How to Regain Productivity in Your Remote Team: Ken Weary of Hotjar

Today we have Ken Weary, VP of Operations at Hotjar!

In this episode, we talked about the reason why Hotjar prefers asynchronous communication, why software tools aren’t as important, and the “Tribes” system Hotjar uses in project ownership.

We also talked about Hotjar’s onboarding process, meeting culture, documentation principles, and why being a self-starter is the number one attribute to have as a remote worker.

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

• How Ken and his spouse manage their children’s education while being digital nomads
• Why Hotjar decided to always default to asynchronous communication whenever possible
• How Hotjar realized that productivity was going down
• Hotjar’s meeting culture and requirements
• How Hotjar’s utilizes the “Tribes” system in project ownership
• Why being a self-starter is important as a remote worker
• Hotjar’s onboarding process and documentation principles

Mentioned resources:

• Hotjar
• Running Remote
• WeWorkRemotely
• Slido
• David Darmannin, CEO of Hotjar
• Trello
• Hotjar Team Manual
• Confluence
• Laura Roeder of MeetEdgar – Build a Company That Doesn’t Need You
• Hotjar is hiring!
• Ken’s LinkedIn

Full transcript:

Jovian: Hey, and welcome to another episode of “Outside The Valley,” a podcast by Arc, the remote hiring platform that helps you hire remote software engineers and teams easily. In this podcast, we interview remote startup leaders, remote work advocates, and workers of distributed teams who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. And as you have noticed, we’re trying out this new intro format so we can directly get to the conversation.

And today we are joined by someone from a company I really love, you’re also a customer, actually, which is Hotjar, a powerful analytics tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users. The Hotjar team is 100% distributed. And other than having a great product, it’s also one of the companies I really admire when it comes to transparency, team management and, of course, company culture. You can see it reflected on their brand and how they are customer-obsessed. And here with us today is none other than Hotjar’s VP of Operation, Ken Weary. Ken, welcome to the show.

Ken: Awesome. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jovian: So, as I’ve mentioned to you before, we’ve met briefly, so I listened to your talk in the Running Remote conference. And I was super fascinated by, you know, how you explained the process and internal process in Hotjar and the philosophy behind it. So, I’d love to dive into that a bit more in this chat. But first of all, can you share a bit more about yourself, and actually, how did you get to join Hotjar?

Ken: Awesome. Yeah, happy to. So, I joined Hotjar about three and a half years ago. I was at the time living in Mexico, vacationing in [inaudible]. So, I am a digital nomad myself. For the past five and a half years I’ve been on the road. And what makes me a little bit more unique than others is that I also travel with my family.

I travel with my wife and two kids. I have a 14-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son and together we’ve been traveling for more than half of my son’s life. And so I’ve been working as an independent contractor for more than two years and had seen an advertisement for Hotjar on WeWorkRemotely when they were seeking VP of Operations. And it was a good match with my skill set and experience based on prior gigs that weren’t remote. And I applied for it, got to know the founding team, and the rest became history.

Jovian: Yeah. And you mentioned about how you are slightly different because you travel with your family. And this is one of the things that we actually never really talk about in this podcast, but I’m super curious about that. Let’s just start with this first.

So, in your talk, you mentioned that you were traveling with your child, right. And I think I’ve heard from a lot of people that one of the challenges when you’re in a digital nomad lifestyle is when you have a family. What about their education and whatnot? So, I’d love to understand more about that. So, now you’re traveling with your child. Can you share with me, like, how do you guys manage when it comes to their education and their lifestyle? I wonder how you and your family deal with that.

Ken: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m very fortunate because my partner, my wife is an educator. So she’s extremely comfortable with being their school, their principal, their teacher. And so she’s been leading their education as a homeschool parent. And my full-time job is Hotjar, her full-time job is teaching. And so that said, we approach teaching from the aspect of my wife does direct instruction, of course, for core subjects of math and reading, writing history, so forth, but we use the two other resources to supplement that, the first of which is our travels.

So, when we’re traveling to new area, there’s no better way to really understand the history and the culture and different aspects than to expose them to that locally. And so because of that, and whether that’s visiting museums or battlegrounds or art galleries, they’ve seen some amazing things. The Parthenon and Acropolis in Athens, or the pyramids in Giza.

And there’s a lot more that they can experience from an education perspective from actually, you know, crawling inside the Great Pyramid of Giza than just reading about it in a book. And so we supplement education with the real-world experiences that they have. And additionally, another huge resource that we use is the internet, of course.

