It was an interesting story to share with people who feel like they don’t have a lot of hope right now. That is an environment and a feeling that a lot of people have when they’re battling chronic illness, and it breaks my heart.
Today we have Jennifer Aldrich, Senior Manager of Design Partnerships at InVision!
In this episode, we talked about how InVision’s culture has adapted to their rapid growth, how their “design-first principle” has impacted their culture, the difference between a community and an audience, and her personal story on how remote work changed her life.
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- How culture and onboarding evolved at InVision as they experienced rapid growth
- What companies should know about building a community
- Challenges Jennifer faced as a community builder
- Why remote work is a life-changer for disabled individuals
- Advice for remote job-seekers
Mentioned resources:
- InVision
- Clark Valberg
- Jennifer’s Twitter
- Remote work is more than a job perk—for people with chronic illness, it’s life changing
- Job openings at InVision
Full transcript:
Jovian: Welcome to another episode of “Outside the Valley,” a podcast by Arc, the remote hiring platform that helps you hire senior remote software engineers easily. Here 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. Today we are joined by Jennifer Aldrich, Senior Manager of Design Community Partnerships at InVision.
So InVision itself is one of the pioneers when it comes to distributed work. And they’re very huge. And I’m super excited to have Jennifer here today on the show to learn more about the company itself and Jennifer’s role, and some things about how remote work helps Jennifer. So without further ado, Jen, welcome to the show.
Jennifer: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.
Jovian: So, Jen, InVision itself is a company that I really love. You know, we used it internally. And I’d love to learn about the life and the culture in InVision. But before that, can you share a bit more about your role in InVision as the community partnership manager? What does it entail?
Jennifer: Absolutely. I have an amazing job. I have seriously the best job in the world, I think, to be completely frank. I have the opportunity to go out into the community every single day. I do it online, remotely, of course, and connect with people in our community and learn from them and guide them and then talk to our team and find out where there’s crossovers, where we can help people with content, what they’re most interested in. We take that approach.
Another piece of my job, my favorite part, honestly, is that I get to work with nonprofits. So anytime people are hosting events or they’re having something go on with their groups, I can work with them to set up partnerships for like licensing and things like that to help them as they’re doing their work. And it’s so fulfilling to get to work with these different organizations.
There was one that I was working with. It was actually a hackathon, and it was international, that was focused on ways that they could help homeless across the world, people who are without homes, and ideas, and then ways that they could fund those ideas. And then people were taking action on them the day afterward. And being able to help be part of that was just unbelievable. So my job is so much fun.
So, yeah, I do community interaction, just with designers all over the world every day, and then I get to do things with nonprofits, and I get to direct educational programs over to the head of education that we have here at InVision when I come across those. So colleges and universities, we get to help them, and it’s just such a fun job. I’m having a great time.
Jovian: Yeah. I’d love to dive a bit more into the community aspect of the startup role in InVision, especially when it comes to our current unfortunate situation like where are we are battling a pandemic all around the world, and how does…I think people find some new bond with online communities nowadays, now that everyone is stuck at home and so on, so I would love to get into that a bit later. But, first, one of the things that kind of makes me, like, in awe with InVision is you guys are huge, like literally huge. You have, like, hundreds of employees. How many employees does InVision have now?
Jennifer: I think we’re up to 700 actually.
Jovian: That’s a lot.
Jennifer: Yeah, it is a lot for a remote company. And we’re fully distributed all over the world. Yeah, we have people from all over the place. And, yeah, it’s been really exciting seeing the growth. When I started with the company, we had, when I interviewed, we had 50 employees. And I’ve only been here for not even 5 years yet, and we’ve grown from 50 to almost 700 in that short span of time. So it’s just been absolutely incredible to see that growth, and experience that from the inside.
Jovian: And that’s actually amazing, like 50 to 700 in less than 5 years.
Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah, it’s incredible.
Jovian: That’s great. Yeah. So this is the most interesting part, like, with such rapid growth… You know, in a huge company like InVision now, even though it’s, no matter if it’s co-located or distributed, there’s always a huge risk that a team member’s voice or a team member will feel her voice unheard. It happens in co-located companies, and I feel like it’s even more when it’s you’re fully distributed. So I’m curious, was there any special mechanism or guidelines to prevent this kind of, you know, feeling left out in InVision? Like, is there any particular ritual or culture?
