Notion's EMEA GM on how to Grow a Series B Startup Internationally

Notion is shaping the work-from-home revolution, by offering an application that simplifies and declutters your digital home office. Think of it as an all-in-one workspace for notes, docs, wikis, projects, and collaboration. 

The company is on the fast-track to becoming the new normal and its recent presence expansion in EMEA and APAC is a testament to this. 

Here to discuss the company’s growth and how he is pioneering its development in the region is General Manager EMEA Robbie O’Connor, whose career spans across the globe’s most prominent tech companies: Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, and Asana.

In this episode we discuss how to take a Series B company and expand it across international boundaries, the elements a startup needs to go global, how Notion drives growth, Robbie’s personal favourite frameworks and the secret ingredients to building high-performing teams. 

What you’ll learn

• Robbie’s background and experience 
• His experience in rapid growth of tech companies, what other companies can do to follow suit.
• How to prepare your startup for international growth
• How to define your vision and clear objectives
• His perspective of the EMEA market.
• How to stay relevant and competitive 
• How to overcome growth challenges in your career

Getting your company from zero to hero has never had a clearer path thanks to Robbie O’Connor’s insights, tips, tricks, trials and tribulations. 

The most impactful tools for learning come from other people’s experience. If ever there was a time to unpack an industry leader’s career, this podcast is your blueprint. 

A very interesting and insightful interview, thank you Robbie O’Connor! Happy listening!

For detailed show notes and relevant links, visit www.stunandawe.com

If you want to accelerate traction, hit the growth stage, and upgrade your scaling skills, check out our Growth Leap online course. It’s a step-by-step guide to design your tech startup for high performance and impact. It’s packed with actionable and proven frameworks and tools to improve your startups performance, from better customer acquisition to clear prioritization and more productive meetings.

Learn more here: https://academy.stunandawe.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Yeah,

Speaker 2: 0:05

Welcome to another episode of growth. I'm your host, Michelle Daniel. We talked to a pretty awesome business builders. We're designing, disruptive and meaningful companies.

Speaker 1: 0:16

San

Speaker 2: 0:17

Francisco based notion is an all in one workspace for notes, docs, Wiki's projects and collaboration. The company is growing rapidly and recently expanded its presence in EMEA and APAC with a few key hires. Well, our guest today is one of them. Rubby O'Connor is general manager, EMU and notions. First feet on the ground here in charge of the company's growth in the region. He's got an impressive track record. Having worked at Microsoft, Google Dropbox in the sun. We cover quite a lot of ground during a discussion. We talk about growing series B companies internationally, what tech startups need to go. Global notion strategy to drive growth. Rabi's favorite strategic frameworks, and how to build high performing teams. Connor, thank you so much. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm really good. Michelle. It's great to be here. It's great to speak with you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Thanks for your time. Rubbing your general manager, Ian, yet notion. And before that you've worked for other well-known tech companies before we really get started, can you give us an overview, a bit of your background and experience? Yeah, absolutely. So, as you mentioned them, you know, I joined notion a couple of months ago as the company is beginning to scale internationally, and I lead the region for, for Mia Reno. We're just really early days, we're getting set up and previous to notion, I worked in Asana where I was the head of sales for EMEA. I kind of led the go to market operations there for four years, which was a ton of fun. And previous that I worked in Dropbox where similarly I was the first hired for Dropbox in the region within a medium and I perform numerous roles there as the company scaled over about four years. I started my career really with Google again, where I was for for four years. Again, we worked with an, a really cool team there in Google maps and Google geo. My birth, I guess, within technology was I did an internship in Microsoft here in Dublin and their European operations center, which kind of gave me my passion for working in tech for working in international environments and for working for really ambitious organizations. So the really impressive track record and well, as you said, you just joined notion a few months ago in the middle of very, very challenging year for pretty much everyone, but why did you feel notion was the right step for you at this time? I guess for instance, foremost, I'm a huge fan of leading edge technology. And the last number of the years, I've seen first hand that there's been a generational shift in the tools that people are using in their lives and indeed in their work as well. Um, a more tech savvy generation are moving into the workforce and I'll already have lived in the workforce. The basic tools aren't really gonna work for them anymore, and they want to be able to work in a more personalized experience now. Um, I guess as part of my work over the last number of years, I've always made a point of understanding the landscape of tools that are making a difference. A notion has been on my radar for a couple of years, um, as a product that really is at the leading edge. When you meet users from companies who really enjoy your technology and that'll help them to do something or anything better within their work. I think you see that there's a product there that has tremendous value. Interestingly, notions users and customer base are really widely distributed and with an enormous presence in a Mia in APAC, our company is headquartered in San Francisco, but it's, it's an international base. Um, the quickly seen the need to establish operations and regions to get closer to the users. I guess you learn a lot of yourself about yourself as your career develops. Part of my ambition is to continue to grow and to being a world-class operator. And in recent years, I've learned that part of my strengths and my motivations are at the challenge of building things. Um, after I've been four years in Atlanta with the company moving into to a new phase of its own growth and hung and part of a great journey, I thought that was ready to begin my skills and my experience to a new challenge. So it was began to think about what I wanted to do next. I was connected with, with notion COO actually Kasari on the CEO Ivan show through, through my network. I'm on the learn more about their vision for the future of work. Indeed for notion, I was really inspired by the division and just really sparked with them as people. I really loved the product personally, and I felt the business challenge of scaling internationally operations for this company was something where I could, where I could really help. I probably would make a decent level of impact. So, you know what it's like for your career, when you, when you get a really good feeling about something, you really got to go with it. So it's not like all of the stars aligned here for me

