Lessons from managing over 700 employees while making mistakes – Resilience is more important than perfection.

You are an extraordinary leader, a founder, a manager. You and your team members are also human, so mistakes are bound to happen. When you try to run fast and achieve more, you will make even more mistakes. That’s ok and it happens to everyone. The trick is how to grow from mistakes vs slowly crumble. Use this framework to grow stronger from your mistakes rather than have them pull you and your team apart.

If you let mistakes linger, they develop a life of their own, lowering motivation, velocity and harming your culture. The worst thing about these mistakes is that you are often not even aware you made them and have no opportunity to fix them.

To deal with this fact you can slow down and try to be perfect or own up to the fact that you, and everyone else, will make mistakes. Then be proactive about creating a social contract to makes you and your company stronger rather than weaker when mistakes happen. 

So how do you get it done? it’s a 5-second drawing and a 5-minute conversation you have with almost everyone in your company.

The 5-second drawing (only draw the black):

The 5 min conversation – explain what you drew:

1. The squiggly line: all of us working fast together to achieve amazing things.
2. The X: when I or someone else makes a mistake.
3. The ?: This is critical, this is the point where the person “harmed” has the option to: stay quiet and hold his grievance/annoyance in secret, or WITHIN 24 HOURS to speak up and share the issue with the person who made the mistake (or their manager) so that they is aware and has a chance to fix it.
4. The upwards arrow: represents relationships and team getting stronger as they quickly overcome mistakes and are less afraid to make them in the future. They trust each other more and grow.
5. The downwards arrow: represents the relationships and team getting weaker since mistakes remain hidden, unfixed, and fester unhappiness.
6. Your personal commitment: end the explanation by sharing your personal commitment to always respectfully share within 24 hours when someone has made a mistake so that they can fix it and become stronger. Then EXPLICITLY ask your employees to do the same with you, to let you know within 24 hours when you made a mistake so that you can have the opportunity to fix it. This allows you to continue to run at a high velocity and vastly reduces the damage caused.
   

Do this with the team several times. Eventually, you only need the 5-second drawing and not the conversation. Celebrate when the full-cycle happens, and the is selected. It’s a fantastic feeling to know that mistakes are a critical part of compounding and constructive growth and that it is not only ok to make mistakes but rather a necessary step of mutual growth. Everyone can achieve more and be themselves and learn how to grow in a safe environment.

Be amazing, make mistakes,

Amit

The post A team contract to overcome mistakes and become a better leader first appeared on Simply Broken.

Startup fundraising starts well before you are actively raising (lessons from +$100M raised). When done well it is a competitive Auction. There are 3 main phases: a) build an interested investor pool,  b) do “price discovery” regarding the amount, valuation and terms and c) run a competitive auction that simultaneously brings interested investors to the table. This meaningfully increases the likelihood of closing quickly, with the right investors and good terms. Much more below including practical steps and templates.

Startup fundraising playbook – running a competitive auction

Many people say startup fundraising is similar to enterprise sales, after raising over $100M with 8 different startups, I disagree. Fundraising is a thoughtful process that ends with an Auction where the founder is the auctioneer (specifically, fundraising is a Sealed Bid Auction). Your goal is to bring many interested bidders (VCs) to bid on leading your round at roughly the same time so you can choose and improve the best offer. 

So what do you need to do to succeed, first always be building an amazing startup. Second, organize a compelling and competitive auction every time you raise money. 

A few essential facts to begin with:

• The auction itself is the last stage. There is foundational prep work that must to happen to enable a successful auction.
• Not doing an organized process increases the likelihood of a poor outcome (lower valuation, lower amount raised, bad terms, lower quality investors, or not being able to raise at all)
• You are always engeged in fundraising but very differently depedning on your stage. This is what this post is about.

Fundraising has three phases:

1. Phase One – “Not raising” ~6-12 months before you start to run the Auction (Phase 3)
2. Phase Two – “Preparing to raise”, ~3 months before your start raising
3. Phase Three – “Running the auction and actively raising” – running an organized, high velocity, competitive process to close a round (takes ~8 weeks)

Phase 1 – “Not raising” (except if an investor preempts)

You are not actively raising but are setting the groundwork. You do this ~6-12 months before you plan on raising/running the auction, with the main focus being:

1. Meeting potential investors for friendly and informative conversations – create an investor CRM (sheet) and have open conversations with potential future investors. Share with them your business and ask for advice on topics that matter to you. Have real and honest conversations about your business, and also about them. Their areas of focus, investing style, typical amounts they invest, whether they lead or not and when, etc. You are not yet raising, be clear about that from the get go and build rapport. You are: 
   • a) giving the investors more data points for their time series (investing is a line not a dot) so when the time comes they have a much more informed opinion and 
   • b) hearing the perspectives of highly-intelligent people who see a lot of startups and can share interesting advice 
   • c) signaling that you are doing this with other investors so when the auction begins it will be competitive.
2. Meeting connectors/advisors: similar to investors, create a connector CRM of a) people you know and trust b) people in your industry or solution space and c) other high-profile people who want to see you succeed. Schedule short touchpoints with them regarding your startup. Share your progress and discuss topics that matter to you where they could have interesting perspectives. This is an incredible resource to cultivate generally, but even more so as preparation for fundraising, when the time comes they will provide high-quality intros and signaling to investors that there is an auction and that investors should pay attention and compete to invest.
   • If you are seeing lack of excitement and limited followups (from investors and connecters), there is either a problem with your startup or the way you share your story and progress. It’s ok for many of the people to reject you, but some need to love what you are doing and offer introductions, followup meetings, client references, etc. One of the worst feedbacks you can get is a “Sounds interesting, but let’s keep in trouch” it means it’s not interesting enough for any action to be taken. Don’t give up of course and this person and keep in touch, BUT figure out why your not generating more excitement. This post might help.
3. You should also start paying attention to “Price discovery.” It will become critical in Phase 2. In our case, you want to “discover” the amount to set for your next raise, valuation, terms and goals that you need to achieve to correspond. You’ll hear clues to these in the conversations with investors and connectors. Look for details on comparables (e.g., company X just raised $20M and they were similar to you except they had 15 paying clients, a strong pipeline, etc). Also, take note of the interest level people share regarding your startup and progress, these will become critical indicators later on.
   
4. The only way a round should close at this stage is if an investor wants to preempt. They need to be very excited (and likely also feel FOMO that if this reaches an auction they will not get an allocation or the price will be way higher than what they are able to get by pre-empting). If they raise this option, you say you are not really raising, but if the investor insists, you negotiate not only the investment amount and valuation, but also minimal disruption to the business and a short due diligence process. If they want to do through business due diligence and for you to create materials for them, it’s almost always a mistake to progress. This will hijack your auction, cause you to spend a lot of time with them and not give you the opportunity to create a competitive process/auction. You should only progress if they are willing to:
   • Share a term-sheet quickly with terms that you like
   • Progress with the information they mostly have already (as opposed to starting a business DD process)
   • Commit to a very fast “Confirmatory DD” (i.e., only checking for legal/accounting red-flags)
   • VERY important to know the difference between a real preemption/conviction and a masqueraded hijacking. If you are not sure ask directly, tough questions of the investor even at the risk of losing the pre-emption. If the intent to pre-empt is real, not only will you not lose it, you will in fact increase the likelihood of it happening.

If this is not the case, they don’t really want to preempt, but want you to launch the process specifically for them and before you are ready.

Phase 2 – “Preparing to raise”

In this phase, you are more actively meeting prospective investors, starting to finalize your “price discovery” and are also starting to create a deck & data room for Phase 3.

Main actions are:

1. Continue to bulk up your Investor and Connector CRM:
   • Follow threads of trust and willingness to help to grow your network and having good (and typically short 30/60 min) conversations with additional potential investors and connectors.
     
   • The framing is NOT we are raising a round let’s chat, but rather, X is a super interesting startup/founder I’m sure you’ll enjoy chatting with them (and “they are starting to think about fundraising so if you want a shot when they do you should chat/help them”). Again, friendly conversations, ask interesting questions and get advice.
     
   • Start qualifying investors while you talk with them (ask questions along the lines of how interested are they in investing in your space? How much do they know the field? Have they done any investments in the field? Do they have a specific thesis? Who’s the partner focusing on this?) Don’t let any investor hijack or kick off your process for you before you are ready (unless they are credibly trying to preempt – see Phase 1 commentary). Track who is being helpful or at least trying to help you push your startup forward. Ones that are interested in potentially being a lead will start expressing that interest trying to get closer and offer help (introductions, research, ideas, etc.). 
     
   • Categorize investors to value add vs. pure financial investors – you can be implicit or explicit about it. The proactive value add investors will rely on their network (LPs, strategics, customers, etc.) to preemptively DD you which may actually help in the form of introductions to customers. Alternatively you can implicitly state that you find most value in getting to know investors through their networks and value add. The most aggressive approach would be in the form of stating that to proceed you would expect significant value in addition/advance to capital. .
2. Focus on price discovery – at this stage you want to start narrowing down the amount and valuation you are going to ask for based on your achievements and investor interest. Go too low and potentially leave a lot of money/equity on the table, too high and no one will bite and give you a term sheet. This is both an art and a science and deserves it’s own separate blog post. It’s critical to note that until you have a “good sense” of Price discovery and interest from enough investors you should NOT launch the auction, it requires both to be successful. 
   