My daughter is getting into subjects now that my wife is not an expert on, and so whether that’s my daughter’s interested in genetics and chemistry. And so there are phenomenal courses online for whatever the interest of the child is or whatever the interest of the teacher needing to supplement is. So, that’s very much how we manage.

Jovian: Yeah. That is amazing. Actually, this podcast interview is just like a scheme for me so you can adopt me as your child. I’m just kidding. But yeah, and I think this is something that increasing that I feel like is rarely talked about. When it comes to the lifestyle of digital nomad or even remote workers like the child education, like, there’s so much there to explore, especially in the age of internet, right? You don’t really need to be binded by the traditional curriculum and sense.

Ken: Oh, no. Not at all. I mean, and the resources available online, I would make the case are…in a lot of cases can be much more customized and personalized to the learner.

For instance, my daughter loves Harry Potter and she was interested in genetics. And online is a highly rated Harry Potter for genetics, a course where they actually look at genetic traits amongst different Harry Potter characters based on JK Rowling’s books. I mean, right down the alley of my daughter who’s salivating for this course and took it, loved it.

And there’s just different unique ways of teaching that I didn’t have available to me when I was in traditional schools. And my wife wouldn’t have the creative juices to be able to deliver that, but somebody else does and we can tap into that for a reasonable fee.

Jovian: Harry Potter for genetics, you cannot be any more niche than that. Right. So, yeah.

Now, I want to talk with you more about what comes a lot in this podcast about communication. And there’s also a big theme in Hotjar, and not only Hotjar, in remote work, in general, you know, meeting culture, team culture, as in communication and so on. So, I want to talk about communication first.

As we kind of know there are two thoughts when it comes to communication and remote teams, and they are like async and synchronous, right? And some people swear by async and other people, “Nope. Async don’t work. We need, like, FaceTime, like, routinely.” And correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like Hotjar’s communication mode is leaning toward the async where you can give each other Slack. And I realized that, of course, there’s no right or wrong. It all depends on the setup of the company. But I wonder in Hotjar itself, what was it like that made you, guys, realize that, “Hey, async is, like, the best for us.”

Ken: Yeah. So, I think you’re absolutely right, we do lean async. We don’t have a hard and fast, you know, “thou shall not jump on a call” kind of rule, but sometimes they’re needed, but we want to always try to default to async because if you… What led us down this path is about a year ago we were like, “Oh, wow. Everybody is so busy.” Our productivity was starting to drag and we knew we had a great team. We knew we had a lot of talent, but we weren’t moving as fast as we had previously.

And so one of the really big keys to understanding that was we started pulling up people’s calendars, right? We have open calendars and Hotjar, as you mentioned, we’re extremely transparent. And as you start looking at calendars, you just see these either blocks of time of, you know, 69 minutes long or litany of, you know, 15-minute, 20-minute meetings all scattered throughout somebody’s calendar and it became very clear of, “Wow. This person has no ability to flow in their day.” They’re not able to really sync with the stuff that’s hot and heavy on their plate.

And so it led us to examine that a bit more, find out what was driving all of these micro meetings. And it was clear that what was doing it was we’d started to default to the aspect of, “Oh, I have a question. Let’s jump on a call,” as opposed to, “I have a question. Let me throw it in an email or a Slack message that can be responded at whenever the person is truly available to tackle it.”

Jovian: Yeah. You mentioned that the team realized that it started to drag down productivity, like, a year ago, right? How did you discover that? How did you realize that, “Okay. Productivity is going down”? What were the symptoms or signs? Because I feel like in a lot of companies like people feel like they’re slightly unproductive but they don’t know, like, if it’s…they don’t know how to tell it to people. I wonder what you guys did to detect those kind of things.

Ken: Yeah. The biggest thing was we’d started to miss a lot of our internal forecast for projects being done. So, we’re not hardcore on, “This is gonna be shipped and done by this date and launched,” because things always get more complex or you might have an emergency for customers and things get derailed. But we do put target dates on things or target, “By the end of this quarter, we will have done this.”

And one of the things that’s extremely important to us is we work in an agile environment, and so we’re constantly doing retros to take a look at, “Hey, how did we do last quarter?” And so as we did a quarterly retro, it became clear of, “Wow. We thought we would have been much further along on our roadmap by now than we are. Why is that?”

And then it began to go into a root cause analysis to say, “What’s going on here?” And the calendar was really kind of the glaring thing that jumped out at us to say, “Wow, here’s a really good example as to why some of our really key resources were getting bogged down.