Speaker 3: 4:33

And you seem to have developed an expertise to help series BC companies grow and expand internationally. The tech company is specifically, and this is something that we've discussed in a prior call. You and I, where, you know, when we talk about growth for tech companies, we talk about feature prioritization, customer service and all of these things, but we don't necessarily talk about what is it that you need to do or implement to actually scale a tech company internationally. Can you tell us a bit about, you know, since you've done that quite a few times, what are the key things that you've learned and what are the key elements that you feel are key for a tech company to expand?

Speaker 2: 5:14

Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of fun. How we've ended up in this scenario. That's kind of repeating this playbook a couple of times. It may or may not seem unusual. My career to date really hasn't followed the particular pattern. So to say, you know, you meet many execs who have a very specific vision on everything is gearing up towards the direction that they're going in. Honestly, my career has been a little bit more pragmatic and opportunistic and it might sound odd, but my personality and how, and why are the sort of dictated the decisions that I make? I love technology. I really like people. I really enjoy working on problems, particularly business problems, leaving university. I was really high. I was very fortunate to be hired by Google on those even more fortunate to join a really super niche team at the time, Google was figuring out how to monetize the Google maps API platform. And I joined just as the vision decided to build a SAS oriented go-to-market business and engine. So it was a young book. I was really fortunate to be part of the scaling journey in a very well-funded organization. It was almost like a startup within a very large organization. And I had front row seats to watch some really incredible leaders, um, build a multifunctional division from the ground up. So that kind of gave me my grounding on liking to build and move things forward. At scale. I love working with this team and I took the opportunity to learn as much about SAS, about operations, but marketing about sales, as I possibly could. Just kind of out of curiosity. Um, I also built a rebrand that request more people, um, who I knew would do great things into the future. And a couple of those characters. I met down the line. I also have two brothers who are, who are entrepreneurs. They own their own companies. And my own father had some of his own entrepreneurial ventures as well. And I always admired how they take on real challenges and build their companies from scratch, taking on every risk from big to small and as a business owner yourself. You'll you'll understand that very, very well. Um, although Google working for Google was really great, you know, I always felt kind of insignificant in, in my brother's presence. So it's, I feel like I've taken like the safer corporate option and while not having pure entrepreneur DNA myself, I guess my family always influenced me to want to drive a ton of impact in my career when working in large organizations and questionably, it's really cool. You can do amazing, great work, but for me, I always had the sense that I want to be part of something a little bit smaller and how the higher level of impact. And I guess this is what kind of led me to, uh, to find that juxtaposition where I was attracted to smaller organizations that were growing fast. Cause I thought that's kinda where my, where my strengths and my interests lied. Um, as part of a mentoring program, when I was at Google, I was connected to the CMO of Google enterprise guy called Chris Farinacci. And we really hit it off. Chris introduced me to a number of things, one of them being fire or growth models, which is like the Mecca for all, for all marketing teams. How do we get maximum brand exposure and growth with minimal budgetary input? Um, interestingly at the time, um, you know, Google was struggling to get many companies to adopt the G suite platform and Chris's job was to try and build that products were out there. They were competing against Microsoft. And so he showed me some organizations that were doing it really well. And he highlighted Dropbox for me and he said, wow, this is just a company with a unique tool. It's not groundbreaking data storage has been there. They just take any unique angle on it and look at the cold following they've managed to, to derive. And they're not spending too much money on marketing, but by word of mouth and NPS, this product is just growing really fast. And that really fascinated me that little, that little nugget really kind of got me. And I guess that was my first introduction to two smaller startups who scaling up, who were kind of growing. I then went home that week and I don't think this is Chris's intention, but I dusted off my CV. And I just, I wrote an email into an executive Dropbox on Sabbath. If you're ever looking to grow within Europe, I've got some great ideas of how you do it. And it just so happened that they were at the time they were looking for, for international scanning growth, small company, then just with massive user base and a lot of funding, they didn't necessarily know exactly what they wanted to do. They just knew they needed to catch up with their users. So I don't even think they were intending to hire to my profile, the one of the hardest, some more senior, but they kind of liked the look of me. And so they brought me on board and they hired a really great seasoned tech executive. I said, you gotta call Johann boating. You'll have that lead Slack. And together, we were like an unusual mismatch from the start, someone super experienced to really know what they're doing and just a very enthusiastic fan. And together we were the first two people hired in Europe. And I guess at the time I was so fortunate that I got to watch a world class offering like Johann, figure out what we want to do within the region, set a strategy, communicate with headquarters, what the plan is, start understanding what type of teams we want to grow first experiment a launch and go from there. So I guess that was my first exposure to how interesting a company that's at series fee. How does it get to, to the next, to the next level of growth and ultimately, how does it architect its path towards becoming a public organization I'm open to then I didn't, I didn't really understand that world. I was