Kristen Buchanan: Equitable Onboarding

On this episode of Humanizing Tech, we’re joined by CEO and Founder at Edify, Kristen Buchanan (she/her). A longtime fan of PDXWIT, Kristen noticed many of the people she was meeting had to “manage up” during their onboarding experience. She kept hearing stories about how difficult that is, especially for people with marginalized identities. Kristen believes the new hires aren’t responsible for shaping an onboarding experience; that it’s the people managers who need to own this part of the process in a systematic way -- beyond gut feelings. This led to her building a solution that offers a ​​functional, holistic onboarding experience tailored for teams to attract, keep, and grow great employees. We learn all about Kristen’s philosophy toward equitable onboarding, team building, and her entrepreneurial journey -- specifically the importance of your mentors challenging you, how she took that leap of faith into business ownership, and her best advice both for others seeking the motivation to get their own business ideas out there and for those interviewing for new employment opportunities.

Transcript

Intro: Welcome to humanizing tech, a PDXWIT podcast. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.

This episode of Humanizing Tech is brought to you by First Tech Federal Credit Union. First Tech puts people over profit with personalized financial services and convenient banking solutions. To help you thrive. First tech offers individualized tools for your financial wellness, whether you're saving for college, buying a house or looking forward to retirement, when you're ready to save time and money visit firsttechfed.com and see how first tech invests in you. 

Before we get started, I want to acknowledge the land we are on, wherever we're tuning in from. PDXWIT recognizes the ongoing violence, trauma and erasure indigenous Oregonians and native Americans face. Portland rests on the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Cathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia river. We endeavor to have this acknowledgement and be more than just words. The tech industry is building the future of our world, and it is up to us to ensure that it is a future for all. To find out more about how we're supporting the future of indigenous Oregonians and native Americans, please visit our website. We'll add a link in the show notes as well.

Anusha Neelam: Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome to another episode of humanizing tech. I cannot believe that we are entering fall already, although it is a particularly warm day out here in Portland. So I'm going to pretend like it is still summer for as long as I can. This is your co-host Anusha, she/her.

Jesselle Headman: My name is Jesselle, also she/her pronouns, and I'm really excited today to be able to announce and introduce to you all our guests, Kristen Buchanan! Kristen goes by she/her pronouns as well. She's the founder and CEO of Edify, a software company that helps software engineering managers build technical onboarding plans for new hires. Welcome. We're so excited to have you.

Kristen Buchanan: Thank you so much both of you for introducing me, for that beautiful introduction, as well. And now that I live outside of Portland, we live on Cowlitz land. So I want to acknowledge that as well. I'm so excited. I remember way back, I want to say in like 2014, 2015, I was an early PDXWIT member and going to happy hours back when that was a real thing. [laughs] So my love for PDXWIT goes way back. 

AN: I love hearing a good PDXWIT story. So glad that you have been part of the group for a while and we are super happy to have you here, Kristin, and I'm excited to just dive into some of these questions, but first, would you be able to tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

KB:  Yeah, so, my real educational background is in adult learning, actually. I studied museum education and art history, and I spent a lot of time in both art museums and science museums, building adult education programs, and eventually found myself in nonprofit education. When I first moved to Portland back in 2013, I was working as an AmeriCorps member, and doing small business development through education. And that was super fun. It was like food cards and mom and pop shops and small organizations, not really the startup and tech world - that came later - that interest. And eventually started working for a web development company here in Portland, Oregon, doing business development, which was just really fancy words for sales. So, that was really my first, it was both my first for-profit job other than waitressing and things like that.

But it was kind of my first experience in technology. I actually remember in college having the opportunity to take HTML classes and looking at it and being like, oh, I'm not ever going to need that. And I'm going to work in museums. That's silly for me. Later of course, I started teaching myself how to code and, and all of that. I worked for this company and I actually realized how much of an education problem there was in our own industry that our customers in the web development world really didn't understand the technical requirements that our developers needed in order to build them the solutions that they wanted. And so there was always this kind of back and forth and these like 74 page RFPs, and it was really frustrating to everybody. And so I started teaching classes to our customers to be able to better articulate what they needed and what their goals were out of say the website or the app that we were going to build for them, and then relaying that back to our developers so that they could understand that.