Jovian: Got it. Got it. So, after you discovered the main issue of the whole thing, what were the next steps that you guys did to mitigate all of this, which I think like started the movement to be more async?

Ken: Yeah. And to be fair, it was much more of a reminder to go async. We’ve always tried to be an async aspect, but over time you lose focus on that or maybe you realize you need more focus on it. And so really, kind of the next thing that came about were twofold. Number one, we updated what we call our weekly schedule.

So, across Hotjar, even though we’re agile, we do propose a lot of things to the team of, “Hey, consider working in this manner.” So, our CEO created a really nice post that we put out to all team members that said, “Hey, think about organizing your week this way. And so let’s front-load meetings on Monday so we can kick things off and with planning, and one on ones were needed so you get that running and the team has a really good cadence throughout the week.

And let’s also make sure that we don’t overburden ourselves with meetings beyond that. So, let’s think, you know, scrum-based, you know, time-boxed and efficient daily check-ins from teams, but let’s also look to make sure that we protect the aspects of really deep work.” And so proposing different chunks for that.

One of the things that we recommend to the team is consider a Wednesday meeting-free. Meeting-free Wednesday. Let’s not get together and have meetings unless, of course, you really absolutely need to.

And so I’ll probably on any given Wednesday only have one meeting and the rest is for my deep work. And so we publish this, we talk about it to the team in both synchronous and asynchronous aspects to make sure that it begins to be much more part of our DNA and reminding, and then we also incorporated that back into our onboarding as well.

So, when new team members join, this is another thing that we noticed because we’ve had a lot of really good growth in size of our team. One new team member joining who is continuously pinging people on Slack looking for real-time answers, when that begins to be very disruptive, and that can be a little bit contagious, right? And so one of the things we did is let’s make sure during onboarding, we reinforce this to people, make sure they know that, “Hey, you’re new, you may forget this. It’s all right. But always default back to this type of thinking.”

Jovian: Yeah. There’s a lot there that I want to unpack slowly because it’s related to hiring, onboarding, documentation and just like company culture in general. But I think I remember you shared this last year in Hotjar. Like you mentioned, there’s this kind of like… It sort of relates to the post that you mentioned. So, Monday is meeting’s day and Wednesday is like no meeting day. So it’s more like a general guideline. Am I correct?

Ken: That’s right.

Jovian: Okay. Yeah. That is fantastic. One of the things… I just remembered. One of the things that I find interesting because people…some people thought the…when it comes to async versus sync it’s the tools that you use, but it’s not. It’s really just because the process… This is an analogy that I always remember. Can you share that? The drunk driving.

Ken: Yeah. A lot of people love to talk about tools and especially remote work individuals love to talk about tools. What are you using for X? What are you using for Y? And I hate that question because I think it’s looking at the problem, the symptom or actually the objective in the wrong way because there’s an old saying, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” Right? If you start with something that…if you start with thinking about what is it that I need to solve a problem and you go straight to a tool, you’re going to miss the key requirements for actually ensuring it’s fixed.

And I think the analogy I shared at Running Remote was if a drunk driver gets arrested and you ask what kind of car they were driving, that’s completely irrelevant. It’s that the bone head had too much to drink and decided to get in the car, it’s what he did or he or she did that was actually the mistake. And so it’s important that you look at things from a process perspective of how are you going to use a tool.

So, you can use Slack asynchronously and use it to save threads and to look at follow-ups from that perspective, or you can look at it as a real-time synchronous tool that is highly effective or disruptive. It really depends upon your process and how you encourage people to use it.

Jovian: Yeah. I gotta confess, even us, like, we found that crap a couple of times, basically, the shiny new object syndrome, “Hey, this is cool. Should we try using this?” And then we even subscribe to it for a couple of… And then nope, nobody using it and then just… That’s a couple of dollars, a couple of hundred dollars down the drain. It happens.

So, I also want to talk about… We’ve talked about meetings. Now, I want to talk about the meeting culture itself in Hotjar. I think there’s a lot of people, companies that still struggle to have effective meeting. So, what is the meeting culture like in Hotjar? Is it some kind of certain guideline of how you should do meetings to save time and then to be making more effective?

Ken: Yeah. So much like we talked about before of we believe in guidelines, right? So, every team, every function, every meeting may have a different objective or different personality and how it’s run. There are some teams that will utilize Trello during the meeting or other teams that will utilize Asana during the meeting.