just on a, on a great ride with that, with a cool brand. I got to work really closely as I mentioned, but Johann and the leadership team that he built as well, as well as with the global functions to understand a lot more about how you build operations, um, particularly in a company that's going through a period of hyper growth. How do you prioritize what markets you want to go after? How do you prioritize the target segments that you want to chase? How is that different for each different market? How do you coordinate and align your resources towards a coherent game plan? Um, how do you manage that while you're also hiring like hundreds of people? So I kind of became one of the early kind of young Turks, I guess we would want to experiment with, have a hypothesis that we could build an inbound sales engine. And we'd just throw a couple of smart people out to figure out how we would do that. And over the course of time and we'd figure out, is this something that's scalable? Does it work? Do we need to build a team here? Or is this something that needs to be put in the cooler for a little bit down the line? So I kind of became one of those people who was like setting up new teams, building experimentation, frameworks, setting milestones and checkpoints and ascertaining, whether something works or not. I guess Dropbox was in a unique position at the time because it was well funded and you didn't have the luxury of doing that. But I guess that taught me a lot of DNA around thinking about, you know, how you set up your, your go-to market operation to match your product ambitions, to match your marketing messages as well. And so it was from there that, uh, that another great mentor, the guy who actually hired me into, into Dropbox, so called Oliver, Jay, um, moved over to a sauna as their, as their CRO. And his boss was actually Chris Farinacci from Google would come over as the COO. So we felt that there was good alignment. I felt I'd learned a lot about, about how to do these pieces with great mentorship from someone like Johan and Jeremy McCarthy, who now leads per persona in Europe for sales and Adrian Gormley. Who's now the COO of at 26 world part of a really strong talent cluster. And I got to learn from them. So I thought I was ready to kind of do it myself this time. Right. And they joined us on as their, as their head of revenue for the region as well. Um, it was a very different challenge with the Sinai. You know, the company was at series B, it was in a much more nascent latent category around the Canada project management, um, category, um, the child, the company wasn't as well funded, even though I had a super strong, super strong founder and Dustin Moskovitz. Um, so the challenge was basically to, to repeat this kind of playbook, but do so in a really efficient way do so in a really, really, really efficient way. And that's where I P and L responsibility for the first time and probably have a lot of cross functional responsibility as well, where we needed to ensure that our marketing team was staffed really well. And that we had a very coherent strategy for the region, as well as on ciliary functions, like people, operations and finance and HR within the region to reasonably be well. And then that company has gone through an impressive journey over the last little while. And I guess I felt like I was, I was ready to go again,

Speaker 3: 12:30

If we step back a little bit on what you just said, and let's say you have startup founder, who's been, you know, getting traction, getting good growth. And they're thinking about going international. What are the top three things that you think these people have to think about to make sure that the growth and the expansion is going smoothly?

Speaker 2: 12:51

Really, really good question. A really important question. I think, I think as a company moves into series B territory, it's clearly a product or a service that people want or they need, um, you've done well. And you've done enough to put a business in place that is attracting investment and that there's people who are willing to put a lot of money behind you. And usually most of these companies will have a plan for what they want to do with their, with their funding, as it comes in that can be build more products that can be hire a bigger sales team. Cause you feel like you've cracked the code for where you want to go, or it can be that you want to, you want to expand internationally. I think understanding what your ambition is around that is, is really important, then what comes international skating points? Oh, interesting one. So I guess first and foremost, I would, I would ask the question of, you know, is the company ready to scale? Um, because scaling takes on a whole new level of complexity, particularly internationally, you know, your legal team, your hate, your team, your culture, your management structure. Is it ready to stretch now that you'll have new sites around the world, are you able to support these people and give them a real positive working experience? And these, the first thing I think about, secondly, where is your product and who's using it and is it in Japan? Is it in Korea? Is it in Europe? Are we seeing strong growth there, like putting operations in regions and what are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to accomplish by this? And it can be very attractive and it can be like a thing to do to, to grow internationally. But the more figured out a company is about what exactly it wants to do by establishing international presence is really, really, really important. And then thirdly, I think hiring is really important. Uh, I think it's important to get the right people in place early people who really assimilate to your culture quite well. Um, people who have high IQ and can manage international relationships really, really well. People who can set a vision for the region, uh, and feed it back and acquire the very tactful professional manner, the resources that they need to grow. And then finally I'd throw in. It's really important in my mind to have, you know, a two year or even a three-year vision because, you know, startups, I like it. It's a great idea at the beginning. And then you hit your, your operational difficulty side. You need to have a true North that you're, that you're heading towards. And it's really important for the whole company to be really, really aligned, um, behind the drive, towards expanding with your international user base or customer base. And your ancillary operations will follow suit.

