Doubling Your Productivity

- [Announcer] This is an audio course. No need to watch, just listen. Welcome to the latest addition to LinkedIn Learning: Podcasts. We've curated some of the best business podcasts and made them even easier to listen to. Each episode is split into sections. Use the links in the contents area to skip to whichever section you like. We're always looking for new ways to help you learn, and we'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks for listening. - [Interviewer] One of your big claims to fame there is doubling the productivity of the Facebook employees. And so let's talk about then, what are some of the interventions that made the biggest impact and are the most transferable? Because I imagine, you know, most listeners are probably not going to say, Hey, let's build out a new system that helps predictively service resumes of candidates, although some might, so that's not off the table, but I'd love to know which ones have the most impact and are the most transferable? - [Male Speaker] Well, I think it does very much depend on what kind of business you're in. So you really have to adapt your productivity strategy for the business and even for the role that you are in. But a few things that I think are general strategies that we employed. One is really understanding what are the long (indistinct) in getting things done. So for Facebook, the biggest function in the company is the product organization. The second largest function is the sales organization. The product organization, their productivity is driven by how much code can they write and is that code impactful? And to be quite frank, that really wasn't a problem that my organization could fix for them. But sales is a different story. Salespeople, you know, they got to meet with customers. They need to understand which customers to spend time with. And there were a lot of things that we could do to help them be better prepared for those conversations. And especially because Facebook's customer base was growing so much, having a much richer and better understanding of, you know, who's an advertiser of the company? What is their advertising objective? What problem are they trying to address with Facebook advertising? Where are they in their journey? Are they being successful? And therefore, they needed some more advanced advice. Are they just starting? And they don't really know how to use the different advertising products. That would affect how the sales organization would approach customers. And so a lot of what we did was just centralizing information to make it clear at what stage a customer was in. And that helps to give the sales organization the right tools, the right conversations to have with companies; conversations that were specifically designed to help them alleviate problems with the advertising products and help them be more successful with accomplishing their objectives and therefore spend more with the company. And we became very, very good at this. - [Interviewer] Yeah, but you know, I'll tell you what, that resonates in terms of, you're centralizing information. In a way that doesn't seem like such a revolutionary move, but in practice, it makes a world of difference. Like, just even putting out a podcast and sort of like, I've got to pull a lot of different pieces of information in terms of after this interview is concluded and before it's published to the world. And so it's actually pretty cognitively intense and it requires me to kind of open up like five or six different windows, but sure enough, with my awesome team... thanks guys. Has put more and more of that into one place. And so I can do less work. In a way, it doesn't seem like a big deal if I spend eight minutes pulling information from different places, but multiply that by hundreds (laughs) of episodes or occasions of an activity and you're really impacting productivity simply by centralizing information. - [Male Speaker] And (indistinct) to access. - [Interviewer] Yeah. - [Male Speaker] And so you can follow this same methodology in almost every role. I do this today for Woven, for my customers. When we onboard users, some of our users request personalized onboarding. We literally get on the phone with them, talk with them about what they're trying to do with their calendars and teach them how to use the product. And we start with all the information that we know about them going into the discussion so that we don't have to ask them things that we should already know. And by having understandings of these questions, we can more effectively tailor our conversation to our customers in a way that's going to give them a better outcome.