Jennifer: The culture is definitely the key. So, one of the things that we do is asynchronous messaging on Slack. So, we don’t have to connect, because as I mentioned, we’re all over the world.
So we have a certain set of hours that’s East Coast time that a majority of our employees are online, and that’s from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., which gives us a pretty solid spread across the world of making sure that we have at least a few hours of time where we can all be online simultaneously. But the rest of our communication happens asynchronously through Slack, or through email or that type of a thing.
And we use Zoom all day long every day. So all of our meetings are in Zoom. I’m a huge fan. I know other people during the pandemic are probably getting a little bit over it, but I love it. It’s so great.
Jovian: It’s the mainstream now.
Jennifer: It is. I know. It used to be people would say, “What’s Zoom?” And now everyone knows what Zoom is. But, yeah, it’s been perfect for communication for us, because you can just jump into a Slack, or into a Slack, you know, message channel and talk about a project. You can create one for a specialized group. So a few of the ways that we’ve made sure that people’s voices can be heard are we have channels for each team, that are public, of course, to tell people what’s going on. But then we also have private channels for each team. So, we have areas where people on a specific team, like partnerships, we can share pictures of our kids and our pets, and we can talk about what we did over the weekend. And it gives us this really strong sense of community and connection. And then we also have the work stuff going on.
So it’s like having a water cooler all the time all day long, where you can meet and chat. When you start getting stressed, you can leave a message, and then over the course of the day, people are chiming in and responding to that. So it takes away some of the noise. It keeps you from feeling that disconnected feeling like you’re at home by yourself, because everyone is at home by themself. So that’s another key piece to our company, is the reason it works so well, is because every single employee here is remote. It’s not like we have one person who’s far away.
So over-communication, people have become really good at, everyone has become really good at, and I think that’s extremely important when you’re in a remote environment. Making sure that you communicate clearly, you use the channels that you have available effectively, and you choose which ones are right for each situation.
So for example, if we’re working on a project and there’s confusion around it, I personally prefer making a Slack channel to have those discussions with threads, so that we have a paper trail of what’s going on, why decisions were made, as opposed to hopping on to Zoom, where it seems like that would be a better choice, because you have a group of people, you should talk it out. But then you don’t get that paper trail unless people are chatting and you can record. But nobody really wants to go through an hour and a half long recording to find out what’s going on with a project most of the time.
So using those channels effectively is huge for building that communication structure. Making sure that you over-communicate at times that you need to, and making sure that you check in with people for feedback constantly. That’s another piece that’s extremely important, especially in a remote environment, because you can’t see a person’s face when you’re Slacking them to see what their response is, you know? So that’s really important that you give feedback and say, “Oh, that’s a great idea,” or, when someone’s talking during a meeting, say, “Oh, wow, yeah,” or, “Hmm,” just to make sure they know that you’re engaged. Because when you’re in a remote environment you can’t always tell, and it can be tough when you’re on one side, not having a two-way conversation at certain points.
Jovian: Yeah. So, I find it interesting, because you’ve joined InVision since it was 50 people, now it’s like 700 people. What’s the biggest change in the internal process when InVision grows from 50 people to 700 people, for example? Do you still onboard people the same way when you’re 50 people versus when you’re 500 people?
Jennifer: That’s a great question. And absolutely not. It has changed so much over time. But when I started, the onboarding was basically everybody says hi in Slack, because there were only 50 of us. You get a bunch of messages, they send out an email welcoming you to the team. And then everybody responds back to that email and says, “Hello.” And then they send you like a zip file of PDFs full of paperwork that you need to send back. So that’s the early days, and then you get in touch and download the software that you think you should download. And now we have a huge process that’s involved, and it’s incredible. Our HR team is just phenomenal in general. We call them our People Team.
They’ve created an entire course that onboards people into InVision. And it includes a guidebook, and it includes classes for…there’s several eight-hour days that people go and they attend for the onboarding. And they learn about not just the company, but remote work. They learn about InVision, they learn how to use our product hands-on, and it’s phenomenal. And they learn about the communication structure and when to use different types of communication.