So, what we’ve said is, let’s go back to what are the core requirements of a meeting? Number one, it’s got to have a true purpose and agenda. So, if you don’t have a true purpose and agenda, you shouldn’t schedule a meeting and even more so you should never accept the invite for that meeting. So, it needs to have a clear objective.

And I decline meetings on occasion because a team member doesn’t put in there what it is that the agenda is about. What are we trying to cover? I’m not talking about, like, “Hey, for 10 minutes we’re gonna cover this, and then 5 minutes this. We’re not talking about uber-detail, but what are the objectives of the meeting? We’re gonna talk about these three things and we’re going to come with a decision on them.” Okay. That’s an agenda. So that’s number one.

And then number two, it’s, it should only have the minimum number of participants that are required. So, don’t invite the whole team just because they might be interested. Oftentimes, that creates the aspect of what’s characterized as FOMO, right? “I’ve been invited to this meeting. I got a fear of missing out. I’m going to make sure that I attend it.” So, only invite those that are truly required.

If you think it’s good for other informational purposes, record it. Record it on Zoom and share it out to other people. Therefore, if they are really concerned about it or really super interested, they can get caught up on it. So, those are kind of the two parameters that we have as core requirements for any meeting at Hotjar. Beyond that, again, we leave it really up to the people and to the topic as to what’s required or what’s the best way to run that meeting.

Jovian: Does Hotjar do, like, all-hands meeting, company all-hands meeting?

Ken: Yeah. So, each week we actually do one.

Jovian: I see.

Ken: We call it our weekly release meeting. So, what the purpose of this meeting is, it’s an hour every Friday and it is recorded for those that have a conflict or perhaps out of the office. And the purpose of it is to keep the entire team abreast of the changes that are occurring within our environment. And we’ve talked about moving this async, but we’re not quite ready to do it yet. It’s actually part of our culture, part of our cadence that we have as a company.

Every Friday, since we work in an agile environment, each team, whether you’re an engineering team, involved in front-end, back-end or you’re in our marketing team, you have shipped something for the week. And it’s the ability for you to highlight what is shipped if it is notable. It’s not required that every team present because perhaps you’re working on a multi-sprint release. That’s fine. But you’ll probably present the next week or the week after because your work will build.

And so we wanna make sure that we’re really ingrained in the aspect of always be shipping, always be improving. And so it’s the ability for each team to share that. So we do that each week. And then once a month we have an all-hands meeting that involves looking in a very transparent way, “How did the company perform last month? Let’s look at our KPIs and key metrics, share that with every team member.” And then give them the ability to, in an AMA format, ask questions to executives about our performance and why something was unexpectedly good or why something didn’t happen according to our forecast.

Jovian: Got it. Is the AMA like anonymous or it’s just like everyone on Zoom can just raise their hand and ask question?

Ken: Yeah. What we found is now that the company… Hotjar now has more than 100 team members. If we leave it for open mics and talking and raising hands, we’re probably going to miss somebody. And especially people have common questions. So, we use the tool Slido to be able to do… So people can submit questions either named or anonymous, but we encourage the names perspective as part of our transparent culture to do that.

But notice the way I described it too, right? Slido is what we use, but first thing I did is describe why we can’t use Zoom and raising hands and open mics, talking. So, it’s really important to always look at, you know, break down what the problem is, then come up with a solution.

Jovian: Great. Yeah, that’s fantastic. So, related to the weekly sprint and the agile culture that Hotjar adopts. As far as I know Hotjar utilized the tribe system when it comes to proc development and probably some marketing. As far as I know, people call it different names, tribes, squads. And can you elaborate a bit more? And how does Hotjar use tribes and utilize it? And how does it work?

Ken: Cool. So, what I’ll describe is what’s in place now and what I described at Running Remote was an earlier iteration. So, we’re always evolving and changing as we look at this. But the purpose is still the same, which is, this kind of came about more than a year ago at Hotjar where we were looking at, “Hey, what are the things we want to address at Hotjar? We want to address onboarding. We want customers to be onboarded in the best possible way as they first joined Hotjar. Well, we want people to regularly utilize our service and get more value. Okay.

Well, who owns that? And who owns onboarding at Hotjar? And is that marketing because they helped acquire the customer? Is it engineering because they’re building the product or is it customer success because they want our customers utilize it more?” And we had an ownership problem. And so what we began to realize is, actually, yes, all of them own onboarding, but how do you address that so that you’re making the most direct benefit to our customers at the same time?

