Deep Dive with Claire Hughes Johnson

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Claire Hughes Johnson. Claire is the former COO and current Corporate Advisor of Stripe. She's a former Google executive. I forgot to mention that in our last one. She is author of the book Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company, which is absolutely my-

Claire Hughes Johnson: Management and Company Building.

Matt Blumberg: Management and Company Building, sorry. Which is my new favorite book on management.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Well, thank you.

Matt Blumberg: It's absolutely a must- read if you are a manager. Claire, good to see you.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Good to see you. I appreciate you having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. I love your book. I would love to ask you just a handful of questions that I jotted down as I was reading it. And the first one is, you worked at Google and Stripe. Google was big when you got there and a lot bigger when you left.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. From about 1, 800 people to 60,000.

Matt Blumberg: I think 1, 800 counts as big.

Claire Hughes Johnson: It was the biggest place I'd ever worked. Yeah. For sure.

Matt Blumberg: And Stripe, you were there earlier, but you were certainly there for hypergrowth. A lot of the tactics in your book are very disciplined- operator tactics. A lot of our audience at Bolster, although we certainly do work with early public companies and series D, E, F, we also work with a lot of earlier- stage founders, seed and A and B. I guess my question for you is, did you find in your journey at Stripe that there was the same level of applicability of a lot of the tactics that you talk about in the book? I could imagine being a pre- seed founder reading your book and just being overwhelmed. Like, " Wow, it's too much process. It's too much this." How do you think about the founder journey and the scaling journey and being a disciplined operator?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. There's a section at the end of the very long hiring chapter where I say, " It's now occurring to me as I write this, that someone has read this whole chapter and thought,'Is this woman insane?' Because how are you going to possibly do all this?" And then, I say, " But actually, your talent is your most important asset." At least in most of the businesses you and I work with. And yes, you should. But you're absolutely right, Matt. You don't start heavy. You can't start heavy. It doesn't make sense. I would say that the book is not for the zero to 0. 5 or the zero to one stage. Because really, you're working on your existence. Product market- fit. You're just building the product. You're not yet building the business. The book definitely should not be applied in those early days where maybe you're not setting goals for six months or 12 months. You're saying, " In the next month, what are we trying to accomplish to figure out if we can exist?" Let's say you've graduated. You've got traction. People are willing, hopefully, to pay you even for your product. And then, you've got to turn around and build a business, and that's where the book starts to apply. But to your point, I don't think... I've talked to some founders who were like, " Should I institute QBRs now?" Quarterly business reviews. And I'm like, " Well, who's coming to that meeting?" If you don't have enough of a structure... For Stripe, we didn't institute anything like that until we were multi- product; leadership teams for multiple parts of the business. The executive team wasn't in everything anymore. First principle is, use your intuition. I am not going to bring in something heavy. I do argue that, and I still will argue to this day, that a lightweight process is your friend. The lightest possible version of some of these things is your friend, because humans like to be organized. I do think some amount of a little bit of a light version. Like, " Let's just set some goals." Because you're starting to build a muscle of, let's do a little bit of planning. Do we need to plan for five years? No. Do we need to do a business review process with a big deck? No. But let's every X, maybe it's every quarter, every six months, once a year, sit down, think about what's most important. Write it down, share it with each other. Think about the lightest weight version. The other thing that I talk about in the hiring chapter, but is true, and also in my operating structure chapter is, you're looking for replicable processes. And what was really powerful with Google's OKRs was everyone's like, " Our OKR is magical." And I'm like, " No, they're just an objective and a career resolve from Andy Grove, and they're a good way to write a goal." That's all an OKR is. But what was magical for OKRs at Google was that they used it as an organizing structure from fairly early on through pretty big scale because everybody participated. The company had OKRs. The executives had OKRs. They rolled down through teams and through individuals, through the whole company. And they made it important and they made it visible. The fact that the executive team took it seriously and wrote their own as a group and used it to show the company priorities, that was what was magical. And that's actually fairly lightweight. They just kept scaling it. You're looking for these things that you do in a custom manner that you then say, " Okay, let's build a process that's lightweight around this thing that we originally did a little bit custom." And then, if it starts to scale, you're like, " Let's actually build it really repeatedly." But I think that you get a feel, and you know this, Matt, from building companies, for when you're outgrowing something and it's got to get a little bit more. This is where you start to look at tooling. How do I build this into the way we operate more? Also, you're getting people who are specializing more in their roles at that point, and they're owning those processes. You just pick up your head and look around and say, " Are we outgrowing? Is this stuff working? Is it too light now? Does it need to get bigger?" But something is better than nothing is my main argument.