So they lay that groundwork when people first come in the door, so that they’re comfortable. They understand how the company works, and they can just jump right in immediately after onboarding, and jump in and start.
Jovian: I’m always curious about a process, because evolving a process is actually quite difficult, especially when you see, I’ve interviewed a couple of remote work distributing consultant in the podcast, and they’re basically helping companies to transition to be a remote company, because there’s lot of internal process that has to change in order for remote work to succeed, right? Before, you only, you know, “Hey, can you do this?” “Hey, this already shipped.” And if you’re in the same room, it’s easier, right? But when you’re remote, when you’re 50, 100 people, and everything starts to break…
Jennifer: So, building out the infrastructure is definitely a key piece of making your remote team function properly. And a lot goes into that. And that’s where our people team has come in, just building that out over time and scaling it and making sure that things are working properly. And if something’s not working properly, researching that and finding out how they can fix those things, and it’s definitely a growth process. The more you scale, the more interesting it gets and more intricate, but they’ve done a phenomenal job handling that transition.
Jovian: Absolutely. So, I think this is a good segue to my next question, is about the culture of InVision. So how do you describe InVision’s culture? Do you think there’s any connection between InVision’s design culture… I think this is one of the official mission statement or vision in InVision. That’s quite like a tongue twister there. So, do you think there’s any connection between InVision’s design culture with its remote culture and core values?
Jennifer: Absolutely. It’s a huge crossover. And honestly, I think that InVision’s culture and the core values are the reason that we’ve been so successful and able to scale this quickly, and, you know, like, just the whole company and the product, and everything has grown so rapidly. And it’s… design is the center of the entire company. You know, our two founders actually worked together, and then ended up creating this product because they needed it in-house for the agency that they were working through. They ran the agency. And so they were like, “Oh, man, we really wish we had prototyping more quickly. We need this to exist.” So they made it as an internal tool, and it grew rapidly into being so powerful that they ended up going and making it its own product.
And then it just exploded from there, because it was cutting edge. Nobody had that at the time. And it was incredibly useful. And now we’ve grown into this giant product suite of different tools that teams can use, and just cross-functionally between the development team and the design team. And we have a tool called Freehand, where any team can jump in. So we have product management that’s jumping in to create all these whiteboarding experiences across the company. And it’s just been the coolest experience. The culture, that’s buried deep into the company, is employee care at the center. And that’s something our CEO feel extremely, extremely important from the very beginning. So we’ve had great benefits, we have great care, we have neat perks.
But really, where the company culture comes from is making sure that everyone on the team supports one another. We have this whole program where we do donations throughout the year, and it’s, the involvement in it is huge. And so we have this go-giving is what we call it. So you go out and you do charity work or you, you know, donate to charity. And we have a whole program based around that. And you can see the company page where people can add things and come up with ideas for organizations that we want to donate to and areas that we want to support. We had at, one point, an employee’s house burned down, and it was just devastating. And the company jumped in. And people were donating thousands of dollars within an hour of finding out that it happened, just to support the family.
So, it’s just that kind of an environment where everyone genuinely cares about each other, coming in through the training when you join the team, that onboarding, that’s made extremely apparent. And that way it has just spread throughout the entire company. And people come in the door knowing that that’s how we function here.
Jovian: That’s great. I want to move on a bit into, to talk more about community. Community is always thing that I’m always interested in, and it’s really correlated to remote work. So, Jennifer, you are really experienced in connecting people and building community and, as far as I know, even before you joined InVision. And again, I always think remote work makes the barrier even lower to start building communities everywhere, because people just have more time and bandwidth to contribute to particular community, because they work from home, you know, time flexibility. So what are your advice for companies or even individuals that want to start building a community?
Jennifer: I think there are a lot of different facets to it. One thing that I’ve found working through InVision, and this is something that’s helped me a lot in building community, is that our CEO is very open and transparent, and communicates extremely clearly with the team internally. And it helps us when we’re building community to do the same with our audience.