And so what we did is began to align people in what we’ve called “tribes”. And now we have two tribes. And the tribes are focused on the user journey, the front-end journey, and then the consistent nurturing of the customers to stay with us. Beneath those tribes is a second structure called squads. And so within the squads are even more discreet areas of ownership.

Jovian: I see.

Ken: And across these tribes, they’re multi-disciplinary, they involve our engineering team, our product managers, our marketing and customer support as well so that we have direct line of sight as to who is engaged as a micro-team, a squad, or a tribe. What areas of our customer journey? And we found it to be a lot more direct and clear as to ownership and areas of improvement. That’s definitely still a work in progress as we continue to evolve and tweak that, but it’s getting much better.

Jovian: Yeah. I’m just curious. So, on the tribes itself, so, like you mentioned, there’s probably a couple of people from different teams that is responsible for the onboarding on a certain way, right? Engineers, design, and marketing. So, in that tribe itself, who is this decision-maker, usually? Who has the last word, so to speak?

Ken: It depends on the size of the issue.

Jovian: I see.

Ken: We do look for our product managers to play an extremely strong role in the leadership of this. And so, more so than anyone, they make the majority of the decisions, not obviously in isolation, they work with a team in doing so, but when it comes to, “All right. What’s gonna get the most attention from our users and provide them the most benefit? Are we gonna do A or B?” They are responsible for making sure that the decision is made in the most successful-driven, data-driven perspective possible, and so they tend to make most of those decisions.

Obviously, if it’s a longer-term strategic decision and that then moves up the chain to more of an executive decision, but as far as the regular improvements along the roadmap that’s planned, it tends to be our product managers.

Jovian: Got it. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So, I wanna move on a bit into the Hotjar’s hiring and onboarding process. So, this is one of my most favorite topic because it’s really hard. And people have different, like, ideas in how to approach, so I’m just curious.

Okay. For Hotjar itself, as far as…and especially when it comes to remote team, you have to be good at hiring because if it’s a bus, it’s really… Sometimes it takes longer to find out because you’re not in the same place. So, I wonder in terms of… Let’s start from hiring. Do you think there’s anything on the hiring face that makes Hotjar just a bit special or different compared to other remote companies?

Ken: I would say if I could re-characterize the question a little bit, I don’t believe that there is a fundamental difference in how remote companies should operate and how a physical company should operate. I believe that the same symptoms of failure exist in both.

The beauty of remote is you can fail faster, which I view as a gift because you have the ability, if you structure it right, to actually further things in a much quicker way.

But I think that the benefits and drawbacks from a hiring perspective are very much the same. So, at Hotjar, the way we do recruitment is the same way that if I were to work in a brick and mortar business tomorrow, I would encourage that we look at it the exact same way because you get to more of the true working dynamics and company culture match quicker, in my opinion. So, does that make sense? And I can dive into how we do it?

Jovian: Yes. I think it kind of makes sense, especially on the remote company. Now that I think about it, I think in my opinion, like, in remote companies, I think there’s more emphasize on not your resume, but it’s more like, are you a self-starter? I feel like there’s, like, the theme that you have because resume sometimes, it’s hard to identify if it’s a good figure or a bad.

Ken: Oh, absolutely.

Jovian: If you are a self-starter as in, like, “Oh, I’ve created a podcast on the side project. I do meetups.” And that is a big sign. Okay. How about… Let’s say… What are the biggest characteristics when it comes to culture fit when you’re looking for people in Hotjar?

Ken: Yeah. So, Hotjar has five core values. And what we try to do with that as part of our interview process is making sure that there is mapping to the core values. To your point, I fully, fully agree with you that there is… One of our… Well, two of our core values relate to what you said of, you know, “Hey, do they have something going on in the side? Are they doing things?” which is, number one, one of our core values is always be learning.

So, are they doing something to further themselves whether that’s completely unrelated to the job? That’s totally cool, right? What are they doing to show that they are contributing to their own learning? Are they a lifelong learner? Right?

Are they learning something outside of their core skill set and domain because that tells you that they’re obviously the type of people who are passionate about getting better about something even if it doesn’t relate to their to their job. That’s fine. Trust me, it bleeds over.

And then the other one, another core value that generally is embedded within that is we have a core value of “Be bold and move fast.” So, are you showing incremental improvements in doing so or is it, “No, I’m working on this uber-long doctorate that, you know, is going to take forever,” granted that is showing the lifelong learner, but how are you approaching that uber-long doctorate? What is your path for incremental improvements across the board to get that done?