Speaker 3: 15:08

I want to talk about notion and you know, the strategies and the experience that you've been through so far. But before we get into that, I would just want to make sure everybody knows what notion is and not make any assumptions, which is a great reflex to have when you build a tech products. So can you give us a bit of a short overview? What notion is?

Speaker 2: 15:26

Yeah, of course, notion isn't, isn't all in one tool for notes, project documents and collaboration, and the tool can be used by individuals to keep their lives and notes organized and by teams and even hold companies to coordinate the work of, of tens or thousands of individuals. Um, we've over a million users worldwide, and we're used by thousands of teams to build a Wiki's project managements, shared documents. I keep communications flowing all in one spot. And the major challenges that that notion solves is lower productivity. You know, people spending a ton of time search information, um, people repeating themselves and duplicating work where they can't find it, it already exists. And notification overload and context switching, which is ruining focus, I guess, notion makes it really easy to find what you need, collaborate with others and focus on more of your work in one place.

Speaker 3: 16:15

I have to confess my first encounter, let's say with notion is quite similar to when I discovered Google back in the days of remember I was at university, my roommate told me, man, you have to try this, you know, like, there's that simple page with just one search box and they find what you looking for so fast and they even tell you how many seconds it took them. And somebody did the same thing with me for notion. It's like, look at that. And it was a bit the similar, wow aha type of experience. Can you share a bit with us, with strategies, the company put in place that explained that rapid and successful growth?

Speaker 2: 16:57

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's, it's similar feedback to kind of what I've been hearing as I've joined notion, as I'm, as I'm talking with users on with companies who are using the tool as well. I guess people are getting a little bit tired of jumping through dozens of ups, times notifications every day, just to get one thing done and it limits focus and productivity and damages transparency, because information gets siloed within separate tools and it kind of squanders the time spent searching for the right resources or meeting in person to stay aligned. And we're really excited to have a massive and energized audience around the world. It's really, really global, but we're also focused on building the best product for franchise customers with teams over, over like a thousand users as well. It seems to be resonating really, really well with our, with our user base. Our longterm vision is to give everyone the ability to shape the tools that shape their lives. You shouldn't have to know how to code, to build the best tool to solve your problem either in your personal life or in your work well. Um, and when everyone has the best tools to solve their problems, we've been able to tackle the world's biggest problems, um, together, which I think is just like part of the philosophy of how the tool is set up, which resonates super, super well. Um, on top of that, I think notion has done a really, really good job of building tremendous feedback loops between our user base, our customer base and our product team, um, because the product team is, is reading nimble and agile. We've been able to iterate really, really fast against what people's needs are. Um, we have this really, really impressive tagging system within the organization. So every interaction with customers or with users, the topics that are discussed are tagged meeting well, I'm there, there for status report over by our engineering team or we're able to spot what are the trends, the patterns, what are people asking for? And as I say, iterate and build really fast, um, against what those needs are. So it's not always fast. Most of the time super, super fast has been a couple of features that have been, uh, that have been waiting for a while to come. So I think what that's created is that's created a really strong connection and bond between the company, the product and its user base and its customer base, which in turn has led to a really high NPS. And it's led to a very, very, very connected experience for our users and our customers. Be it existing users, experience users or people are using the product for the first time. And that as well has, has kind of resulted in, in strong viral growth of the product by people recommending it organically to their peers, to their friends, to their colleagues, which leads to that strong kind of halo of growth for the product. So for me, just a couple of months in, and that seems like under the hood, what led to the growth from the outside before I joined the company, I had a similar experience to you. I was like, this is just really intuitive, smart technology, um, which I can pick up really easily, um, kind of makes you, it makes my work look really good. I'm not particularly someone who does things presentation super stylish in your class. We did this tool help me organize my thoughts and made me look good when I was jotting stuff down.