3. Create and commit to your internal fundraising plan and timeline, use this template as a starting point:
   • The key steps are to finish preparing the materials, then thoughtfully reach out first to your connectors then to all relevant investors all within a very short time-span (i.e. days) so that you launch the auction at the same time.
   • Here is a spreadsheet template you can use as a starting point, make it your own.
   • If you don’t commit to a plan and process, your fundraising will manage you instead of the other way around. 
   • It’s ok to change the plan as new information comes in, but actively go back and change as opposed to transitioning to week by week “let’s see approach” that rarely ends well.
   • Expect this to take most of your time, plan on having others on the team pickup day to day responsibilities as much as possible so you can focus on driving the process with high velocity and focus. 
4. Start preparing your deck and data room
   • You need an impressive deck, not to present it, but to share it ahead of time so you can then have intelligent conversations with investors. Your deck needs to share a story that is Radically Simple. Instantly Credible. Can’t-sleep Exciting (see my other blog post). You never share it externally until phase 3, because it will create the perception you are already running the action and will “start the signaling clock”. When you are in Phase 2- you can pull up a slide or two if relevant during investor conversation saying “great question, we’re starting to put our deck together and we can take a look at a draft slide, would love to hear your thoughts”.
     
   • Data Room (see a template of assets):
     • Business Data Room – this is optional, but I highly recommend it. The benefit of having it is that it can accelerate the process and create more FOMO. If you have a data room covering a variety of topics, investors will assume that you organized it since others have asked for different data points and you are sharing it with them as well. OTHERS…. INTERESTED = FOMO. Below is a sample set of topics for your data room. I highly recommend having at least some of this ready, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that much effort and improves the likelihood of success (here is an explanation of what’s inside each folder). 
       
       
       
     • Legal Data Room – assuming you are more than a 3 person operation you will need this, but it’s not worth the effort just yet, it can be pulled together rather quickly with your lawyer and accountant after there are term-sheets. If you have big legal red-flags (e.g. an active lawsuit against you) you will want to mention it earlier and prepare materials to allow potential investors to evaluate it ahead of time and have it factor into your “Price Discovery”. Otherwise it could disrupt your process later on.

Phase 3 – “Running the auction and activly raising”

It’s money time, literally.

You are ready, have interested investors, deck, most of the data room, it’s time to make it happen.

Your goal is to bring everyone to the table at roughly the same time (follow the timeline you committed to.) This creates FOMO, it creates positive signaling value and doesn’t allow any single investor to hijack your process. Meetings will need to happen quickly in rapid succession. When an investor gives you a term sheet you set up the process well so that you are able to tell other investors that you have a term sheet and they will be “ready-enough” to compete if they are sufficiently interested. Your goal is to move all of those “I’m really interested, would love to chat more” to a hard YES (i.e. Term sheet) or a hard NO. You are happy with both. 

You do this by following the key steps we outline in the fundraising timeline sheet:

1. Reach out to all relevant investors on roughly the same day (personalized notes of course)
   
2. Schedule meetings for the following week. If you get back people telling you they can only meet in a month you can now credibly respond that it won’t be relevant by then so if they are potentially interested you should find a time next week.
   
3. Be polite, but very clear that there is a lot of interest and the process is moving forward quickly. You should also be able to articulate to each investor why you would love for them to be “The One”. Valuation matters but it’s not only about valuation, there are many more factors. Find the ones that each investor possess and articulate it to them. This is important. When an investor considers giving out a term-sheet / competing in the auction, they want to know that if they do so there will be a high likelihood that you will choose them.
   
4. This is basic, but never agree to anything related to deal terms when you first hear of them on the phone. Always polite, tell investors you will process it offline and get back to them. This gives you both the ability to be more thoughtful and also more control of the timeline. 

If you prepared well, built up the investor and connector CRM and have done “Price Discovery” well the auction should now progress at a high velocity with meetings and progress happening in rapid succession. 

It’s critical not to pause or slow down since if the fundraising process doesn’t start and end quickly, the process itself will be a negative signal to investors. Investors will ask themselves “oh, I’ve heard they are fundraising, they haven’t raised and it’s been a while, which must mean that they’ve met a bunch of people…and a bunch of people have said no… I wonder what they know that I don’t?”. Also, investors will know there’s less competition for the deal, which means they can take their time to dive in more, negotiate more on valuation, try to get better terms because there is no urgency. I’ll end with a note on luck and perseverance. Building a startup is hard. It takes a ton of effort, skill and also a meaningful amount of luck. So remember to take everything seriously, but not too seriously, we only live once.