We do a Q&A where every single member of our team, all 700, have the opportunity to ask questions directly to our CEO. Anything they want to ask. It’s not just like the happy feely things. If they have an issue on their team, they can actually bring it up to the CEO in that environment, or if they have ideas for product enhancements, they can bring it up in that meeting. And it’s been so incredible hearing the things that come out of those meetings.
So that clarity and that transparency and that level of communication has helped build a real foundation for us in building our communities out in the design world. And since our CEO was a designer, like that’s his background, he has helped us greatly. And culture and community for him are a key piece of InVision. That’s just huge. Having educational materials for the community that we work with, making sure that we’re giving them resources that are really impactful.
You know, there are other companies that just, they’re marketing, you know, they just do marketing and that’s all. Here, that’s not the key focus. We actually want to help support the community. And I think that because it’s coming from that place genuinely, it really reflects in the authenticity of us interacting with the community, because we’re here to help, we’re not just here to sell.
You know, this is our community in addition to being our audience.
I think that’s part of why we’ve been able to build such strong relationships is because people in our company have histories in design, even though they’re not working necessarily right directly on the design team. Like, my background is in product design. That’s where I came from, you know, and I did product design. I worked with the design team when I first came in. I did content strategy. It was a blast. And then as the company grew, we ended up needing more and more specialization over time. So, people who are previous designers, we have a person who works on the people team to help design programs. We have me working in partnerships and community, and I used to be a designer as well. So we’re all part of the community.
It’s deeply embedded in the company culture, because there are designers all over the place. So when we’re having these conversations, they’re authentic conversations coming from people who actually have done these things. It’s not just random people who have been hired to talk to the community. It’s actual designers who are already part of that community that are having these conversations. And it’s really fun for us, you know, especially for us, getting to interact with our people all day long. We have people on our marketing team who don’t have background in design, but they’re really passionate about design. They’re excited about it. It’s something that they’ve wanted to learn about and that they’re very interested in.
So the folks that are on the team that are in that situation, even though they’re not designers, they have that passion and that excitement around the topic. So, for them, they’re becoming part of the community because they’re learning and growing in what they’re doing. And as they’re talking to people, they’re learning more and more about who’s in the community, how the community functions, different ways that they can support.
Jovian: What do you think is the difference between a community and an audience?
Jennifer: I think the main difference between community and audience is that anyone can be an audience. An audience is something that you throw things at, to me. It’s like you come up with an idea and you toss it at them, and then, they’re people that you want to have buy your product. And that’s really the core focus is having this audience that you’re tossing out these ideas.
Community is where you’re building an area where people who have similar interests can come together. I think that’s the main difference. So the audience is kind of one-facing, and you’re talking at them. And then you’ve got the community, where you’re helping people learn and grow and finding out what will make them most successful, and helping provide those items that they need and the resources that they need and giving them the opportunity to connect with each other, as opposed to you connecting with them directly and that’s all.
So, I think that’s the main difference to me, between audience and community, is building an area for people to connect and help each other and for you to help them as well, versus the people that you talk to.
I think that’s the main difference there.
Jovian: Yeah, I think a lot of companies have it kind of confused between building community and building an audience, and we have lots of, you know, community managers and whatnot. But the main goal probably they just want to build an audience. So I think it’s an interesting topic, because building community is definitely not easy. What are the biggest challenges you faced when it comes to community building since you’ve been doing it for a while now?
Jennifer: When I first came in, at a start up, you wear a million different hats, of course. Everybody does everything. So, like I said, I was working a little with the design team, I was doing some content strategy. I was blogging. I was doing all these things. Then they asked me to revamp the social media strategy, and I had never done that before. Like, I had a following that I had worked up through my blog, and I, like, connected with people in the community, but I had never done, like, a corporate social media account before. It was a little overwhelming, to be honest, trying to figure out the tools and how that was going to work.
And what I found was, when you’re interacting with people on social media, you talk to them like they’re people, and that’s the key. When you’re having those conversations, you use your own voice, instead of using, like, a professional, creepy, business voice, because nobody wants that when you’re on social media. It’s just awkward and uncomfortable.
So, building an online presence and building a community online, I think the most important part is to maintain your voice as you’re building those relationships. And as a result, you can have real conversations.