Speaker 3: 19:39

When you have a company who has such a, you know, rapid growth, great product and good track record, and you have to pick it up and bring it to the next level in a different region, what are your top priorities? You don't have to tell me all of your secrets, but you know, when you take notion from where it is and you want to bring it to the next level in the EME region, how do you plan for this next phase?

Speaker 2: 20:06

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question. And obviously it's something that I pour over constantly. It's kind of, I guess it's my job to me is a really unique region and like other regions that has unique challenges and it's, it's a different lock that needs a different key to, to unlock it. We've numerous markets that have different languages, different cultures, there's different trends that are happening within different countries. And there's different attitudes towards, towards technologies or towards societal changes. And the media markets can operate at different paces. Also, you know, your brand can be super hot in Sweden, but non-existent in Spain. Um, some markets might find your tech liberating. Others might find it invasive in SAS technology. You know, you can find that your tech is really with person users in one market, but no presence with businesses or it can be completely vice versa in a market that's only a couple of hundred kilometers away. If you imagine with most of these technologies born in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, when you're dealing with a market like North America, just one big homogenous market, um, it's going to be like jarring or daunting to an organization when you show up and you've got all of these different needs and requirements. And in many ways, the most important element is to find a balance between having a very solid centralized brand while tailoring your messaging or your target segmentation in markets that you want to be present in. And I think you need to understand where you want to be present in first. Um, interestingly, most growing tech companies always score their first wins in the tech industry itself, right? Tech companies buy from tech companies. There's a few reasons for this tech companies are typically super forward-leaning and open to new technologies, tech employees, regardless of where you are in the world are seeming to increasingly look, think, act, and talk like each other. It's almost like there's no national boundaries in this particular industry. And so the only problem is often designed with them in mind as they're the primary feedback loop. And in a sense, you see some growth really starting in tech companies and look with strong startup presence in France and Germany and the UK and the Nordics and Benelux and Southern Europe as well. So as you, when you kind of start scoring your, your first early wins and learning a lot about how you need to localize the real challenge comes in your product when your product starts getting adopted by the broader economy, can the company managed transition from, from marketing to, to other tech companies, to, to pushing your marketing towards more traditional industries. And that's where you're localizing your product and localizing your approach becomes really, really important. And obviously starting with languages and messaging, and which will open up your, your total adjustable market. I thought of that kind of tech ribbing and who were all English speakers, and they're really becomes, becomes a whole new ball game. Um, you know, in Germany they might care about, but safety and privacy in Sweden, they might care most about design. Um, in other economies they might care about, about cost efficiency of your product as well. So you need to pick your messaging quite carefully. And then as you scale, I think part of the Mia skill is prioritizing. It means strategic about who you're trying to sell to and how it's different for every company, but it's, it's a really fun, right? Um, and again, for us, for Silicon Valley headquartered organizations that are scaled in Europe, I think part of the executive team's challenges is crafting that vision and not making it seem too complicated and having a super-strong plan, which prioritizes where you want to go first and how you,

Speaker 3: 23:16

Yeah, I totally agree me being based in Berlin, originally from Canada, I've seen the complexity of the EMA markets, which also makes it such a beautiful place to live, but I'm interested in what you said about localization user feedback and all of that, because you work mainly for American companies. And one of the challenges when you are selling are you are doing customer support for a company who a product and engineering team probably centralized in a different market. You are always, let's say pulled in different directions, right? Because you want to make sure that as you said, you're meeting the needs of, you know, your key, your key users or key markets. But at the same time, there is a centralized product and engineering team who has to prioritize things and build a platform that fits for as many markets as possible. So how, if you manage that and in the past, and maybe more recently up notion, what, what are your key secrets to be able to be the best friend of the P and D team in a different market and stay relevant and effective? What your users in EMU? Yeah,

Speaker 2: 24:30

It's kind of the, it's where the rubber hits the road perspective in this job. I guess, I guess my viewpoint, there is some of it isn't rocket science, right? There's some really big economies in Europe. Um, there are some, some industries and verticals that, you know, have strong economies themselves and strong buying power for your product is a super strong fit for, and then there's other, there's other industries, which might be a little bit softer, but you might have a hunch about it being somewhere. You could go. And then there's some easy decisions around where you, you definitely feel that you don't need to go. Hopefully your data that you take from where your adoption already is can also be a nice overlay to set a basis on where your product is already showing green shoots of getting traction. And then you look at the resources that you have at hand as well. So with those three pieces, now your intuition and your experience of where you you think are, you know, it's really good growth, what your data is already telling you from your product. And then one of the resources at hand there's, there's a nice matrix that you can create there, which should hopefully act as a defining rod to help you make really good data informed decisions about where you want to go. And I think the more stringent and strenuous you can be on that, it actually helps you form your strategy really well. And when you have a really strong strategy, that's, that's well versed and well socialized within the organization. That's where you can, you can do really good job of getting the right backing or the right internal internal support for kind of where you want to go. You know, it's different for every company. Some companies are super resource heavy and you can do a lot of things up at the same time. And some other companies are in the middle order. You can maybe pick two of five things that you want to do. And for some companies need to be ruthlessly, ruthlessly rigorous in your prioritization and start where you think you can score the most points first in my mind. And I would say that I've seen a couple of times there is some repeatable playbooks, but I will, I wouldn't say it here because it's quite different for every organization in my mind.