Now go be amazing,

Amit

The post Startup fundraising playbook – running a thoughtful competitive auction first appeared on Simply Broken.

My first startup Socrative, did just that…eventually. We focused on helping K-12 teachers by saving them time and showing them what their class understands via a real-time mobile testing app (Acquired by MasteryConnect June/2014). At first it wasn’t clear to us who we were serving (schools, principals, students, teachers or parents) and we had even less clarity as to how to segment our users within each of these groups. However as we advanced we decided to focus on teachers and within that we developed distinct teacher segments.

For example: Tech-savvy teachers that were adopting a variety of tools, then down-selecting to only a few which they use consistently. The challenge there wasn’t to reach them but to keep them engaged, and when we did, we got tremendous amount of referrals. Another, very different segment, was tech-averse teachers who needed to use tech in their classroom to satisfy school mandates. As you can imagine we had a very different approach for them (more about Socrative here).

More recently, serving as the SVP of Product Innovation at Lifion and ADP (world’s largest HR company), we leveraged the same approach but now at an enterprise level. We deeply understood why our customers want to spend the time, effort and money to upgrade their HR software and had different GTM approaches based on their job-to-be-done (e.g., go global faster, be a more attractive employer, reduce HR operational costs, integrate systems, etc.) without these segments our journey to scale from 30 to over 600 employees would not have been as rapid and successful.

There are many more examples, but I’ll pause here for now and share my common-sense approach for identifying and segmenting your client base. Doing this (and iterating to get there) will impact almost everything else within your GTM strategy and execution and will result in reduced costs and higher velocity.

What is GTM segmentation?

It’s an approach to slice and group your potential buyers into similar clusters. Each of these clusters will have buyers that are attracted to, buy and use your product to fulfill similar needs. Essentially they will be “hiring” your product for a similar job-to-be-done (i.e., a specific need or set of needs they want to satisfy).

It’s important to note that most products can do many things and are therefore being “hired” for many different jobs. For example: You could “hire” a CRM software to a) keep better track of high-value customers b) proactively address potential churn issues or c) create dashboards and reports that accumulate a lot of otherwise disparate customer information (or all of the above at once). All of these are different jobs-to-be-done with different competitive sets and value propositions. In the first example, your product might be competing with a “High-Value” Account Executives while in the second case it would be competing with customer success platforms and in the third example it would be competing with BI tools. Therefore, your approach to marketing and sales will change according to segments and jobs-to-be-done.

What makes a great GTM segmentation and where to start?

Clarity, specificity and ability to categorize customers efficiently into different groups (segments) is the goal.

To get there, you start with segment hypothesis (e.g., Segment 1: Fast growing companies “hiring” my product to recruit faster , Segment 2: low-margin retailers “hiring” my product to keep recruiting costs low, etc.) and then answer the following questions for each potential segment. A good segment is one that is large enough, and that has tight answer to the questions below:

1. What Jobs-to-be-done are customers in this segment “hiring” your product for?
2. What pain-points are you solving?
3. What is the impact you are having? (e.g., Cost savings vs. revenue, how is the impact being realized: more customers, reduced hosting costs, etc?)
4. Who is your typical champion? Buyer persona? (i.e., who will be the person/committee making the buying decision and driving the buying process)
5. Is there an efficient way to identify customers within the defined segment? (e.g., it is much easier to identify fast growing company vs. companies that have culture challenges)

Segmentation (especially B2B segmentation) is a mix of science and art, there is no mathematical process to reach the best results and it requires both a deep understanding of your customer base and creativity.

Test on your current customer base

Once you have reached several potential segments “test” them on your customer base:

1. Choose customers from current customer base, assign them to a segment and see whether your answers to the question above hold true for the customers you selected.
2. If a single client can easily fit in multiple segments then your segments are not distinct enough and may need to be combined or broadened.
3. Are there many customers that don’t fit into any segment? that’s fine as a starting point, but will eventually need to be dealt with.

Do the math and prioritize

Once you have a few segments as a starting point and you’ve categorized your customers into them, do the math to prioritize. Using your data about your existing customers, measure the key metrics your care about (e.g., sales cycle, deal size, CAC, NPS, margin, up-sale potential, etc.) and combine with data about the segment (e.g., size, growth, geography concentration) to prioritize where to focus.