And that was really good, both for the business. It was good for our projects. And I felt more at home, right? I felt like I was actually doing something that took my skills and applied them in a new way. Long story short though, I didn't actually love working at that particular company. And so in September of 2014, I decided I was going to start my own business. And I basically used the next six months of my job there to take some PTO and figure out how to start a business. And I was meeting with lots of people in a lot of different places in Portland, thinking about how can I apply education and learning design to these other environments that aren't non-profits, aren't museums, things like that. And I actually had some friends who I actually met through PDXWIT, they were starting new software engineering jobs and having a hard time getting onboarded.

And so we would sit down to coffee and kind of talk about what are the questions that you might ask that your manager could answer to give you a better experience, right? Basically managing up to get your own onboarding experience. And that was working for them. They enjoyed that process and it dawned on me. I was like, okay, you know, the new hire really shouldn't have the responsibility of making their onboarding experience. Although many people have, probably lots of people listening to this podcast have. Especially if you're an underrepresented person in tech, I see that happen a lot more frequently there. It's more of a systemic thing, right? The manager of the company should be dealing with this and should be really owning this process. And so why don't I, instead of helping my friends one by one, why don't I go to these companies and pitch it as a service?

And so that's kind of how I started my first business. And for the next almost six years, I ran that consultancy supporting software engineering teams, both in Portland and abroad. I went all over the world to support a lot of engineering teams to build software engineering onboarding, and a variety of other learning experiences. And that kind of really led me to starting this new company. At the end of 2019, I closed my old company and I took the intellectual property from it and started building an MVP of our software. And we can get into that journey later, but that's what I do now.

JH: What made you take that leap of faith and start trying to figure out how to build a company that's not just something that comes easy to everyone?I doubt it did for you as well. Tell us about that.

KB: That's a good question. I think now that I've done it twice, it's a little interesting and it's different than the second time. The first time back in 2014 I ended up, I actually quit that job in February of 15 and basically I had like a thousand dollars in the bank. And I had almost 70K of student loans and I was just unhappy. I was so unhappy. I was getting migraines at work. I was just feeling not myself. I'm not a person who was an anxious, depressed person and just was like, I don't want to go to work anymore. And basically, I think I had gotten so burnt out of that job that I felt like I don't want to work for anyone else. I would rather, I told myself, I'll take a service job. I will do this. If I can figure out how to support myself and have control over my life in a way. 

And so at the time I want to recognize, I didn't have children, I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't even have a car at the time. So my risk in my life was really low at that point, all things considered, right? Almost six years later when I wanted to stop my old company and start this new company, my risk was a little bit higher. I had actually become successful in my business, thankfully, so I'd bought a house. I bought a car. I was in a stable relationship, had a dog, I had things that I wanted to take care of, including myself. But I had also burnt out of that business too, right?

I was burnt out. Consulting can be really, really fun for a certain type of person in a certain period of time in your life. But I was traveling like every other week and I just am not a person who loves to travel on airplanes. And it was just getting really tiring and exhausting. And so I actually was very lucky enough to take a sabbatical. Funny enough, I had actually overpaid my taxes so much that I got a really big refund and I was able to go to Southeast Asia for a month and just sit and read books and think, and I gave my business to my employees at the time and said, pretty much everything is on autopilot. It's cool. Let's check in. I did like a few, 3:00 AM calls with my clients from Cambodia and Thailand.