Speaker 3: 26:20

And you've talked about matrix or frameworks. Is there anything that you've been consistently using because a lot of people talk about mental model about decision-making. There was a nice podcast with, I think it's Daniel,[inaudible] CEO of Spotify on Tim Ferriss show recently where he talks about decision-making and all of these things. Is there anything that you've been, you know, throughout the past few years consistently using and say, this thing makes my complex business so simple helps me make decisions helps me prioritize.

Speaker 2: 26:55

Yeah, absolutely. I think working with Dustin Moskovitz and Assata, this is like what he is all about, and he's all about clarity. And he designed this, this matrix and for how the company kind of makes decisions that he turned are called the pyramid of clarity, and it can work within companies from the top down perspective. It can work within small teams. It can even be a personalized way to kind of set up your framework. So if you think about what's your mission, what are we trying to achieve here? Ultimately like at the top of the pyramid underneath that, you know, what are our strategies in order to, to achieve that mission underpinning that what are the objectives that we want to set in place in order to achieve that strategy? And then underneath that, you know, what are the key results with which, how are we going to measure the success or the failure of these objectives as well? So it seems kind of easy to say it, I bought in essence, in reality, it can be tricky to follow these things together. However, I certainly use it as a, as a personalized framework for myself when, when managing teams or initiatives or projects, if you're just super clear on what we are trying to achieve here on everybody's reading video line to us, um, we have a well discussed and aligned and agreed strategy, and everybody is on board with that as well. Um, we have been ambitious and we've documented really well. What are the objectives that we are, that we're going for? These are what all our operations are based around upon. And then we have the right checkpoints and milestones in place to ensure that we, uh, we're measuring whether the results are working. I guess that's kind of part of the skill of, of leadership and management is being able to implement these things. I think the lubricant that makes it all work really well is, is really clear. Um, in my opinion, really human communications as well, and being very deliberate about being overly communicative and making sure that everybody is on board is, is aligned, understands it. And when it doesn't understand it, take the time to make sure that they, that they do understand it and their role to play in it. And that they're comfortable with it too. I think what makes it work because it sounds good for about a day is, is really fast and candid feedback loops. Um, if you can instill a culture within your teams, where feedback is, is as blessing as a gift and the more candid people can be, and the more disarmed they can be in candid feedback, the quicker you're going to be able to double down on what works. And you're going to be able to squash the books that are always in the process as well. And then finally, from a, from a leadership perspective, something that I've learned kind of sometimes painfully, um, has been just consistency of thought and consistency of action. Um, if you say something, you know, follow through is really important, that helps people respect and understand on the line to the decisions that you've made as well. So it's not something that came out of HBS or, or it ran in some MBA program, but it's just, it's just a methodology that's kind of worked for me

Speaker 3: 29:30

All, conceptually, it all makes sense. And I just want to break it down to the more granular level you've talked about, you know, being clear on objectives, missions, and all of these things. I don't you to give me a lecture here, but if we try to break it down for the audience a bit better and pick one example, what would it look like? If you have an objective, what kind of objective would you have? How would you break it down? And then you talked about over-communicating over-communicating can be a very relative terms, depending if you're a, a person of many words or not. So if we were to break this down into something a bit more concrete, what would it look like?