What’s next?

Now you can start defining the Go-To-Market strategy and execution (e.g., Sales, Marketing, Customer Success) per segment and across segments, but always in context of your GTM segmentation (see example below). I will cover more of this in future posts.

Example: Your segmentation can show you how you investment in Customer Service/Success is paying off in each segment.

Your segmentation can and likely will change as your business grows and your product evolves, no shame in making changes and adjusting, it’s a required aspect of scaling. If you have comments, ideas or want to connect further please reach out to us at info@lionsip.com.

Additional Reading:

https://jobs-to-be-done.com/market-segmentation-through-a-jobs-to-be-done-lens-5ef9242de65

The post The Key for Successful Go To Market: Rational Needs-Based Segmentation first appeared on Simply Broken.

Every business story needs to be: Radically Simple. Instantly Credible. Can’t-sleep Exciting.

Success in almost every new initiative or startup begins with telling & selling a story. Then, over time the story materializes and is replaced with data and results. I have seen too many amazing ideas fail before they even begin since they don’t deliver the message.

For example, I recently met a founder, let’s call him Jonathan. When we first met, it seemed like a terrible start-up and more of a bootstrapped business. Luckily for both of us, I decided to dig a bit deeper. What I discovered can be summarized as follows: 1) huge market that’s currently overlooked by investors 2) the company helps customers 6x their revenue in the first year! 3) CAC/LTV of 7+ and a rapidly growing top line. The founder knew most of these, but they were lost in the complexity and I did not HEAR them in our first meeting. Don’t let this be you, make your own luck.

Every story and then every key-point within it should be:

1. Radically Simple to understand for the audience, especially when have limited context and will only pay limited attention.

2. Instantly Credible, by providing the key insights, highly synthesized

3. Can’t-sleep Exciting – raises your heart-rate, and interrupts your ability to go to bed at night.

You need all three and you need them in sequence. If it’s not simple, I won’t understand it, and the rest doesn’t matter. Then, if I don’t believe you, our conversation stops there. Finally, if I understand it and believe you, I need to get excited to move into action.

Framework deep-dive:

Is it Radically simple?

• You are deep into your work. Things that are simple to you will not be simple for others.
• You need to be able to say your key point in one (ONE) short sentence
• Test it out on a friend or employee, don’t add much, tell them the sentence and ask them to explain what they understand. Then ask them questions about it. If they are not 80% correct, it’s not simple enough.

Is it Instantly credible?

• Credibility comes from many places: your background, reader’s background, facts, anecdotes, pattern recognition, and even common sense.
• Start with common sense and your background and ask yourself: how much do I need to strengthen this key point? If you are considered an expert in the space, you can sometimes assert aspects with little explanation, which keeps things simple . Same for common sense.
• If it doesn’t pass the personal background or common sense test, it’s time to figure out how to add credibility. You are looking for 1-3 (no more than that) key facts, figures, borrowing from other domains (Uber for Trucking), or strong anecdotes that will explain your statement.
• If the only support you are finding is complex or convoluted, don’t stop. Consider changing your key statement. If it’s not simple and credible, it doesn’t support your goal.

Is it Can’t-sleep exciting?

• What? Start with defining what is exciting to your target audience: making money? Saving the world? Eliminating poverty? A specific cause?
• Big Enough? Then ask yourself: Is this big enough? Does this make a material change so that people invest their time/effort in it?
• Likely to succeed? Does it seem likely to succeed given the setup so far? What assets and unique advantages do you have?
• Effort/Investment required? How much effort or investment will the reader require to be a part of this fantastic success. It needs to be a great value prop (“for limited effort or investment your will be a part of all of this…”)

The post 3 Must follow rules for fundraising storytelling first appeared on Simply Broken.

Throughout my career and life I was lucky to be surrounded by people who thoughtfully challenged me, from my engineering professor father at home to colleagues at McKinsey & Company, through incredible professors at MIT and Harvard (including the amazing Clayton Christensen who was a mentor at Socrative, my first startup) to very thoughtful senior executives at ADP (where I lead a group of 600+ employees to drive innovation and it’s next-gen business). At some point throughout the journey I fell in love with questions, frameworks and mental models that help capture critical thinking about the state of the world in a systematic, repeatable and improvable way.

To that end, we created the Growth Scorecard (sample here). It is a set of guiding questions for CEOs and leadership teams that want to grow their business. It starts with the basics and dives in deeper and deeper to allow leaders to reflect, generate new ideas and prioritize actions. This is a key part of our framework for working with founders to dig in to their business in a structured way and figure out the biggest gaps and opportunities where we can help drive value.