Matt Blumberg: For sure. Actually, I think one of the things I was reflecting on, having operated at bigger scale and now, again, at smaller scale, I think it's generally true that things get heavier, more complicated as you get larger. One of the things you said in the book was that company- wide meetings should be used sparingly. Actually, I think that's one of the few things that actually gets lighter as you get bigger.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: We do all-hands every Monday and it's fantastic. But at the end of Return Path, we were doing them quarterly.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Right. Same with Stripe. Same with Stripe. But what we did do actually, so I do think that's one of the things that... Because look at how expensive that meeting... Well, first of all, you can actually use it to get stuff done when you're smaller. You can use it weekly and talk about, " Let's make it..." Sometimes, you can even make a decision together when you're small enough. Whereas as you get bigger, it's much more of a broadcast forum. It's very expensive and there's 1, 000 people. That's 1, 000 hours of your employees. You really want it to be very high quality and really important content. And you don't need to do that once a week. Yeah. At Stripe, we went from weekly to monthly, to quarterly, exactly the same. But one thing we did actually bring back, which has been really successful, is we call it Fireside Pride, but it's basically the founders doing a more casual... It's all virtual and we have a user talk. We have a demo, like something happening in the product that they're... The founders curate. They're like, " Here's stuff I'm seeing in the company that I want to highlight and that I'm interested in." Occasionally, an outside speaker, but in a very casual pop into Zoom. Ask them a few questions, have them talk about what we... Really, it fits with the culture of Stripe, but it's also a chance to connect as humans with the founders and what they're interested in and what they're celebrating in the company. And then, occasionally, we have one of the other executives come in and sit in and be the co- host. I think that we lost that, especially during the pandemic, some of that. And that's been helpful. But again, it's not heavy. It's not heavy.

Matt Blumberg: Right. All right. Let's switch topics to the impact that you have as a manager on the people who work for you. One of the things that struck me that you wrote in the book was that great managers, they're great at scaling the company, et cetera, but that great managers can push employees to make career choices that leave them much more fulfilled. And I love that. I appreciated that quite a bit. I have definitely coached and mentored CEOs over time that don't get that, that feel like, " Well, why should I do that? How does that help me?" What if that's counseling them out of the organization? How do you think about that as good for the organization, as well as good for the person?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Oh, this is one of my favorite topics. And I would've said earlier in my career, let's see, maybe I was a director, maybe I was early to being VP at Google. I went to the offsite of a senior leader, because I was dotted line to him. And as the offsite ended, Matt, and this is... I was in the camp of, why would you do this? He said to his leadership group, of which I was an adjunct member, something that shocked me, which is like, " Look, if any of you are thinking of leaving or you want to talk about your career, or you're concerned you're not in the right place, you have my cell phone number. What I ask is that you call me, that we talk about it together. And you know that I'm there to support you." I walked out of there shocked. I was like, " He is telling them to tell him, to call him that they're leaving." Well, first of all, I would hope, by the way, someone you're working with would tell you with some notice. But I think he was really saying, " I want to counsel you. I want to be part of your decisions, even if your decision is something that is leaving me, leaving my team." People, by the way, who worked for this guy were always extremely connected to him, very loyal, really loved him and followed him. When he left Google, a few of them followed him, too. I'm not surprised, because they felt really cared for. My way of thinking about this is, in the book, I talk about this thing called a career conversation. But I'm like, " If you're really going to be a good manager of someone," and I give a guide... The book is very practical, so I appreciate that you liked it.