But other than that, I just got to sit and think for a month. And it was a beautiful experience that I got and I realized like there's more to solve in this area that nobody else has built yet. And I am up for that journey. I am up for it being hard. I'm up for it being confusing, but I am not done with this problem space yet. And I think there's an opportunity here. And so when I came back, I actually pitched the idea to a founder friend of mine. His name was Luke KeNeice. He was the founder of puppet and another startup called clickety. And I was like, okay, here's the idea -it's going to be software to onboard software engineers. And he was like, okay, well, that's interesting. But is there anything else? It was not a very compelling pitch.
And he gave me some excellent feedback. This was, I want to say, November of 2019. He was like, come back to me. Go home and come back when you feel like you have a bigger vision about why. Why do you want to do this in the world? And it was mentors like Luke, others throughout the Portland and beyond ecosystem, that really kept challenging me and helping me think - there is something here and there's an opportunity and it's not as big of a risk as I think it could be. So business building is not for the faint of heart. And if you're a person who gets really uncomfortable, maybe not knowing where your paycheck is going to come from in three to six months, this might not be for you right now.

It might be in the future and that's okay. And it's totally okay to come at something from a side hustle perspective until you have enough traction and you feel really comfortable. There's going to come a day though, and I've heard this said about children, there's going to come a day if you really, really want your business to be successful, that you've got to take that leap. And you just have to have faith and it's faith in yourself. It's not faith in the market. Anything else you should do your homework on that and make sure that you have tried to sell this product, that there are customers who are gonna buy it. Anytime a business owner or somebody with an idea comes to me. And I'm like, okay, that's really interesting, have you sold it? And they're like, oh no, I've just been thinking about it. Like go sell that, try to see if someone will buy that from you, because if they won't, it might not be a good time for you to quit your job and try this. But that's one of my philosophies in my experience.

AN: That's awesome. And first of all, I just want to say, it's crazy how much I'm getting a little bit of time to hit reset can really bring us that clarity, that much needed clarity sometimes. But it sounds like you eventually hit a point in your career where entrepreneurship really seemed like the route for you and the best choice for you as well. Did you always know that was something that you wanted to do, or was that something that you sort of landed upon after going through several hurdles in your career? 

KB: I love this question. So a couple of things, one, I've always had an authority problem. Two, I've always jokingly, but semi seriously said, I think I've almost always almost been fired from a job I've never been fired. Thankfully, knock on wood here. [laughs] At this point, I do have a board. I can actually be fired from my own business, but let's hope I don't. But I am the kind of person that's always asking why, why does it have to be like that? What about the system? Can we go back and see what the root cause is? Let's investigate that. And that can be really threatening. And I think a lot of people who are ambitious in problem solving in their career and are creative, people feel that. And then unfortunately that really a lot - I don't want to bucket all businesses into the same bucket - but it can be very threatening to people who have built a successful company.

They don't want to change the way that it is, right? Especially nonprofits, especially institutions like schools, things like that. The way things have always been is the way things will be in their eyes. And it can be very challenging. I have so much respect and support for people who want to change things from the inside out and they have the fortitude and patience to do that. I don't have the fortitude and patience. I'm a very impatient person. And so I've always known this about myself, even from the time I was a little kid. I grew up Catholic and I got in trouble because I was selling holy cards. They're like baseball cards, but for saints, if you're Catholic. You can collect and they’ve got prayers on the back, and I would print them out at my house.

And we had like this pretend laminator thing that you would roll stuff through and I'd cut them out and then I would go sell them. And then I got in trouble for that, but that was kind of like my first business, you know? And I was always trying to make other little businesses as a kid and even into high school and college. And so I knew that I wanted to do this. And I think a lot of people do, I hear from a lot of people, especially women who get into their late forties or fifties, even later than that and say, gosh, I've always wanted to do this, but I've been so nervous. And that's why I emphasized a couple of minutes ago, faith in yourself, right? That you can do this if you want to do it, right?