Over time we will publish more and more of this assessment online, but for now feel free to check out our ~60 question sample here.

If you have ideas for improvement or want to chat further feel free to reach out to us at info@lionsip.com

Amit

The post Questions for growth — Introducing Our Growth Assessment Tool first appeared on Simply Broken.

Originally published at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/next-gen-hcm-from-adp-honored-with-2019-top-hr-product-from-human-resource-executive-300928843.html

ROSELAND, N.J., Oct. 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Announced today at the 2019 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, ADP’s ‘Next Gen’ human capital management (HCM) platform earned “Top HR Product” recognition and the “Awesome New Technology” award.  This marks the fourth time in five years that ADP has earned the “Top HR Product” recognition and the fifth year in a row it has received the “Awesome New Technology” award. 

In designing this new global HCM platform, ADP recognized that as organizations become increasingly agile the next evolution of HCM needs to drive team performance and adapt to changing needs.  Built cloud-native from the ground up, this new platform supports a personalized experience that cultivates fluid, dynamic work to unlock greater value for the organization.

This achievement further showcases ADP’s ongoing commitment to deliver innovative HCM technology for both business leaders and HR professionals. 

“The world of work has entered a new era of unprecedented change; long gone are traditional, hierarchical organizational structures. Today, most work is done on dynamic teams with organizations functioning as networks, and we’ve designed our solutions to better meet this growing demand in the marketplace,” said Don Weinstein, corporate vice president, global product and technology of ADP.  “We’re incredibly humbled by Human Resource Executive’s continued recognition of our products.  We are proud to showcase all the great work being done by ADP at this year’s HR Technology Conference.”

“Human Resource Executive has been evaluating HR products and conducting this competition for more than 30 years,” explained Steve Boese, co-chair HR Technology Conference.  “Our goal has always been to identify products and services that clearly deliver value to the HR community while demonstrating true innovation.  This is the first time in our history that a company has won the same award five years running, and this level of excellence is a testament to ADP’s drive to address key pain points in the HR community with major tech innovations and solutions.”

Winning solutions at the HR Technology Conference are selected based on several criteria, including their level of innovation, value add to the HR professional, intuitiveness for the user and ability to deliver on what they promise.

The post Next-Gen HCM from ADP honored with “2019 Top HR Product” from Human Resource Executive first appeared on Simply Broken.

Excerpt form Josh’s article (full article at https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/)

ADP, An Unexpected Tech Leader

This industry is not for the faint of heart. Building an enterprise platform takes years, and once you start you’re stuck with the architecture you start with.

Workday’s architecture is fourteen years old and quite innovative, it feels proprietary. SuccessFactors is similar in age and is now being re-engineered around SAP Hana and a new Experience interface. Oracle recently re-engineered its HCM platform and it took almost five years. So when a company like ADP starts from scratch, it can upset the apple cart.

While many customers rushed to buy cloud-based HCM systems, their satisfaction has been mixed. The platforms are highly complex, they don’t accommodate new organization and performance models, and buyers want more innovation.  HR departments want a stable, reliable HCM platform but they also want to be able to mix and match the best of breed on top.

Today, using what is called “cloud-native” systems, vendors can build modern applications faster than ever. And technologies like AI, cognitive interfaces, natural language processing, and graph database are readily available from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft.

Enter ADP.

ADP you say? Aren’t they a 70-year-old payroll company?  What are they doing in the cloud architecture business?

Well yes, ADP does pay more than 40 million people in the US (one in six). But behind the scenes, the company is filled with technologists, and its new Lifion group has assembled some of the most senior tech architects in the world.

As Carlos Rodriguez the CEO and Don Weinstein the head of Global Product and Technology put it, ADP used to be a “services company fueled by technology.” Now it is becoming “a technology company with great services.” In other words, the company has heavily invested in its platform.

The new platform, today called ADP Next Gen HCM (a real name will come), has the architecture other vendors only talk about, and as it picks up speed it could become a major disruptor in the market.

What Is ADP Next Gen HCM?

Let me explain what ADP has done.

Through a skunk-works development team in Chelsea, NY, the company has been rewriting its payroll engine and HCM platform for several years. The project, originally called Lifion, is a “cloud-native” platform which embraces the latest technology stack needed to scale for the future.

Full article at: https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/

The post Why ADP’s Next-Gen HCM Is A Disruptive Force In HR Technology first appeared on Simply Broken.

Hello world. It’s time for the next adventure. It has been an unbelievable journey at ADP and Lifion over the past 5 years. A journey that I will miss and reminisce about throughout my entire life. Moving on has been an incredibly difficult decision after all we have achieved and are about to achieve in the coming months and years.

I feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunity to be part of ADP, building and leading Lifion through exponential growth, and am tremendously thankful to all of the amazing people that were a part of this Journey with me.

Our past several years building Lifion have been challenging and high velocity as we have been creating a world class platform, product and organization. While the work is not complete and there will still be many challenges ahead, it is hard to believe how much ground we covered in such a short time. I believe that Lifion is better positioned than ever to transform ADP and the HR industry (and so do the leading analysts). The team and our ability to recruit amazing talent has never been better. Our clients are starting to share positive feedback and our product, platform and business continue to mature every day.

While I’ll be cheering from the sidelines, I can’t wait to see where ADP and Lifion are 3 years from now. The world needs a better HR solution so that millions of people can have better careers, build better lives and have a brighter future. I feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunity to be there when we just started.

More about the next chapter coming soon, feel free to reach out to me, especially if you are interested, or know people/organizations/funds who may be interested in investing in the Israeli technology sector in a way no local investor has done before.

Never stop creating,

Amit

The post My Next Adventure first appeared on Simply Broken.

Originally published by by JOSHBERSIN · PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 23, 2018 · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 – here.

ADP Unveils One Of The More Exciting HCM Systems I’ve Seen.. And More

Most of you probably think ADP is kind of an old payroll company, focused primarily on small businesses. Boy, are you wrong.

ADP, in fact, is the world’s first ever cloud-based HCM company (the ADP payroll is a cloud system), and the company is more innovative than ever.

I just attended ADP’s latest half-day analyst meeting and I want to share some exciting things with you, primarily because they’re innovations I’ve been looking for over the last few years.

1) Brand New Network-Based HCM Platform

Let’s start with the most exciting:  over the last 3-4 years ADP has been secretly building an entirely new HCM platform to go along with the company’s completely new re-engineered payroll engine (below). This new platform, which doesn’t have a name yet (originally code-named LIFION), is what I’ve been looking for.

It’s a true team-centric system built on a Graph Database using what is often called “low code” development. In other words, you can change it by moving objects on the screen and the system reconfigures itself.

A Graph Database is a huge new technology, pioneered by a vendor called Neo4J. If you’re a geek like me you’re going to want to read about this. You can get the book from Neo4J and if you’re a SQL database person like me it will blow your mind. This is the technology underneath Facebook, Google, and most big social network systems because it models large groups of people based on relationships, not tables.

I wont get into the details here but I really do think this is the disruption that could change the entire HCM market. Current systems, including Oracle, SAP, Ultimate, and most others, are built on various versions of tables and fields, which force designers to build business relationships that consist of links and pointers. The result is that really modeling relationships and teams is very hard.

(Note: Workday is truly an exception.  Workday actually built a graph-oriented database in 2005, when the company first introduced its object model. At that point in them Neo4J and other “graph databases” were not in the market yet, so Workday developed many of these features. Workday, for example, is non-relational, it is built on relationships, it uses microservices, and the company’s new knowledge and skills graph use this technology. So Workday is quite capable of delivering a platform similar to ADP’s new system.)

In a graph database every object is related in some form of relationship, like the real world. So applications like modeling a social network or understanding why some people buy blue shirts and others buy red shirts is easy.  The picture below may help.

I won’t try to explain the technology in detail but what it means for HR systems is that we can easily build a system that says “Josh is the CEO of Josh Bersin Inc” and “Josh is also leading the marketing team” and “Linda reports to Josh” and “Matt is a friend of Josh” and “Ashley is an associate of Josh” and “Ashley and Linda are on another team” and “Matt is on another team which Linda advises” and on and on.

All this may sound silly to you but in a real company this is how stuff gets done. The hierarchical structure of who you work for is irrelevant for most work-related activities, so it gets in the way.

If you’d like an introduction to the power of “relationships” in a non-relational database, I recommend you view Petros Dermetzis, technology architect at Workday, talk about how Workday works.  Jump ahead to minute 4:00 to hear about graphs.

 

The ADP platform has been in development for a while and I’ve been talking with them about it over the years. When I first saw it I told them it would be revolutionary, and I think it is.

There are many reasons this is needed, including:

• People work on multiple teams, so we need goals, workflow, training, compensation, and multiple leader models in the HCM system.
• Many people in the company are contractors, part-timers, gig workers, and other alternative workers and we need to model them in the system.
• People are often managed, paid, and trained based on their relationships and influence (ONA tries to solve this) so connections are part of value.
• Core HCM systems need to be more flexible so third party apps can plug in with different data models, which are very hard to do in traditional systems.