And so diving into that, whether that’s, you know, a doctorate or whether that is focused on much like you said, of, like, “Hey, I’m going to these conferences, doing these meetups,” and, you know, where you see all these incremental aspects of growth as well. So, looking at them together is really important for us and so you begin to see that, you know, there is a culture match from that perspective of, if it is looking at things at a very large perspective, it probably means that an individual might not move as quickly and as fast as we’d like to move. We’re very high-paced in that environment.

Jovian: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think you frame it really well. Is there like an incremental steps of these, stuff? Like if there’s a big project, like, are they able to kind of, like, “Okay. This is step one, the next step that I can do in the next five minutes, for example.” And you want to see that kind of clarity because getting back to the theme of remote work is that sometimes not everyone can help you and guide you to what to do next.

Sometimes you have to be able to find it out for yourself and then try to break down the big picture to more smaller slices. And it doesn’t mean that this is not important for non-remote companies, but as you said, it’s even much more important… At least in my opinion, it’s even much more important when you’re working remotely, especially when you’re looking for remote jobs because nobody can control you in a way.

Ken: Yeah. No. It’s funny that you say that. So, when I was looking for…when I was going through the interview process with Hotjar three and a half years ago, our CEO and founder, David, even told me that one of the things that attracted him to me was the aspect that I was a traveler and that I was constantly traveling and having to figure out how to constantly move throughout the world, not just with myself but with my family and figuring out whether that’s immigration or travel or language or culture was and still is part of how I am a lifelong learner shows an adaptiveness to change, the ability to be flexible. And so from these perspectives these are characteristics that mapped for him mapped me to the culture. And so there’s… You can do it in a bazillion different ways, right? It’s what is it you’re into and how does that display?

Jovian: Right. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. And so I want to move on a bit to the next phase. After hiring, of course, after you find the right person, you onboard them. So, this is a big issue even in complicated companies. Sometimes even us, sometimes we still have that issue. For example, where do I find this document? That’s this onboarding. We’re getting better at that, but there’s some small tweak that we still have to make. So, can you share a bit? So, when someone just joined Hotjar, this is their first day, what was the onboarding process like?

Ken: Yeah. So, we start our onboarding from the day somebody signed to contract with us. So, if you signed a contract with us and you’re gonna join in two months because you’re leaving another job or taking a break in between, really, from our internal perspective, onboarding has started which means that, A, we need to get you information about whether that’s for if you’re gonna become an employee of Hotjar, and then we employee in three different countries.

What are the benefits and perks that they need to get signed up for payroll? Getting that setup upfront is extremely helpful, but also it means that we want you… Because when day one starts, we want your account setup, we want you to start to hit the ground running with the computer at home that is secure and meets our security requirements. So, we need to get a computer order for you as soon as possible.

And so one of the things that we do is we provide at Hotjar a €5,000 home-office budget. And so from that perspective, it gives the ability to order the computer that… I’m sorry, 3,000. Five, three. Yeah. So you need to order the laptop that you want. We give the ability and freedom to the team members to order a laptop that works for them whether that’s a Mac or a Windows device, whether that’s…pick your brand.

We have some security requirements that we have for all devices and some minimum specs, but for the most part if you’re a Windows gal or a Mac guy, it doesn’t matter, order what sees fit. Because we hire in so many different countries, it means that it also may take a while for it to ship to you. You may have to get caught up in taxation or anything like that.

So, it’s important that we start our onboarding at that time because on day one, we want you to start with your computer, open it up, and then that’s when the onboarding truly takes place from a more visible perspective, but it’s important that behind the scenes a lot of stuff start before.

So, day one it involves really setting up a litany of accounts. So, we use more than 100 different SaaS-based tools. And in order to have access to all the important process documentation or the collaboration or anything like that, you need to have access to the tools. And so a new team member will have quite a bit of setup to do from that perspective.

Our expectation is for their first week that they’re not doing their job. Their job is to actually learn about our environment.

And so we have an onboarding Trello board that every team member is assigned and they go through it step by step to learn about the company, to get introductions to different team members, to review our processes, to set up different accounts.

And there’s a lot to learn, right? To learn about our tech stack, to learn about, you know, how our devs work, to learn about, you know, active backlogs and where they exist, and how to get access to them. And so there’s a huge exposure to that. And that’s week one.