Matt Blumberg: It's practical.

Claire Hughes Johnson: It's just lots of templates, exercises, bullets. It's not abstract. I give an example of how you have a career conversation and the way, the talking. The talk track works. Of course, you have to have your own style, but why I do it when I first work with someone is, I'm trying to understand. It's not a performance conversation. It's not a feedback conversation. It is just, let me get to know you better. I say to people, tell me about not personal details they don't want to share, but where you grew up, why you went to the college you went to, why you chose that job. What I'm trying to get them to show me is their motivators. What have they done in the past? Why did they do it career- wise? And then, I'm saying, and where do you see yourself in the next five years? I'm not saying, " Tell me what job you want." It's not a promotion conversation. I'm like, " What do you think you're doing? Are you leading more people? Are you running a company? Are you founding?" I write these copious notes and I link them from our one- on- one doc. I'm like, " Here are my notes and what I learned about you." What's really interesting, Matt, is people come back, whether they're, by the way, making an internal job decision or they're making an external one, and they say, " Oh my gosh, this other team just offered me this product manager job," say. I'll be able to say, " Wow." Because we'll touch occasionally on, how are you feeling about that next five years? And I'll say, " That was never on your list of anything you thought you'd be doing." I feel like my job is to say back to you, you told me you had these ambitions. You wanted to learn in this way. Now, you're like, are you actually just being attracted by the title of that job? Did something change about what you think you want with your life? Or why would you go to that company? It's nothing to do with anything you ever said you were interested in. My job is to just help you make a good choice, and I think people trust me by that point that I really am trying to do that. But the most powerful way to do it is just to channel back what they have said and done and help them honor themselves. Because you know this, Matt. The only person who's your real career coach is you. You know what's in your head, your heart, your gut. Eventually, you know what good decisions are for you, and so I really just try to get that back. But I do think if you don't open the door for that kind of moment, that kind of conversation, and by the way, I have had people say to me, " Yes, I changed my mind." I'm like, " All right. Well, let me help you."

Matt Blumberg: Right. Tell me why. What happened?

Claire Hughes Johnson: You're retaining them, hopefully, for the company, which is in the best... Especially if you're a leader, you just want good talent to stay. They might not be in the seat that I have, but that's okay. The other is, if you're not, if they made a good decision, I have to feel good about it. Honestly, the number of people I've seen either follow a leader who supported them as they made those decisions, which has happened for me, for sure, or boomerang, by the way, back. I don't know how much you see it, but-

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. We used to celebrate boomerangs like crazy.