And I think the other thing, and this is not quite your question, but in the tech world, we tend to look at these articles from tech crunch or fancy places like this. And it's like some 22 year old dude who went to Stanford or Harvard, and then they made this cool startup and they raised 11 bajillion dollars. And then you think that that's what a business is. And I'm here to tell you that is not what a business is. For the most part, those startups, even startups like my own company today, and we can even talk about this if you're curious, but they are not profitable. They're not true businesses. At the end of the day, they are propped up by venture capital money. And that's a whole nother conversation. It's a whole different kind of economy in a whole different way of running a business, but you can make a solid business for yourself, whether it's in tech or not, in a really kind of genuine way to yourself and to your values. It doesn't have to look like what you see in Fast company magazine or other places like that.

AN:  Yeah. And I'm curious with what you just mentioned in regards to when you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be okay with some level of instability and not necessarily needing to know where your next paycheck is coming, and really believing in yourself and that being the north star for how you pave the way forward. Do you have advice for people that want to start their own company or have their own ideas that they want to forge ahead with? And what sort of motivation did you use when you were starting your company and building up?

KB: Absolutely. Yeah, to answer your first question, I think that my best - I don't know if it's my best - advice, that comes to mind in this question is don't sit on it. Don't sleep on it. If you have an idea for a soap company, a software company, anything - come up with what was called your MVP, your minimum viable product. You won't know, by the way, until you try to go give it to somebody and get them to pay for it if it's your MVP. You might come with some soap and they're like, mm, no, that isn’t it, it doesn't smell good. [laughs]  I'm not going to pay for that. Or it makes me itchy or whatever. You have to actually get it out there. And I have known people unfortunately all across the spectrum of people who sit on something for months or years even.

And it's because they don't feel like it's perfect yet. And unfortunately there is no perfect. For those of you listening, who feel like you want to get it picture perfect or pixel perfect. It's just never going to happen. Let me tell you, because what's going to happen is when you put something out into the world, and if it's unique, you are actually expanding the horizon line of your customers. They could not see that future and now that you've given them something that they can see a future that's beyond what you gave them, right? You keep expanding how far they can look out into the world. And it's like, oh, what if you did - I'm just going to keep with the soap metaphor - what have you did shampoo? What if you did body scrub? Like what if you did all of these other things, right?

And they wouldn't maybe have been able to tell you that if they didn't love your really unique combination of essential oils in this one soap that you made at the first time, right? And so whatever that kernel of an idea is - you've got to get it out. Whether it's a paper, a piece of paper, like really the first version of this software was a whiteboard sketch with an old customer of mine. That was the first version of the software. We call that a paper prototype, right? Back when you could actually be in conference rooms with people. And I think that was also November 2019 when I sketched that up for somebody and it gets more and more real, the more people you talk to about it, and the more feedback that you get. Even in Edify today, a year and a half in, I did this this morning.

I am sitting there talking to potential customers or people who would use a product like mine, asking them stuff. I'm not selling them stuff, actually. I'm asking them, what are your pain points? What do you feel is missing from your stack of work tools? Or why do you feel like this is so challenging? Why do you do it this way? What do you wish for if you could wave a magic wand? And if you've got a kernel of an idea to hold it in is both a disservice to the world, and it's a disservice to you. Because if you don't ever put it out in the world, you'll never get the feedback, you'll never be able to sell it. There's somebody that I know who I have in my mind right now that I've known for probably five or six years.

And they've had this beautiful idea and they've just never put it out there, right? And it really breaks my heart because I think that it could be a thing. I think it could be real business. Now, no one else can make your business for you. Like you have to go out and do it. You have to be comfortable believing that you can sell it. And I think something that holds a lot of people back is this selling concept. It's this idea that I have to give somebody something they don't want. But if you are building something that you think has value in the world, then it's not going to be hard to sell it because you need to match the thing that you're building that has value to the kind of problem that person's experiencing and not every person is going to experience it.