Here is ADP’s high level pitch page on the product, but let me give you an example. Have you ever tried to model a University?  Professors have their primary professor job, they’re also adjunct professors in other departments, they lead centers and other administrative groups, they have research grants they lead, and it goes on and on. I cannot imagine how you’d design that in a typical HRMS. It’s possible, but it’s not very flexible.  ADP’s system can model a University, a consulting firm, or any other organization where people have more than one reporting relationship and one role (just about every company I can think of).

The product is in early release (ADP has five big clients and is starting to seek more), and the big work now is to build up all the talent and processes around it. The system already has an agile performance management system built (OKRs, check-ins, assessment similar to StandOut, the product ADP acquired a year ago) – but they have to build modules for recruitment, career, compensation, and much more yet. But I think that will happen fast.

So stay tuned for more on this topic, I’m sure ADP wouldn’t let us write about if they weren’t pretty confident it was going to be a success. It will be piloted in 2019 and is expected to roll out in production in 2020.

 

The post ADP Unveils One Of The More Exciting HCM Systems I’ve Seen.. And More first appeared on Simply Broken.

In a traditional team structure, conflicts can be escalated to the boss to resolve. Can’t agree on how to prioritize projects, or on which deadlines need to shift? Ask the team leader to step in and make a call. Think a coworker is acting snarky, or that their work is too sloppy? Advise the manager to give them some feedback. But for flat or self-managed teams, that’s not an option. Self-managed teams must identify different ways to find and address day-to-day conflicts.

Self-managed teams can focus on three things to help them successfully resolve conflicts. (Traditionally hierarchical teams may benefit from them too.)

Encourage openness to productive conflict. First and foremost, self-managed teams must commit to openly discussing their differences. Conflict should be seen not as an annoyance that leads to anxiety and alienation, but as an opportunity for growth and strong working relationships.

To create this culture of open communication, try turning conflict resolution into an organized group activity. A technique called Planning Poker has opened my team’s eyes to just how productive having dissenting viewpoints can be. Using a point-based system, the technique encourages all team members to raise their opinions, weigh every option, and collectively vote on the best plan. Planning Poker is predominantly used by software developers, but it can facilitate virtually any business decision.

Come to a common understanding about which conflicts can be resolved without the involvement of others. For example, you might develop norms about what constitutes a low-risk decision (for example, it affects few people, or the related costs fall below a certain threshold), and encourage the team to resolve low-risk conflicts without group intervention.

Prioritize accountability over blame. Autonomous teams should win and lose as a group. When shortcomings occur, teams shouldn’t assign blame to the contributors closest to the debacle. Rather than looking at who was responsible, as people express only the symptoms, they should investigate why the issue occurred.

This mode of conflict resolution is akin to the “blameless postmortem” approach much of the technology world takes to understand why products and endeavors don’t reach their full potential. If a team is comfortable speaking openly about conflict and hardships, asking “How did this happen?” when conducting a postmortem won’t lead to the blame game; it will yield the root cause. As Etsy CTO John Allspaw says, people are “the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items.” Punishing them for contributing to conflict discourages this productive dialogue.

To further enhance the blameless approach, a team can discuss the situation with several other teams at the company and gather multiple unbiased opinions regarding the conflict’s root cause and how it could be addressed. Even if this doesn’t result in a unanimous opinion or a clear plan of action, it shifts the focus from the responsible parties and opens the remediation process to many diverse, productive ideas.

Quantify the impact of the problem. A team at my organization was recently at odds because a developer preferred to work at night — which was inconvenient because everyone else worked during the day. This employee was absent from nearly every important meeting, and his teammates constantly found themselves taking extra time to fill him in on everything he missed.

The tension continued until the team quantified the impact of his absence. Each meeting the employee missed took 60 minutes, and the team would spend 30 more minutes recapping for him and hearing his thoughts. With six members on the team, that’s a combined three hours of unnecessary discussion. To top it off, the employee missed about 10 meetings each month, so his team was devoting more than 350 hours per year to these conversations. Instead of focusing on the symptomatic conflict and requiring the employee to work during the day every day, the team decided to develop a flexible schedule that worked for everyone. On meeting days, the night owl could arrive in the afternoon, share a few hours of overlap with everyone else, and then burn the midnight oil as he pleased.

Quantifying the impact of conflict provides several benefits. It encourages productive conversations, creates alignment around the gravity of the issue, and unlocks creative solutions as people identify both the source and the impact of their conflicts. Assigning a numeric value to waste helps teams find better ways to reduce it.

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