Claire Hughes Johnson: And that, I don't think someone's going to boomerang back if they don't feel that connection of, " That person cared about me. They cared about me as I left. They tried to help me make a right call, and I actually can go back to them." I've had a few people say, " You were right, that was not the right move. But I feel like you and I had the conversation that I can reopen the door and say,'Can I come back?' Because you were right." I think it's so important. It's the long game we all should be playing when it comes to talent. If you're not playing the long game, people feel it and they think they're just dispensable. And they're not going to do their best work for you.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. One of the things that occurred to me when I was reading your book was... We have people who listen to this podcast that are CEOs. That's fine. But we also have a lot of people who are CXOs. One of the things that occurred to me reading your book is, sometimes you get... Maybe I feel like this was me early in my career. You can be a great manager, but you can be inside of a company that doesn't value good messages, or that has a bad culture or a weak culture or something like that. What is your advice to the CXO who feels like, " Hey, I'm the discipline operator, but no one else around me is"? My superpowers are not being recognized.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. I say this a little bit in the book. I sometimes had this challenge at Google. Early Google, there was not a lot of value put on management. And I think one of the impacts I hope I had at Stripe is that I came in and was like, " You know what? Management matters and we're going to run the company as if it does." Google had so many other amazing things going for it, and I learned so much. I had an amazing time and career there. I think that the value, by the way, that was placed on management, it did increase. It was improved. But you can end up in this situation, and I guess I would say two things. I'm interested, Matt, in your point of view on this. One is, depending on where you sit in the satellite system, you can influence that or not. At Google, I didn't initially, especially early, I didn't have a lot of influence. But I decided I'm going to be an example, and I am going to honor my values and the way I want to operate and the way I want to lead people. And I'm going to hope people notice. By the way, they did. Over time, I think I gained a reputation internally that actually helped make my career there for being someone people liked working with, wanted to work for, ran things effectively. I remember when I got promoted to VP, Eric Schmidt came up to me and he's like, " People really trust you." And I was like, " Well, I hope that isn't a quizzical expression." I'm like, " I hope they do." But I think that over time, you can really accumulate something and be an example for others and be a beacon of, we can be different, even if you're not in the center of this satellite system. If you're in the center or you're close to it, which I felt at Stripe, you can change it, but you might have to take some risks. You might have to not just be an example, but insist on some things. Or by the way, you know this for executive teams, executive teams often have some things that are like people in a relationship, where the person, when the garbage gets full, the person who it bothers the most often ends up taking out the garbage. I think that a more positive spin on that for an executive team is the person who cares the most about this particular thing. Let's say, quality of management in the company. Might end up being the sponsor, the executive sponsor of the manager meeting, the monthly manager meeting. Or that we have a summit at Stripe. We call it the Manager Summit.

Matt Blumberg: Or management training?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Or management training. Oh, I had a colleague, which, bless him, by the way, he wrote our initial... I thought I was going to be the one, but to his credit, he's like, " No, I care about this. I'm going to help write the curriculum for the management training." Which, by the way, made me realize, " Hey, I'm not alone. There's people here. We care." I really think you've got to put skin in the game and be that sponsor and do it. But if you're doing it well, again, this whole theme of this talk is, play the long game.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Claire Hughes Johnson: It will matter. It will accumulate. People will want to be in your org. They will follow you and you will accumulate more influence on making it the case for others, I think.

Matt Blumberg: Let me ask-

Claire Hughes Johnson: If done well.