There are engineering managers in the world who are really, really organized, and they do a really good job with onboarding and they don't need a product like at Edify right now. I think it's the minority of those managers, but I'm not going to sell to them, because they don't need it. And it's just going to be an unfulfilling experience for me and for them. So if it's your soap company and somebody is really happy with their personal care routine, then probably don't bother there. But other people who might not be, or who are searching for a particular kind of product, you have an opening there, you have a niche. So that's my biggest advice for starting. From a motivation standpoint, I think it comes back to what I said about a disservice that you are withholding your great idea from the world.

Why would you do that? You are such a brilliant person. You have so many talents to give every single person here and this world. Why not put it out in the world? Now there are a lot of really annoying, a lot of artificial and frustrating barriers to the logistics of starting a business. But the actual idea, you can do that today. You can literally go out onto the street and ask somebody, do you think this is an interesting idea? Do you know anybody that would want this kind of thing? And you just keep doing that until you find out?

JH: Absolutely. And this actually phases us into kind of what I'd hoped we would chat about a little bit, about the work that you do and onboarding and how that can really impact change in an organization. And so I'd love to kind of chat a little bit about the ways that you feel onboarding can really change a behavior within a company, make them more effective, and help them grow. I am an HR professional, so I'm very excited to hear your take on this in this space.

KB:  Yeah, absolutely. I think that onboarding has the power and the potential to be actually one of the biggest change agents in an organization. And I want to use a very particular example of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I'm going to say some things that might not be very popular. And that's okay. I have come to terms with not always being super popular. There are a lot of companies who go out and hire a DEI coordinator, right? And that person usually reports to HR. And that person is usually not very empowered - they don't necessarily have their own budget, they don't necessarily have their own staff. They are not usually empowered to do the real work that they have to do, right? And here's an example, like to bring this to onboarding. Onboarding has a place in DEI work because it is actually the vehicle that you can bring somebody into a new way of thinking, right?

You can actually change. You can say, this is how we do things at this company. We just have a minimum bar of these kinds of behaviors. This is how we treat people. This is how we ask you to be, for example, at our company at Edify, we just say, what are your pronouns? It is not a conversation about, do you use pronouns or not? You do use pronouns. They are some set of words, which ones would you like to use? And so it's not an argument about like, well, I am a he or I am a she and I don't feel like I identify and you should just assume about me. We just don't make assumptions. And so you don't have to have this big conversation if you start from the beginning, because everybody who comes into your culture realizes this is the culture that they expect.

And guess what? Onboarding is also a time for offboarding. Onboarding as a time to say, this employee is not going to adhere to these values, or they don't want to adhere to these values. And it is much better for everyone if you just say bye in that month and a half to three months. Where it's like, I don't want you to be unhappy here. To your employee, if you really don't have  the right orientation toward these values that our company has or toward even the technical work that we do, which does happen too sometimes, let's go find you a job that is going to make you happy. And I also don't want to bring toxicity into my company when I don't need to. And so I think if we looked at onboarding like this tool and not this, ugh, all we have to do the onboarding, all the documentations out a day, we got to like schedule all the stuff as this work that we had to do.

And we looked at, instead, it onboarding like at every level, both the company where at the HR level, the organization, the department level and in the team level, if we looked at it like this tool for building great cultures, we could gain a lot from it. That's sort of my perspective on how to use onboarding to be the change tool, the change agent that you want, whether it's through changing your company's culture and influencing the value set that you have, or teaching junior engineers from code school how engineering works at your company. You can do it at both levels.

JH:  I would love to take a little bit more into that and dig a little bit more, if both of you don't mind. My followup question would really be - we know that everybody learns differently, right? And as an adult learning professional for most of your career, I think that there's probably a sense of the need to kind of create equity within that process when we have folks that come from different backgrounds and learn differently. And so I'd love to hear, where has utilizing onboarding as a tool for creating equity come into play for you in the work that you're doing? 