So instead of people just retweeting or liking your posts, you can actually have conversations in threads all over social media with the individuals, and build your community that way. And that’s personally how I built my entire community. As I’ve written and people have responded to my posts, I connect with them and I have a conversation.
And even as my audience has scaled, my personal audience, I’ve been able to continue with those relationships, because it’s something that’s important to me. And with our community through InVision, it’s the same thing. We’re not just adding them to a mailing list and never talking to them again. You know, we’re inviting people to events, we’re talking to them through surveys, we’re getting research for the people who are interested, asking them to come in and talk to us about what’s most important to them. And we’re communicating on social media and interacting with them as they’re talking to the brand there as well.
So just being authentic, using your own voice. I think those are two very key pieces in building community. Being kind and helping each other when you can, as well, is incredibly important.
So if someone’s looking for a job, and you can reach out to someone that you know, that might have a job opening, that’s important, too. So I think there’s just a lot of different ways you can build out that community. And then trying to support businesses that are supporting the community as well is really important. And that’s something that we’ve done through partnerships also is, if someone is working on a really incredible project, like if they’re working on something that’s going to help boost the ability for designers to integrate accessible options within their products, that’s something that we want to support as a program, because it’s incredibly important, or an initiative to increase diversity and inclusion in hiring, and a team that’s doing events around that, and educating companies on how they can make that stronger within their organization, that’s something we want to support. So things that are boosting not just the design community, but making the world a better place, you know? Those are things that we want to invest in as a company. And we’ve been given that opportunity.
Jovian: So, I feel like there are, for other companies, I feel like determining is this important is probably the biggest challenges in building the community, like the first step itself. Like, “Should I spend effort on this? Is it really worth it?” And even after you go over that hurdle, the next step will be, “How do I want to engage with this community?” When you’re with a company, doesn’t matter if it’s, like, it’s a huge 1,000-person company, or like just 50 people company, you have to decide what tone that you want to talk to the community or the audience. And in this case, and it should be, and it should stick, right? It should be consistent. If you want to be known as a fun brand, you should talk like that for the whole time. And if you want to be like a serious brand, you have to be kind of serious. And sometimes people have different opinions. I would guess that’s probably the hardest part when you are in a company and want to build a community.
Jennifer: Absolutely. In the beginning, what our senior leadership did is they put people who had the voice that they wanted already, just that was their voice, in positions where they could build that voice for the brand. And then as that brand was being built, style guides were built, and, so we could have, like, a source of truth for how, like, what type of tone we’re using.
So that if there’s someone in marketing who’s putting together a newsletter, and they don’t have that natural voice, maybe they’re more serious, they have basically the entire, it’s like a guidebook of how we interact with our customers and make sure that they feel really well taken care of, as opposed to, like you said, like, being really serious and sounding extra professional. That’s not really the goal. Our goal is to connect with people and build community with all the things that we do.
So, yeah, it’s been a really interesting experience. So that’s kind of how we did it was bringing in people who already had that voice and tone, having them help build up that style guide, and then being able to distribute that across the company as a source of truth in all the different communications that we have, whether it be social media or newsletters or outgoing messaging or in-product messaging, whatever the case may be, making that consistent across the board. So I think that’s something that other companies, if they’re able to, can definitely go from. And something else was getting buy-in from senior leadership for community, and for the voice and tone and the direction that you want things to go, from the very beginning. Super important.
So, if people in community can find a sponsor and senior leadership as they’re getting things ramped up, and make sure that it’s being passed down through the entire company, that this is a major focus, something that we’re investing in because we think it’s important, that’s really, really helpful. If you’re able to make that happen within your organization, it can make a huge difference in what you’re able to do and the way that you’re able to support your community.
Jovian: Getting buy-ins is also a topic that came up a couple of times in this podcast, especially when it comes to, in fully distributed companies. For example, I talked to Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab. One of the things that really big at GitLab is having things well documented. So, basically you make a case for what you want to do. And that’s where the importance of asynchronous communication and writing kicks in, right? It’s hard to get your CEO into a Zoom call, probably. But if you somehow can make async communication work well, then you can slowly build your case. Like, it’s less than a proposal, but it’s more like just build a case.