Matt Blumberg: If done well. Right. All right. Let me ask for a second about your former role at Stripe, Chief Operating Officer. I have always said the COO role is one that is different at every single company that has one. Yeah. There are times where it's like the head of operations. There are times where it's the inside person there. In a media company, it's often the outside person. Sometimes, I think in really early stages, when a CEO says they need a COO, it can be a crutch, because it means that they don't know what they're doing. Sometimes, it makes sense if you have a founder who's all in on one thing and they need someone to hold the rest together. I'm just curious. At Stripe, which has a reputation for being a really well- run company, what was the COO flavor or flavor of the COO role?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Well, I've said to people, one of the reasons it's hard to define that role, especially in a growth stage, which I do think is where the role makes a lot of sense, I think as companies mature, and this is true for Stripe, by the way, you can grow out of or graduate from needing this additional leverage, this additional layer. But I always say to people, I'm like, " Look, the COO role is whatever Stripe needed it to be at that given moment." So, it would be hard for me to even say to you now, I was like, " It changed a lot while I was there." But when I came in, there was a marriage for me in the role that happened, which I, by the way, really valued in the founders, which is, they really took the time to get to know me. Where could I have the most impact? Where did I have the passion and the experience? And in some cases, the experience, by the way. In some cases, the passion and where could I have an impact? The role was built on an inside- outside axis that I think is one that's more natural than people realize, which is go- to market. So, all customer- facing and support, by the way. So, support, account management, sales, eventually technical sales, all of those functions. Operational functions, but really anything customer- facing. Anything, except for our BD team, but everything else. And then, all the org and employee stuff. So, recruiting, HR, eventually workplace. Those were the two anchors. And I think if you think about it, recruiting is really sales. HR is a form of account management or customer success. A lot of what makes those things excellent is being customer- focused. The customer is either an insider or an external. Those were anchors of the role. I also had a team called BizOps that was our internal Swiss Army knife, that was my help- me- scale- this- company team. We ran company planning. We didn't have a CFO at one point. I ran some processes for running the company around planning and goals and such. And then, at various times, I also took a turn with our risk org or with some other functions when I was needed to step in and help. But that was the way it was defined for us. But I think fundamentally, it was also a role that was a compliment to the founders and where they were spending their time. And then, also, in the executive team, I think you wear two hats as COO. One is as a colleague, you are a member of the executive team, and I just happen to represent multiple functions. I would sometimes say, " Hey, with my head of people hat on, here's what I think is going on." And then, sometimes my role was to be an observer of the whole system. And that's where you're partnering with the CEO, the founder. At Stripe, we have two, but I would be the person who'd say, " Well, you don't have a lot of people seeing everything you're seeing, and I'm seeing most of it. Here's what I think we need to do." It's like an advisor, but it's also a truth teller. It's someone who's a sounding board. It's someone who is also... I think some COOs are fixers a little bit, but like, " Hey, I think this thing is not executing well. What are we going to do about it?" What's hard about that title is, it's not well- defined. But what's nice about it is people understand when the COO shows up and says, " Hey, can we talk about the execution on this thing? Can I help you?" They're generally okay with it, which I appreciated, because I wanted to be able to move everything faster for the business.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. No, that's a great description. I think the phrase that is really sticking with me out of everything you just said was, the job was what the company needed when the company needed it.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Let me end by asking you maybe three or four really practical, tactical questions, which is the theme of your book, right?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Tactics for company building. One of the things that you talked about, which I agree with 1000%, is the power of offsites no matter what your team is. One of the things that you talk about is that offsites are a place where you can practice common vocabulary, or learn common vocabulary. In my experience, the two places that common vocabulary tend to come in the most are either instruments, like people instruments, DiSC, Myers- Briggs, Toxic, et cetera, or books, or articles or podcasts. Just like-

Claire Hughes Johnson: Like frameworks, basically, you get out of it?

Matt Blumberg: Like frameworks. Yeah. Yeah.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Just top of mind, what are a couple of your favorite instruments, books, frameworks that you find when you're at an offsite with your team, like, " Hey, let's pull out our old friend, the Hedgehog," or whatever?

Claire Hughes Johnson: I know the Hedgehog, the Hedgehog framework. I do really believe, as you, I don't think that any work style, I call them, assessment like DiSC or Myers- Briggs or whatever, is perfect. But I think what is helpful is it gives some common vocabulary on self- awareness and on team awareness. So, you can map and you can say, " Oh my gosh, look, this many of us tend to be extroverts. This many tend to be introverts. This many tend to orient toward the task, this many toward people." There's a framework that I like called Insights, Insights Discovery if you Googled it, and it's built off of a... It riffed off of some of the ones you've seen, with a little more Jungian background. But one of the things they do is they give some colors to this wheel. So, you're like, " Where do I sit on this wheel?" What became a really powerful framework, and then in the book, I do an adaptation, a simplification of some of these. I call, for example, someone who's very extroverted, task- oriented director. And what Insights Discovery is, calls that red. And then, whereas if you were more task- oriented and introverted, you might be more in the analytic bucket. That's often a lot of our finance partners, some of our engineering friends. And that, in the Insights wheel, is blue. But the thing that was the most interesting is, the Stripe team did this a few times and we talked about it and we got to know each other. We got to a place where we could use the vocabulary, Matt. This is what I think you're getting at, which is, you are being a little red right now.