Speaker 2: 30:08

Yeah, absolutely. So if we were to say, let's take the example of setting up a sales team with it within a region for the first time we say that our mission ultimately is to bring this great product to market with a really efficient sales engine and to develop a fun and rewarding culture along the path. I think everybody, if they read that statement or you're in a room with a group of people, they'd be like, yeah, I, I, I hear you. That's clear. We want to build a world-class team. We want to bring this great product to market and we want to have fun while we're doing it. Yeah. I'm behind that. Great. Everyone's onboard. Okay. Next step. What's our strategy. How are we going to do that? This is where we get a little bit more drilled into, you know, what works with the product or what resources we have at hand or what our selling motion looks like. So the strategy then is we are first going to develop a new pipeline with a sales development function. Um, we're going to invest in these marketing campaigns or programs to, to make it work. And we hope at the end of the day, we've run marketing campaigns. We generate a pipeline and we're able to, to sell to, to that target audience. So I think again, everybody will understand great. I understand what our strategy here is. We want to the pipeline, we want our marketing campaigns to do that. And we want to, we want to get the sale seal rolling, um, the objectives that are like, what are we actually going to do? Um, so if we say that objective one by February, we want to hire three new sales development reps into the team. By March. We want to have run four brand campaigns, one in Germany, one in the UK, one in Switzerland, et cetera, et cetera. And these are things that are super measurable, read it, reading it, and that can be across different, different functions or different roles. And then finally the key results are the numbers or the metrics that we have assigned to these objectives. So again, from the very beginning with the feedback piece or with the clarity and communications piece, if we're super clear on what our mission is, what our strategy is to achieve the mission, one of the objectives and key results, which are going to underpin the strategy and making sure that everybody understands this, and then check-in points, you know, monthly check-in. I said a reminder every month to just write a note to everybody within notion to say, what's going on in the meal, remind them of what our mission is and what our strategy is and update them on how our objectives are performing against the key KPIs and being super open and human with what's working well, and what's not working well. And then keeping, keeping a phone, the phone elements of the communication, the cadence as well, and that invites, you know, fast and candid feedback, as I mentioned before, uh, and I think it demonstrates a consistency of thought and action,

Speaker 3: 32:36

You're a bit of a process builder, an organization builder given the positions that you've you've had in the past. And today, when you build a team from scratch, what are you looking for? What kind of profiles experience are you trying to bring in?

Speaker 2: 32:55

So a crucial elements to the science of, of how you get things by obviously it's hiring and making sure you have not just great people, but the right people in accordance to what you need. You know, for me, I think, I think teams and companies have very different needs at different times. And my experience has taught me to not be too dogmatic or too rigid in your bias on, on where you stand on the axis of skills versus experience versus attitude. Personally, I've been part of skating teams and I probably hired more folks with that spike in the attitude and skill category. However, I certainly felt the burn of not having enough experience within the organization as well, or I've seen so much beyond locked by, by bringing on people with significant experience as a leader. I think it's really important to consider what your team or a certain initiative that you're staffing for needs at any given time and be super deliberate about how you staff the team while being mindful to strike a really strong balance. If you think of staffing like a football coach, a good team needs a mix of defenders of midfielders, of strikers. You need some very dependable players. You need some really flare players. Um, you need some people who are talkers. You need some people who don't talk at all. Um, you need a healthy mix because ultimately, you know, growing and scaling, you're just tackling new problems every week, every month, every quarter, every year growing is, is just like resolving, figuring out problems. And I think you need to be, to be able to think about things from multiple different viewpoints to kind of get it right. So that's why I always think about architecting and balance at the beginning. Um, in terms of kind of traits that I look for, I do have, I do have some things that do kind of stick out or stand to mind to me. Um, I'm a big fan of Patrick Lencioni if anybody knows Patrick, and he's the author of the, um, of the five dysfunctions of a team. Um, and he talks about four qualities that really do resonate with me talking about firstly smarts. So does somebody have good smart, so they smart and that can be, can they figure out problems, um, political[inaudible]? Can they read a situation? Well, can they read the room well, um, are they able to influence reading really well? Secondly, are they humble? Do they have humility? And is this someone who's going to do more for the team than, than do more for themselves? This is always a tough one to, to kind of decipher because you do want people who are, who are quite team oriented, or certainly have the right level of humidity to fit well within, within your team or we'll help you develop the right level of trust. And then finally, I think hunger is really important. I think hunger is super, super important. Um, people who show a natural curiosity about their role and a desire to be really good at us. Um, but also show curiosity about the, about the broader business as well. Um, which is really important. I think in the, in the early days of an organization, you don't really want somebody who's just siloed within their role, who only wants to do just their job or do the minimum there. You want people who are a little bit curious about how they can help other parts of the organization as well. So I guess that's my, that's my little framework,

Speaker 3: 35:38

But let's go back to the notion and the future. So you, and I know again, you just started in the bigger scheme of things you just started, you started yesterday, but what are your plans for notion in MEA in the next, I don't know, six to 12 months.