KB: Absolutely. It's such a good question. I follow those sciences around learning styles really closely. And it's actually a very fascinating corner of learning science in that. There is research that shows that there are different learning styles. Some people do prefer to hear things -  they're auditory. Some people need to be physical - they're kinetic. The list goes on. The interesting thing about the research is that it actually shows that somebody's preference doesn't have a very strong correlation to how successfully they learn something, which is very interesting. That being said, it is important to honor someone's preference typically, if we can. Because that impacts their motivation to learn. And so there are other components outside of just this correlation causation, right? And so honoring a person's preferences is really critical. And so I think I'll name a couple of different ways that you can do that in onboarding at a scalable level. 

You don't have to create, here's my kinetic learner onboarding program. Here's my auditory. You don't have to do that. You can have basically a variety of ways for somebody to engage in one program. So for example, all of us live on zoom these days, right? For the most part, I actually have one client customer at Edify who's all back in the office and I'm just kind of confused. And I just really don't understand but, but to each their own, right? For the most part, all of my customers are like, we're never having an office ever again. But the trouble with zoom is that there's a lot of emotional and mental labor that goes into trying to read people's body language. And this can be even in real life, physical situations, very challenging for people on the Asperger's autism spectrum.

And so having to do that extra layer of, oh my gosh, what's what is the facial expression that this person is making? I can't make it out ‘cause the video is weird. This is very stressful. And so you could try something like, let's just have an auditory session, let's turn our cameras off for this session. It doesn't have to be that every single session is like that, but you can pepper that through your sessions. Or you can offer a video recording and invite someone to turn the video off so they can just listen to it. Some people like to just have a podcast sort of environment walking around. So there's some things that you can do with the content that you're already creating to do that. There's also things that are more active. We have something at Edify called a user manual and everybody makes a user manual and you can hear it called by different names.

But basically it's a document that each employee at Edify myself included write when we onboard and then we keep it updated. It has things like, here's how I like to receive feedback. Here's how I like to receive praise. Here's how I want to receive criticism. And it allows for both self-reflection number one, is this actually how I want to be talked to and be interacted with? And number two, it's disclosing how I want to be interacted with to other people. So for example, I do have employees who  really prefer not to have public praise. It makes them uncomfortable. It's not something they like. So what I do is I don't call them out in slack, publicly, or in a meeting. I give them private praise because that's what they've requested. And so you can use onboarding as a time to have your new employee build that user manual or whatever you'd like to call it.

But what you need to make sure you do is not just that the person makes it, but that that manager and their team understands it. And so something valuable you could work into your next team meeting is, hey everybody, let's go take a look at everybody's user manual. We've had a couple of new people join. Let's just make sure that we're comfortable with how people interact and how we want to be communicating with each other. So I think there's just a couple of examples of how you can honor people's different learning styles by both asking them and giving them different options of just how they would like to consume information.

AN: Wow. That is some really, really good advice.  I feel like there's so much there for people to be able to kind of take and run with in their own respective companies and their jobs as well. So thanks for sharing that, Kristin, I'm curious, I know Edify software is mostly geared toward technical teams, so engineers engineering teams, what would you say are some of the considerations that are different when it comes to onboarding engineers or engineering teams?

KB: That's a great question. And I'm kind of going to give you a cop-out answer. What's different is actually not so much the type of organization, but the team. So I have this methodology or this visual metaphor of a cake -  imagine a three layer cake. The top layer is our company cake. It's like welcome to Edify, right? So everybody who joins is going to get that cake, it's going to have HR stuff, payroll, how do you get your benefits, culture, mission, vision, values, history of the company. Then you have your second layer of the cake, which is your department. So you might have engineering, finance, sales, marketing, et cetera. And then you have your third layer, which is your team. So let's imagine that, you know, Edify, for example, we are small, we're only 11 people.

We have one engineering team, but one day, hopefully if we're successful, we'll have many engineering teams. And maybe something is different between team A to team B. So when we make a slice of this cake for our new hire on their first day, they are going to get a different slice than somebody else who's on a different team. And that's the way that I like to model how to customize onboarding for a person is that we know what's true for the whole company, we know what's true for the whole organization, that that's the department that they're coming into, and we know it's true for their team. And I think what is different about the team onboarding than the company and even the department onboarding, is that there is stuff that's unique to them that they don't share with other teams. And the way that I kind of help people walk through, what do I put in that part of the cake? 