And I think the Basecamp people call it like a pitch, which I really like, because it is a pitch, like, if you want to get buy-ins from the executives why community’s important and being a remote team is actually, help you to get into the state of flow and just think through about your case, like, why having community is important for your company, or other cases in that matter.
Jennifer: Absolutely. And it’s funny, I was having a conversation with someone newer to the company about this recently. And when I started, there were only 50 of us. So it was basically, we tried something, and if it stuck, and did really well, we did it again. And that was our approach to everything pretty much, was just testing things out, seeing how they went. And if they went well, we did it again. If they didn’t, we didn’t do that again, we focused on something else. And as we’ve grown, of course, that’s not possible. You have to have, you know, a little more structure around it, because of resources. So as we’ve grown and spread, we’ve come up with…ours is the same, it’s pitches, you come up with an idea pitch.
And the thing I love most about InVision is that anyone in any department can come up with a pitch for an idea, and then bring it up. And they can say, “Hey, what do you think about this?”
And we have something called…it’s really cool. We have a #product-bad-version. It’s called channel in Slack, and our entire senior staff, in addition to the rest of the company, monitors that. So if you come up with an idea, anybody, it could be a person in marketing, it could be a person in development, if you come up with an idea for the product or an idea for something you think that could help the community, you toss it into that channel, and then people can have a discussion around it. And it gives it that visibility up through senior level that you were talking about, that can be really hard at other companies.
So you really do have access all the way up the food chain at all times at our company, and it’s such a cool environment. And it just makes people really creative, being able to share all those ideas and knowing that they have that opportunity. So it’s just a really neat atmosphere.
So what we do now is, since I work in partnerships, I’m not directly on the marketing team, I’m just in partnerships. I have the VP of partnerships that I, and community, that I report to directly. If I need support for something from marketing, for example, I’m working right now on a career conversation series, where we get together a small group of designers, and we have a conversation around a topic that’s really important to them. It’s not a webinar. I’m not talking to them or at them. It’s all 15 people have been given the opportunity to share experiences and talk to each other, including me, about things that they’ve gone through and ideas around how other people have dealt with those issues.
So the most recent one was imposter syndrome, is the topic that we’re focused on right now. And it’s been the coolest thing. We’ve had people come in who are CEOs, all the way down to people who are students, who were first entering the community, all in the same call, sharing these ideas, talking about things that have worked and talking about issues they’ve come across. And seeing that it’s something that spreads that far across the industry, from the top down, has been so exciting just to have that open, honest conversation. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of different facets to it and approaches that you can take, but I think open communication is probably the key to unlocking all of it.
Jovian: Got it. So I want to switch gears a bit here and talk about remote work as a whole, and how it enables opportunities for everyone. End of last year, November last year, so you wrote a very open, vulnerable piece on Medium, which is titled “Remote work is more than a job perk—for people with chronic illness, it’s life changing.” I want to recite the first paragraph of the piece, if I may?
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Jovian: So, quote starts, “Remote work is so much more than just a job perk for digital nomads. Going to an office daily isn’t a possibility for some people. Their minds are fine but their bodies don’t cooperate. Remote work allows people who are chronically ill to have full time jobs and excel in them. Some people don’t understand how empowering that is.” I want to ask, what compelled you to write this piece, your very personal story? And I remember it was it’s been talked a lot and people discuss about this a lot on Twitter and how, like, a couple of thousand claps on Medium. Would love to hear your story.
Jennifer: Absolutely. So, where that piece came from was, I, back in my early 20s, started to have a health decline. And it was while I was a designer on an in-house design team. And it took a really long time for them to figure out what was going on. But my health just declined really, really rapidly. And the company where I was working, of course, had a front row seat to that. They saw the entire thing happen, me going from perfectly healthy, running around traveling all over the place, to hardly being able to walk, you know, and being sick constantly.
And I was able to complete my work. Like, no problem, that wasn’t an issue. My mind was fine. But going into an office for me was incredibly difficult, because just navigating around and getting ready and going through and being able to focus 100% of the time, and sometimes I was having seizures that were focal seizures, and it was just a lot. So them having seen that in person, my VP at the time was incredibly supportive, because I was able to keep my work up. It wasn’t a problem. I just needed a little bit of extra time, and my schedule had to be a tiny bit different. So if I had a seizure, needed some time to recover, and then I could crank out my work. It wasn’t a big deal.