Matt Blumberg: Exactly.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Which means, top-down directive. By the way, fast- moving, which you sometimes really need. But hold on a minute, what about the people, or what about the process? What about the data? We would say that, and we would use the other colors. But for some reason, that, " Ooh, getting a little red," became a way that we could check each other. Because you're in a fast- moving environment, by the way. You do sometimes go a little tops- down and you need to really think about it. That's one that comes to my mind. I do think an old favorite, which is in the end of the book, is the urgent versus important. But sometimes you can catch a whole executive team spending half the meeting talking about something that isn't that important, but feels urgent. And you're like, " Wait a minute, someone should get delegated this. This is not the most important thing. In fact, this not- urgent, very important thing is what we should be talking about." That one also comes to my mind.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Okay. Next one. I have never met a CEO of a scaled company, or a scaling company, who hasn't struggled with something that you documented as a struggle, which was, you called it expanding the leadership team. It's this concept of like, well, what's the second level? It's not the C- levels, and it goes by different names everywhere; operating group, operating committee. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone that has landed on, this is how that works well. It always seems to be a shifting target. I think for the people that are on that group, they're in a tricky spot in the organization because they're not at C- level. So, they're not really running things. But they're frequently managers of managers or group heads. And they've got a lot of responsibility, but not quite enough. Anyway, what is the best version of that that you ever saw, even if it didn't stick forever?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. I wish I had. I do think this is hard. It's a moving target, and it's one of these, it's an adaptive problem. It's not a technical problem. There's not a, yes, this is the answer. This is going to move. You are going to need to examine it and move it. And if you don't is when you get in trouble, because you're running the company with the wrong people involved sometimes. But I talk about, and I added some of that content into the book, Matt, because I was surprised how many founders, I meet with a lot of founders, were bringing this question up as they were scaling. They were like, " This is the thing that's plaguing me." I'm like, " Wow, this is really painful." It was painful at Stripe, but I thought I was alone. And I actually watched it play out at Google. Google went from very small to this huge group, to this medium group, to this configuration, this exec circle thing. It happens. It happens. Okay. I think that I wouldn't say there's something I've seen perfectly well, but what I like about what we did at Stripe at certain points was, and some of these things remain and some of them have changed, but one is, keeping a quite small senior leadership team. So, trying to go around this rule of eight, eight or fewer. If you're going to make decisions, if you're going to really have conversations, stick around that. And we did for a long time in that group is it had a fairly stable composition. Which is, when you say, I appreciate you saying Stripe has a reputation for being run well, and I would say, part of that is that group stability and size and agility. That's one. But then, the pressure comes. Well, what about all these other people you're hiring? We went through some configurations. I think Facebook also did some versions of this, where it was like, well, there's an expanded group beyond that that maybe should be in a weekly company metrics review. Well, we've had a version that was more Run- the... We called it Run the Business, a Run- the- Business version that had an expanded comp. And the CEO would come to the meeting, but I would run it. But he would come and then we'd have business leaders in the company. And then, there's a technical counterpart to that. The product and engineering run the products version of that. And I think Facebook did a similar thing where it's like, there was a joint leadership team. But then, there were some pretty important groups that split off based on what they were responsible for, and had some decision- making authority. And had some overlapping membership, but separate and more expanded. I think that can work if you dedicate the time to making it real. The other thing that Stripe has today, which I think is fairly common, but people don't always get there, is yeah, to your point, there's a fairly large group of important leaders, often managers of managers, and certainly in the case of Stripe. We try to be really clear like, look, this group is not a team, is not getting together and having deep conversations and making decisions. But it's a really important forum where you need to get to know each other, because you help run things and unblock things. You're going to hear from the CEO, the CFO. How's the business doing? What's on our mind? What are priorities? And you're going to get a chance to give feedback, early feedback on stuff. Like, " Hey, we're making this change to our people processes. What do you think?" It's a one- directional feedback occasionally. But I do think having an expanded group that signals, " Hey, this person's an important role, we're listening to them," and they're hearing information at a more frequent pace than others. And they should. They should be. Because you're relying on them, by the way. You roll out your annual plan,-

Matt Blumberg: Right. They got to-

Matt Blumberg: They got to

Matt Blumberg: carry-

Claire Hughes Johnson: ...carrying that to their teams and making it real and owning it.