Week two is really, once you’re over some of the standard operational things, then it gets into much more of a department onboarding. And so the engineers have a particular onboarding beyond the company onboarding. So, week one is more company onboarding, week two is more departmental onboarding. And so there’s a process that we have across every department.

Some departments have…their onboarding may last several weeks. So, we’ll pair our engineers together, there will be shadowing. Same thing on customer support, let’s shadow the new team members, let’s teach them our ethos and our tone of voice with customers that we have consistency and regularity, but also the ability for them to add their own personality. And so we do that across the board.

Jovian: Wow. Yeah. I’m amazed by, like, what you say, like, onboarding starts from…the onboarding starts from day one even, though, they have, like, two months gap between when they sign the contract and then they start the job. I never heard of anything like this, actually. And, yeah. I mean, this is just sometimes a logistic thing that’s unsexy in a way, but I…

Ken: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jovian: And this is, like, the operations thing, so people like you are the one that makes this happen, it’s so great. Which leads me to our next question, more like the topic that I wanna talk about is documentation, especially the Hotjar’s team manual. I actually found this by accident even before I reached out to you. I totally forgot, but I’m just surprised that… Okay. These are the team manual and I think you guys use Confluence for that. By the way, for listeners, you can find it in the show notes and you can, like… It’s very thorough. And there are things that I didn’t even realize that, yeah, you should write this down.

The one that stand out is like how you should use the company’s laptop, right? How you use a company laptop, but there’s no such thing as the thorough, okay, what you can do and what you cannot do. So, I want to talk a bit about… How did you go about approaching this whole gigantic thing about documentation because I think a lot of remote companies are not good at it because either they’re too lazy or they don’t know how to document a certain stuff. I’m just curious, like, what are the basic principle that you guys have when it comes to documentation across teams?

Ken: Yeah. So, like you said, we use Confluence. And Confluence is a knowledge-based tool which… So, when we look at that as to say, if there is a process, if there is a procedure, if there is something that needs to be a decision that has permanence, is permanent as anything is, and I say it because nothing is fully permanent, it should be documented, and it should be searchable for the team. And so the link that’s included in the show notes is probably 10% of what we have documented in Confluence.

We have a lot of internal process, procedures, and whether that’s operational-related or development-related within Confluence, and so as a new team member, it is your encyclopedia for how we get things done at Hotjar. And it’s super important that this be documented.

And people oftentimes, I think, say, “Well, it’s because you’re remote and you need to have that.” And it’s like, “No. You’re crazy if you don’t think, you know, co-located or brick and mortar place should have stuff like this documented. Yeah. It takes away… A, it infuses back with our core values of being transparent, so we document how we do performance reviews and how they’re there and that’s all available for somebody to see.

And everybody should see how they’re gonna be evaluated and what the criteria are and when that changes will be able to both be alerted to that. And so those are the kind of things that we put on Confluence.

It really circles right back to our core values of transparency and then operations. But within engineering, it’s really core to, how do you make sure that everybody is following the same procedures when it comes to code reviews or when they’re doing integrations or anything like that? These aspects are really important to have documented and searchable.

Jovian: Right. I’m just curious. So, let’s say in the engineering team, like you mentioned, when it comes to like code quality or certain guidelines, who are responsible to maintain the documentation for the team, if that makes sense? Is it, like, some kind of engineering lead?

Ken: Yeah. It depends on the type of documentation, right? So, if the… So, first off, anybody at Hotjar can edit almost any page on Confluence.

Jovian: I see.

Ken: So, in a broad sense, it’s everybody’s job to update. So, if there’s something that’s out of date, and stuff gets out of date, everything needs constant maintenance, then do it. And so, obviously, if it’s, “Hey, all engineers are gonna start doing X,” then that’s probably something an engineering lead or…

Jovian: I see.

Ken: …an engineering director should be updating. But if it’s, like, you know, “Oh, this is not where we store this anymore or this is not how we do builds,” those types of things are tweaked all the time by the entire team.

Jovian: Right. So, it’s kind of, like, let’s say when it comes to, again, as an example, like, Engineering Lead to somewhat be, like, own the documentation processes. And when it comes to like the whole company-wide operations, it’s you as the VP of Operations and with People Ops Liaison.

Ken: Very much so.

Jovian: Right. That makes sense. So, yeah, I think in this podcast, I think you’re the very first… I hope I’m not wrong. But I think you are the very first, like, ops person, which is really familiar with, like, really get down and dirty when it comes to logistics and documentation and whatnot and, of course, day-to-day operations. I’m just curious since you’ve been in Hotjar for a while now, is there any mistakes that you’ve made and learned from as the VP of Operations of a remote company or probably just as a company in general?