But in a traditional office setting, of course, that’s not very possible to do. And so they started letting me work part time remote, and it was just life-changing at that level. So as that was happening, our company was acquired, and someone else came in and they were still very supportive of the remote work piece. But then I was offered this opportunity in InVision. Somebody at InVision reached out to me through Twitter, speaking of building communities on social media. They actually got in touch with me because of Twitter and because of some blog posts that I’d been writing. And being a full time remote company, I actually didn’t tell anyone other than my direct manager that I was ill.
No one in the entire company had any idea. It didn’t impact my work. It didn’t impact my relationships, because something I found that, once people find out that you’re battling illness is that sometimes they have a tendency to treat you quite a bit differently, and not give you as many major projects, because they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to stress you out and make you sick,” you know. So I was able to, for four and a half years at InVision, work full time, no issues, nobody could see me being ill. Anytime I was sick, I just went off camera. Nobody could see my face, because that’s something in office, when you come in looking like death, people see that. When you’re in a remote company, people don’t see your face, they don’t know. You just keep it together and then everything is fine. So, four and a half years I hid that.
And one of my mentors is Stephen Gates and another is Mike Davidson. And both of them knew what was going on. And they both said, “When you’re ready, it would be really impactful if you were comfortable with it, no pressure, to share your experience, because so many other people are going through this, and they’re afraid to talk about it.” I was afraid to talk about it, because I was afraid that it would impact future job prospects. So in the event that InVision, let’s say, InVision was acquired or something, and 5 years or 10 years from now, after that happened, I wanted to make sure that I had lots of job opportunities to move into. And now that I’m really established in my career, after all that time, I finally got to the point that I was comfortable.
And having their support as I shared that was absolutely huge. But the response to sharing that post was absolutely incredible. I had people reaching out to me from all over the world, telling me that they’d been battling chronic illness, they’re going through the same thing. Some of them had the support, some of them didn’t, and just hearing their stories, it just broke my heart and warmed my heart at the same time. And I got so many thank yous for sharing that experience, because it’s not something people talk about very often. And it can be really difficult.
And talking about how I as a person am able to work, no problem. I’ve worked up in my career I’ve built up, you know, worked up the food chain. I’m a senior manager of an entire program now at InVision, and being able to do that while being chronically ill in a remote environment, without anyone knowing, across the entire company was just kind of a…it was an interesting story to share and to share with people who feel like they don’t have a lot of hope right now. And that is an environment and a feeling that a lot of people have when they’re battling chronic illness, and it breaks my heart.
So, just kind of sharing that you can overcome that, and you can work past it, and you can get into a full time position and continue living your life. Because most people who are chronically ill do not want to be on disability. It’s not fun to do. Some people are like, “Oh, yeah, disability must be great. You can stay home all day.” It’s awful.
Nobody likes it. It’s a horrible thing to go through. No one is enjoying that experience.
People want to work, whether they’re sick or they’re healthy, being able to work, it just, is so powerful for people, especially when they’re going through something awful like that.
So, yeah, so that was the article and that’s kind of where it came from. And I had all the support coming in from people in the community as well as from my mentors. And I honestly had a panic attack. I’m not gonna lie, full blown panic attack. My left arm was numb. Like, I was freaking out after I hit Submit on that post and published, but I’m so, so glad in retrospect that I did end up doing it, because it’s really been an incredible experience hearing the stories from people who’ve gone through similar things.
Jovian: I really wish the credit for remote work will catch up even faster. I know that this kind of accelerated because of the unfortunate condition of the pandemic. So, last year, I went to a conference called Running Remote. And in the opening ceremony, they played a video of a young gentleman who is based in Bangladesh. He’s been disabled since he was his birth, and it’s super difficult for him to function normally in the society. He was able to find some freelance design gigs in Fiverr.
And seeing the video is just really heartwarming because this is a young gentleman, disabled, living in someplace, some small village in Bangladesh, and he is able to connect with people around the world, delivering creative work through the internet, with people and clients he never met. So I really wish this catch up even faster and to let people around the world know that your opportunity is not limited to where you live, or even in this matter, your physical condition, as long as you can still train your mind and create.