Matt Blumberg: I think that's right. Actually, I think that's one of the things that CEOs have to get comfortable with, with that larger group. That there's a lot of goodness that just happens from having them in the room for something.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Having them know each other.

Matt Blumberg: Having them know each other, but it's like there's some inputs and outputs. It may not be your most productive meeting of the day, but the impact on the overall organization.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that most CEOs and a lot just are impatient. They're like, " Why? This is not the most productive part of my day." But actually, it's amplifying. You're getting scale if you do the messaging right and you do the asks and you listen to it.

Matt Blumberg: Right. Yeah. All right. Here's my last question for you. Well- run companies, and I don't know if you've said this exactly, but I think you would agree based on everything I read, are really good at making clear decisions, and are also really good at doing retrospectives.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Right? Whether it's a launch or a product release or a whatever. What worked? What didn't work? What was my role in making it work?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Maybe I had done something. What have you seen as best practices not for doing those things, making decisions, holding retrospectives, but for documenting decisions and documenting the learnings from retrospectives, so that the organization can learn from them, not just the seven people sitting around the table, for the retrospective?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. You're ending on one of my pain points, Matt, where I'm like, this is so hard to solve this documenting. Where's the source of truth? This is where I've actually talked to some companies. I'm like, internal communications and internal tooling, this is one of the pain points out there. I have played around with things like decision logs. Meaning, a team where we write our most important decisions, and then we actually, why was it made? Who was there when we made it? And then, we go back and edit. Stripe, that didn't really work, so I did that at Google a little bit. One thing that has worked at Stripe that I think is, when we publish something like, " Here's our top priorities for the next six months or for the next year," the strategy, we revisit it on a cadence, let's say, of six months. Say, we published the plan for this year, which we did, and then we're looking at it six months in, and we actually do the markup. And the markup of, okay, we said these were the most important things. Is that still true? What has changed? What have we learned? You can't do this with this many documents internally, but if you have some touchstones for the year, and instead of saying, " Oh, and then we sneakily edited it and republished it," which is not great because it's not... Stripe's very transparent culture, that wouldn't... But we actually went back, did a combination of decision and retro and said, after we published this, what did we decide that was actually different than this? And we show it. What did we learn, and what did it make us change? And that was really well- received. I think picking a few touchstones that you keep a markup version and you're very clear about... Because by the way, what's this sign of intelligence? That you can get new information and change your mind. And that happens with companies and plans. That's one thing that's worked. But this is a hard one because I do think... And the retrospectives, so many of those learnings get embedded in the humans involved, not in the actual collective memory of the company. I think the way, by the way, that they do get embedded is if they become part of the value system, which is, we're always transparent when we change our mind, for example, or something. I do think, though, it's a challenge. There are so many good documents in Stripe where I'm like, " You could read a lot of retros." They're all in the inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: They're all there somewhere. Right.

Claire Hughes Johnson: You'd be trolling through quite a lot of shared docs.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Well, let's wrap up. Claire, first of all, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I really appreciate it, and I know our audience will appreciate your wisdom. I feel like I could talk to you all day long about this.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Well, I really appreciate... You clearly are an aficionado of these topics, and I really appreciate that you actually did look closely at the book and the chance to talk about some of the details.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. No, I sure did.

Claire Hughes Johnson: It's welcome. Thank you.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Thank you for being here. Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. And if you don't currently own it, you need to go own it.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Thank you. Thank you, Matt. It was such a pleasure.

Matt Blumberg: Thanks.