Ken: Yeah, absolutely. So, I hate to say it, but I’ll circle back to our core values of learn by doing.

Part of what we have within that core value is the fact that we’re gonna make mistakes and that’s okay. The important part is, did you learn from them? Did you make improvements upon that?

So, yeah. Hell, yeah, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake, I would say, overall I was recently doing a personal retrospective myself for 2019 and I think it’s the biggest mistake I’ve made in certain aspects is not hiring fast enough from the aspect of as we grow, as we mature, as we continue to introduce, you know, greater accountability for our team as well as for our business and for our customers, it’s keeping up with the hiring that’s necessary for that and looking beyond where we are today instead to where we’re going tomorrow and beyond and building that strategy out.

So, I would say that’s my own personal, most recent learning. But we have done a number of different, you know, mistakes from not being as clear about what is a hardcore process, you know, where thou shalt not do something versus, “Hey, this is our recommendation, but feel free to roll your own and have some flexibility with this guideline.” And so I think it’s really important that we’ve evolved to the aspect of making sure that that’s very, very clear as to what is a hardcore process we must follow versus a guideline that is flexible.

Jovian: Yeah. That is really hard, isn’t it? Because now that you say it, it’s sometimes hard because there are things that is kind of like in the middle. Like, it shouldn’t be like a strict process because it will feel bad, but in a way, if it’s too loose, then it’s also bad for the company. Right.

So, I think I talked to Laura Roeder from MeetEdgar a while ago. So, her approach is that, for example, there are things like that that kind of like vague and there’s some nuance in it. For example, if… She gave me as an example. If someone goes on a business trip, and then the company will pay for their accommodations. If there is some kind of, like…there’s kind of like norm of the hotel rate or what is the highest can I go? Right? Sometimes people are just too afraid or companies are just too afraid to be, “No, this is the ceiling,” or something like, we are afraid to be seen as cheap and whatnot. But yes, those kind of things, that nuance, it’s really hard to decide.

Ken: Yeah, it is because you also you don’t…you need to balance the, this is the way we do it and we’re flexible with the…actually, we can’t be flexible on this. There’s also the aspect of, like you said earlier, do we really need to document this? If you’re asking yourself that question, the answer is probably yes, but because you think, “Well, this is common sense. Who wouldn’t expect this?” But at some point, the situation arises where you probably should document that question.

Jovian: Right. And it goes back to kind of like the theme that we have with transparency. Even the goal to be more transparent it’s like incremental. Sometimes it’s not easy to be just transparent, but the things [inaudible 00:44:02] should be transparent on this or not. And it goes back to the company vision, core value, and so on. So, that’s why having an ops person is really important. It’s an unsexy job, but it’s very underrated especially when it comes to remote companies it is that important.

Ken: Yeah, yeah. And it’s important to have… Getting back to that accountability. So, across operations in Hotjar, everybody defines operations differently. But operations at Hotjar encompasses people ops, it encompasses financing, it encompasses compliance.

And so within each of those areas, we have a lead who’s responsible for that and that lead is responsible for making sure our finance documentation is up to date. How do we do expense reports? When do we do monthly reporting? And where’s that available? Compliance. What about GDPR? How are we… What are the controls that we need to update and inform people about across the board? Yeah.

So, it’s really important that you have discreet ownership, but yet, the aspect of who’s responsible for making sure we meet GDPR compliance, well, really the entire company is, who’s accountable is that lead. And so it is making sure that everybody has the flexibility to be responsible, but ultimately accountable.

Jovian: Yeah. I am tempted to go through that rabbit hole to talk about the finance, compliance, but I’ll probably need like a second part of this podcast, and we have, like, six minutes left. Okay, Ken, thank you so much for your time today. I really learned a lot. And how can people find you or learn more about Hotjar online?

Ken: Yeah, awesome. So, first off, we are hiring. We’re always hiring. So, if you go to hotjar.com, there’s a career section and you can find out all about the perks that we offer, the way we work, information associated to our hiring process in a transparent way. And I encourage you if you’re interested and looking for engineering, design, development, marketing, operations, customer service, check us out, please. For me, in particular, you can find out more information about me on LinkedIn as well as also email. So, email is ken@hotjar.com.

Jovian: Awesome. Thank you so much, Ken.

Ken: Awesome. I enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. Great questions.

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