated many of my best ideas while going on a run (at least it's not the shower!).

It is well known that frequently taking a step back and taking time off is very important yet it's easy to get lost in execution mode since, at this stage of a company, there's always too much work for too small of a team.

I also spent my Friday reading a large chunk of [this interesting book on work and time](https://www.amazon.com/Overwhelmed-Work-Love-Play-When-ebook/dp/B00EX0XYU6/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1633648964&sr=8-1). While I don't agree with all of it, it did trigger me to reflect more on how I (and we as a company) spend our time.

## Time at Ashby

Managing time is something we have focused on very early as a company. One of the main goals of  [Thoughtful Communication](/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication) is to allow us to be very productive without working unsustainable hours (optimizing for the long term is another of our values).

So far our focus around time management has been heavily focused on _excelling at execution_. As with many startups, Ashby started with a large burst of research and creativity followed by a long cycle focused on executing against the early insights.

![Research vs Execution](/images/time_and_productivity/chart.png "Rough approximation of time spent on execution vs. research and planning.")

## A New Phase

Ashby is now entering a new phase.

There are two key milestones that will impact how we use time going forward:

- Within the next year or so we will have completed executing against most of our initial insights. More time and focus will shift to novel features and products.
- We need to do everything at a larger scale. In addition to doing a great job at what we do (e.g. writing product specs, on-boarding customers), many of us will need to take time to build a "machine" that can do the same at scale.

In order to free up time to work on these new priorities, we will have to take away some time from pure execution. Someone who is responding to customer requests 40 hours a week doesn't have the time and focus to build out a system (team + processes) that can ensure amazing support at 5x the scale of customers. A sales rep who is on demos all day cannot come up with creative new prospecting ideas. An engineer working heads down on code 40 hours a week won't be able to research and generate new product ideas or devex/infrastructure improvements.

Part of the answer here is hiring. We will need to build enough slack in each team to free up capacity for longer term initiatives alongside day to day duties.

**But the other part of the answer is thoughtful time management.** By forcing ourselves to invest some amount of time in long-term initiatives, we can relatively quickly reduce the execution load (a very good recent example of this is our Sentry fixer rotation).

## Creating Leverage Needs Time, Enter "Leverage Time"

I've touched on this in the paragraph above, but time, when wisely invested, can be leveraged (which means it can pay itself back many times over in a short period of time). Examples of activities that create leverage:

- Taking time to learning a commonly used tool/technology deeper to be able to move faster.
- Taking time to create a snippet out of a frequently used response to customers.
 - *More generally, we can reflect on activities that consume a lot of our time and build solutions to reduce or eliminate these activities.*

### Detour: Quick Side Note on Engineering Leverage Time

When starting Ashby, Abhik and I discussed early on how valuable it could be to have an engineering coach. Their role would simply be to spend some amount of time shadowing each engineer on the team: observing how they used their IDE, how they set up their local development environment, where they spend time, etc.<Footnote>We don't have an open role for an "enginering coach" (yet), but if you're an experienced engineer that would be interested in doing this I'm happy to chat!</Footnote>

To this day, I'm still embarrassingly slow at some software engineering things and pairing with others has helped me learn a ton. In most jobs involving mechanical engineering, it is very common to be observed and trained while doing the job. For software engineering, obviously only a small part is "mechanical" and most time is spent thinking. But I've still seen huge productivity boosts by, for example, learning better debugging techniques.

I'd like to see some engineers on the team use leverage time to pair and see what the results are (I also assume this transfers pretty well to other roles). To allow this to be effective, you are not allowed to be worried about looking stupid in front of others 😀.

## Permission and Systems Matter

We are generally a team of high trust and ownership. We focus on the results of people's work not how they did it. But we are also a team of ambitious people who want to be as fast, productive, and responsive as possible.

### Quick Personal Detour to Make a Point

I'm fairly confident that I would be better at my job if I could go on midday runs 3-5 times a week (instead of at most once a week today). For me that was not always the case when I was heads down executing on engineering projects (I still found it helpful, but not nearly as much as now). But now, some time away from responding or reacting to day to day tasks lets me reflect and find leverage points to better use my (and our team's) time going forward.

So why don't I? Partially because I don't have systems in place to block off enough time. Partially because I feel like I would be setting a "bad example" by being away from my desk midday multiple hours a week. While I'm pretty confident the team wouldn't take it that way, it is still a nagging concern (I'll work on improving on this point).

If that is true for me, it is likely true for many others on the team.

If we want to spend more time on leverage time, we will need to give ourselves permission to do so. And we will need to put systems in place to ensure that we get that time.