Speaker 2: 35:55

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm just, I'm so enjoying being in the startup scale-up environment, again, it's just such a fun time where, where there's so much potential and opportunity within an organization. And, um, and having, having been around the track a couple of times, I think I can pick my part in a deliberate fashion here quite well. So we don't have our plans laid out just yet. I'm still in the middle of figuring out exactly what we want to do. We do know is that we have a really, really strong user base within, within a Mia, a really strong mix of personal users of notion of people are using them within small teams. And then some really, really impressive larger organizations who are already wall-to-wall with our tool. And I think in my 30, 60, 90 day plan, first of all, I wanted to do a listening tour. So I met with as many customers as I possibly could as many users as I possibly could just to listen around how they like, why they liked the product, what they use it for, what we should be doing better, or how they'd like to see the product to grow and develop. And honestly, for that feedback back to our product team as well. And with that, with that cool tagging system that we have, I guess that gives me a good indication of what's possible and what the potential is I'm working closely with, with our COO, with, with Akshay, as well as our marketing team, um, beginning to plot out, you know, how would we go about over three years or, or so building our presence within the region, continuing to, to see our user growth grow, um, maintaining and strengthening our community presence within the region as well, building our inside operations, you know, what can we handle from our inside headquarters within, within EMEA? What are the processes and systems and teams. Then we set up initially to, to start building our, our monetization on our revenue engine. And then later down the line, do we need to grow beyond Dublin? Um, do we have a need for further presence in some of our core markets where we need to get even closer to some of our users, it's still early days in the next six months and 12 months will tell me a lot more about what we need to do strategically in order to, to, to really win within the region. Um, and I'm really looking forward to that challenge and just being part of a, of a, of an early stage journey, you know, notion it's still only 72 people. It is today, which is remarkable considering the number of users and the revenue that the company generates already really, really remarkable. And it really feels like family. And I'm the, I'm the new Irish girls within the family, which is, which is so much fun. Uh, and shortly, you know, there'll be six European cousins and then there'll be 20 European cousins and that'll be 50, or because it's what you think is a fun ride for the whole company. In general,

Speaker 3: 38:16

You've said that notion has done a fantastic job with a relatively, still small team so far. How can our audience learn more benefits from the notion product or specific programs that you guys have?

Speaker 2: 38:30

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you can read up on notion, notion dot. So when you can learn all information on our tool, it's super easy to try our product and to sign up for them personal capacity for free. Um, I encourage everybody to kind of get stuck in and get your hands on product. Cause it's, it's pretty cool and pretty transformational. As people mentioned, we also want a pretty impressive program for, for startups Oh, into the all-in-one nature of our tool. No, she was really, really useful, particularly for startups or organizations that that need kind of a, an all in one solution for further work. And last year we created a really good program called notion for startups, where we're startup organizations who are affiliated with a, with a VC or an incubator or startup hold. Some form can benefit from a thousand dollars of, of notion credits, which goes a really, really long way. I get to access to our, to our teams, our enterprise platform. We need VCs and incubators and home, and to sign up for our partnership program, which is available via notion.sl/startups or notion.associates/partners. And we have literally have hundreds of VCs, incubators and hubs already signed up for this program, but anybody who wants access to that star can encourage their affiliation companies to sign for the partnership program. And we can go from there. If you don't see your program available there, just contact me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to try and get your organization set up as well.

Speaker 3: 39:54

I don't want to take too much of your time. I know you're, you're busy and you have a load on a plate, any final thoughts or advice that, you know, you'd like to share with our audience before you go,

Speaker 2: 40:03

Of course, as you kind of alluded to earlier on, I guess the weather, my career has kind of panned out has been that, that series B guy. Um, I think this is such a fun stage for an organization. I guess, joining I'm always very humbled by the people who've been there before. Um, the real heroes are the people who've taken it from inception through to, you know, angel investment or bootstrap through to series a and whatnot. And I, I like, I always feel like you're standing on the shoulders of giants as you come on those early stage. People deserve so much of their props because they've literally got the machine up and running, but the series B journey onwards is it's so much fun. It's really where you sweat your fish or cut bait. And it's where strategy becomes the most important thing I think you can do within, within your organization. So can you use the strategy, learn to level up, learn to grow yourself, you know, in hypergrowth like my former boss and a great mentor, remind Oliver, Jay. He reminded me that in hypergrowth every six months, you're interviewing for your job again, because the company has, has changed and it's become more complex. So if there's some advice I can give is that, um, something I've always looked to do is continue to invest in yourself, make sure that you're leveling up all the time, make sure that, you know, in six months time when the company's at a different stage or 12 and five, you are still the person who who's able to take on the challenges that will be there at that stage. And you know, sometimes if you forget that you, you may find yourself just not having all the resources you need to do the job really well.

Speaker 3: 41:19

What's the best way for our audience to follow you, Robbie.

Speaker 2: 41:23

Yeah. So, um, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I also post periodically on the company blog and whatnot. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Robbie O'Connor, uh, I love networking. I love speaking with people generally about needs or issues. I'm happy to talk about notion or technology anytime as well. Thank you so much for your time. Good luck for the next steps. Thanks Michelle.

Speaker 3: 41:50

Thanks again for listening. I hope you enjoy the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes@thestunningup.com. Also, if you want to accelerate your startup growth and build something meaningful, well, check out our growth lead for tech startups online course@growthdotstunning.com. Thanks a lot.