What ingredients go in there are these four pillars. And there's four pillars of knowledge type that we call it at Edify. One is a professional expectations, which is, how do we behave in this organization? Two is product. What do we make in this organization? Or this team? Three is process. How do we make it? And then four his tech stack, what are the tools that we use? And you can apply all four of those to every single org, a finance team, a sales team, because everybody's product is going to be something different. It just so happens that the engineering team builds a product, usually that is for an external customer. Sometimes you have a dev ops team or an SRE team, and they're building a product that is internal. So they don't have paying customers. They have other engineering teams that are their customer, but that is a product, right? And you want to onboard them into understanding that product. So if you think about both that three layer cake and the four pillars of knowledge, it helps you whip up that right recipe for the new hire.

JH: If that is not literally the best analogy I have ever heard for onboarding. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. Just one of those moments where I'm actually left speechless and I'm not someone that's found in that state very often. So thank you very much for that. Well this has been such a fantastic conversation. I honestly could keep going all day, but I want to talk a little bit about the future. You mentioned, hopefully we're a successful business and people continue to value the product, but tell us about the future for Edify and what that looks like and where you hope to grow and how?

KB:  Absolutely. I appreciate that. And I'm so glad that those little metaphors are helpful. It's funny, through all of learning science, my whole world, my whole industry is very academic. In fact, it's actually strange how academic learning science and organizational development and change management are.  If you looked at all of the books, you're just like, do you do any of you work at real companies? Do any of you apply this stuff to like real life? So I've always wondered, why don't you just have something useful here? And Jesselle as an HR professional I know you are feeling this. So anyway, I'm glad it's helpful. 

But in terms of the future for Edify, I see us growing into what I would call a sort of an operating system for engineering teams. And I see a future that I don't think a lot of customers see right now, which is an earlier, I talked about moving that horizon line. Every time you ship a new feature,and we see this in our own company today, every time we ship something new customers are like, oh, okay, well I could do this and I could do that. And you're like, okay, cool, cool, cool. We have not built that yet. Let us get on that. Pump the brakes for two seconds. But we see all of this friction in engineering organizations that goes around the employee life cycle from recruiting to onboarding to performance management, promotions, even into succession planning and off-boarding when people leave a team or a company. All of these things are normal patterns of behavior, but in engineering orgs in particular, there is a lot of knowledge flow and transfer that's not very good. 

There's a lot of reticence to document things. Things are so quickly that sometimes documentation doesn't make sense in that environment. And there are a lot of long held beliefs about what a successful “engineer” should be able to do without support. And my argument in my own observation over the last six or seven years has been, if you want a healthy high performing team, that is a diverse team that represents your customer set, then you need to invest in these processes. You need to respect your customer enough to respect your team. And when you fail to do these things, when you fail to build out these processes in your engineering team, you not only harm your team members, the people who actually come into your organization, that you spend, frankly, hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring.

We don't even need to talk right now about how expensive it is to hire an engineer. An engineer can get a job today in like 10 minutes. Like it is an insane environment right now. When you fail to do that, that means you're also failing your customers. And so I think that if you want to run a good business, you will jump on board this train that I see leaving the station now. So I think that the future for Edify is helping engineering organizations turn those manual complicated gut driven people processes into a software that is humane. And that is understanding of those environments that engineers work in, but is smarter, is better than our guts, right? So that's the future that I see for us. And I'm super excited to build it. I love that my team is growing to build it. I love that our investors see that with us. And of course, the day to day of business building is its own nonsense and its own challenge. But, I've never been happier honestly, in my life like this. You know when you have really hit on something that you care very deeply about, then you don't feel like it's that hard. Honestly, you just face the things that are hard.