## Finding Balance and Finding What Works For You

While I believe we need to find more time for long-term initiatives, that still needs to be balanced with some important concerns:

- We still need predictability in schedules.
    - When, roughly, will a feature be released to a customer?
    - How quickly can customers expect support responses?
- We don't want to get to a place where we are generating a huge volume of ideas we never execute on.

Depending on, for instance, your role at Ashby or your current projects, that will mean that the ratio of execution time to leverage time will vary and there will likely still be stretches of execution-only time.

When and how exactly you want to use leverage time will also depend on your personal preferences and work habits.

## A First Iteration of Leverage Time at Ashby

<Hint type="success">This started as a proposal to the team. With unanimous support and excitement, we've implemented our first iteration. We'll loop back with results 😀.</Hint>

To start experimenting with leverage time, we'd like you to try to dedicate **10% of your work time to leverage time**. To create a system and explicit permission we will block off everyone's calendars *every other Friday*. Especially for customer facing roles, this will be a forcing function to bundle customer interactions together and create a decent chunk of mostly uninterrupted time.

For customer support in particular, we will have to work on some kind of special rotation. We will work a bit more with the other customer facing teams to define what SLAs for responding to customers might look like.

How might you use leverage time?

- Pair program to improve your debugging skills.
- Work on a blog post you've wanted to write for a long time.
- Go for a long walk to work through a complicated problem.
- Write a proposal for a product, design system, or infrastructure change.

We're excited to get your feedback and see where this goes!

## P.S.

This post was written in my head while on a run. Good evidence that (good?) work can be done away from keyboard and screen.

## P.P.S.

Somewhat related reading:

- [Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time](https://www.amazon.com/Overwhelmed-Work-Love-Play-When-ebook/dp/B00EX0XYU6/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=overwhelmed&qid=1635607843&qsid=144-2077181-7884731&s=digital-text&sprefix=overwhel%2Cdigital-text%2C150&sr=1-1&sres=B00EX0XYU6%2CB01N8YJFTN%2CB00E1O6VG8%2CB08HNLKH7Z%2CB009GIPH0K%2CB01N7WQF5T%2CB07GY1M75M%2CB00JZOZDUY%2CB01N9KLLDV%2CB00G1J1D28%2CB09KL6SYDQ%2CB07KZJ9WS4%2CB09H63GPYV%2CB08WT3ZJQT%2CB08MY11HNL%2CB081M6DLFZ): While the book is centered more around issues mothers (and generally parents) face with time it also has great sections on how to manage time and productivity
- [Time, Talent, Energy](https://www.amazon.com/Time-Talent-Energy-Organizational-Productive-ebook/dp/B01LBRS42G/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=time+talent+energy&qid=1635902517&qsid=141-1916930-5915723&s=digital-text&sprefix=time+talent+e%2Cdigital-text%2C123&sr=1-3&sres=B01LBRS42G%2CB002U3CBUW%2CB08MYVPVR6%2CB00SI0B5VW%2CB008HALPEK%2CB004DEPHUC%2CB004JHYRM2%2CB07PX437QQ%2CB001KPZ2KW%2CB015FMV3LW%2CB00FUZPQP4%2CB000YJ66GE%2CB08B8V2SB4%2CB0816WSSHM%2CB00UCEJ230%2CB006VGG37Q): Great and short book on how companies should avoid drag on energy and time (we're implementing a lot of this!). There's a summary [here](https://hbr.org/2017/01/hrs-vital-role-in-how-employees-spend-their-time-talent-and-energy).
- [Deep Work](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted-ebook/dp/B00X47ZVXM): Good read! Caveat is that it is written by an academic who is entirely free of the demands of the business world. Some aspects are to be taken with a grain of salt, but the core ideas seem sound to me.


As we enter a new phase at Ashby, we're carving out explicit time to break us from our day to day duties and focus on activities that create leverage for ourselves and the company.


⏰ Time and Productivity

Abhik Pramanik

Kyra ran our first holiday book exchange, and it's been a hit with the team (to the point people mentioned it in our 1:1s). I added some photos from our recent meetups.


How we use efficient and deliberate communication at Ashby to keep Slack notifications and meetings to a minimum, focus 36h out of a 40h week, and have fun along the way 😀.


Culture

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Sales Excellence | Approaching Sales As A Quantifiable Skillset For Assessment

⏰ Time and Productivity

How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive

Product

Resources

Company

Developers

Culture

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Sales Excellence | Approaching Sales As A Quantifiable Skillset For Assessment

⏰ Time and Productivity

How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive

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