AN:  Well, that's amazing. It's such good advice and I just wish you and, and Edify the best of luck. I know we'll be keeping an eye on what's next for you and your company. And I know that you shared some really great advice throughout the discussion here, but as we close out our segment, do you have any advice for our listeners on things that they can do? And things that they can apply toward their jobs?

KB:  Yeah. I love that question. Um, and I think I mentioned earlier a lot of people would probably have had the experience of actually having to onboard themselves in environments where I wish that they didn't have to do that. But I would love to give you a framework for if you are changing jobs. And if you are finding yourself in a place where there's not very clear onboarding. I would love to give you some tools that you could bring into that conversation with your manager. I'm a huge fan of Socratic questions and humble inquiry style questions. But what you might do is remember that three layer cake and those four pillars. So write yourself, literally fold a piece of paper in half, twice. So you get four quadrants and write those four categories. Remember the professional expectations, process, tech stack, and product.  And start asking like writing questions, what questions do you have about this organization in these four categories?

The categories are honestly like you're going to have things that are like, is this a process question or a product question? It doesn't matter. It's just there to help you start asking questions, um, and identify, we're not rigid about what goes in there. It's just a place to jump off from. And so use that in conversation with your manager and actually say, if you want me to be successful, you gotta help me answer these questions and I'd love to get them written down. I'd love to get those answers documented and kind of archived for future use for other new hires as well. And I also want you, especially if it's female identifying people, or non-binary identifying people listening to this podcast who may be more apt to do unpaid labor like this, which by the way, if you are writing something down like this, that really should have been somebody else's job to do.

And this isn't really quite part of your job description, you might use that to advocate and say like, Hey, I want to recognize that I need this for my onboarding plan, but if we want to hold to our values as a company, I'd like some support in building this. So is it possible that you could hand me another senior engineer, somebody to help me with this? Because I need to be able to do my actual job and this documentation, right? So talk to your manager about that and don't be afraid to say, this is extra work that probably would've been helpful for me to actually walk into. And I'd love some help with it, so that you can advocate for yourself in that way. And then when you change jobs, inevitably, talk about how you help to build that onboarding program. Talk about how you help to actually articulate these things and see them as a point of value in your organization. 

AN: Again, such good advice.

JH:  Absolutely. And I can second that, that is exactly the effective way to engage, right? I think so much about having those conversations is challenging. And it's not something we're necessarily taught how to do. And so I appreciate you putting the fire under people's seats to make sure that they're  aware and engaged in their onboarding, because it has the ability to really make or break your success in a certain space.

KB:  It absolutely does. And it breaks my heart when I see people feeling like they have to leave a place or have to change jobs. I don't know if I would call it traumatic, but, on the hard end of the spectrum, it really can be. It is a lot of angst and sometimes pain to find a new job, to leave a job. It's awkward at minimum, you know? And so I would rather people find a way to be successful. I used to teach classes at a local code school here in Portland. And I would tell people, if it's a place that wants you to be successful, try. If it's a place that seems like they're just throwing barriers up for you, then that's not your battle. That's not your battle to fight. And I think that that's something that's really hard to remember often when you're like, oh my gosh, what is it going to look like if I leave this job? Well, it's gonna look like if you chose to leave in the first three months, you've got some really valid reasons to explain. And then now you have new data for your next interview. What are you looking for? What kinds of questions are you going to ask about their onboarding program? Things like that.

AN:  Oh, Kristen. Thank you again so much. I am walking away from this discussion, all sorts of inspired. And I know I'm walking away with a lot of advice and things that I know I can do in my own job. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. And also a huge shout out to my co-host Jesselle. It's been great co-hosting with you and a huge shout out to our incredible podcast team. Your dedication makes it possible to share all of these amazing stories. And of course our listeners thank you for tuning in as always. And we will catch you on the next episode.

KB:  You so much Anusha and Jesselle has been fabulous to talk to you. 

JH: Thank you.  You as well.

AN: Thank you. 

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