Jennifer: Oh, that just gives me goosebumps hearing that story. And it’s so true. One of the things that I’ve learned loved about working at InVision is, as I mentioned earlier, I work with people from all over the world, and getting to know more about where they live and their experience and people coming in from every country imaginable, and being able to talk to them about their experience has been huge. And I learned through writing that article that there are other people in InVision who are going through the same thing I am. People that I have worked with for years reached out to me, and they were like, “Man, thank you so much for sharing that article. I’ve been battling chronic illness the entire time I’ve worked here. It really meant so much to me to hear that,” and that gives me goosebumps too, talking about it.
But it was amazing finding out that other people were going through the same things even in my company. And, like you said, people just don’t talk about it often enough. And if we can push that out, you know, around the world, that this is an experience that if you give people the opportunity, as you mentioned, any background, any area of the world, it doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re going through or your health, you can have this experience of working and giving back to the community and giving back to your society. And it’s just incredible. And I really, really hope that that does catch on. It’s such an incredibly powerful experience and opportunity for people.
Jovian: Absolutely. Do you have any words of advice or encouragement for people who are currently in a position similar to you, back then or even now, people who are probably battling physical illness and feel kind of stuck because they don’t know how they can contribute to society with their work? Any advice for them?
Jennifer: I would say don’t limit yourself, is the first piece of advice. A lot of the time, people have a tendency, myself included, to get in our own way, thinking, “Oh, nobody would hire me. I’ve got these issues. You know, it’s awful, and I’m disabled and people are going to know and then they’re not going to let me do this work.” And that’s not the case.
People are way, and companies are way more open than you would expect.
And as a person working remotely, like I said, nobody even knew for four and a half years anyway. It was a complete non-issue.
So one of the things is don’t limit yourself, don’t trip yourself up right from the get-go. Know that these opportunities exist, and go for them.
The next thing is apply, apply, apply, apply, apply for jobs. And there are so many remote jobs available. And I can send you some links to different organizations and different websites that list them after the session. But there are so many that are available right now that a lot of people don’t realize are there. They don’t know that there are legitimate remote jobs. When I first started doing this, my family was like, “Oh, so it’s not like a real job.” I was like, “What are you talking about? Yes, it’s a real job.” They were like, “Oh, I figured it was one of those things where you, like, make crafts and send them in.” I was like, “No, I’m working for a software company again. It’s amazing.”
So, just knowing that those real legitimate jobs are there. And when I posted that article out on a website that is focused on people that are having similar issues, I had a lot of people write back to me and say, “I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t realize that there were remote, legitimate remote jobs out there where I could do things that I had been doing previously, remotely from my house. I had no clue.” And so it’s been a really cool experience in that way.
So don’t limit yourself. Apply like crazy. And then don’t lose hope if you don’t get those jobs right off the bat. Because I had no idea remote was a thing. I had this whole career path that I was on, and I thought this was the end of it. I thought I would never be able to do it again. And I was just crushed, because I love design and I love this community. And being able to move into this position from that mindset was just, you know, it just opened up the whole world for me. So, don’t lose hope. That is the third piece, is just believe in yourself, believe you can do this, and keep pushing forward.
Jovian: That’s great. I just want to have a quick plug here, just like what Jennifer mentioned. If you are a programmer, a software developer, looking for remote jobs, you can apply to our company, arc.dev, where, there is a vetting process of course. But when you join the community, you will have a chance to be matched with remote jobs all around the world, both full time, or, full time as in permanent, and also freelance full time jobs. And if you like to mentor people, mentor other software developers, the Arc team is on the same team behind the platform Codementor, where you can help other engineers or students one-on-one live on the platform, and make some money.
Cool. Jennifer, thank you so much for your time today. I really learned a lot about your experience in building community and a lot more about InVision. It seems like an awesome company. So, how can people learn more about you and InVision online?
Jennifer: We actually have a couple of different places that you can go of course, because we’re focused on community. You can pop out, if you’re interested in applying for a job, I’ll just do a quick plug for that too. It’s invision.com/jobs. You can go out to that page. It’ll have all of our current listings. We’re always hiring, even during the pandemic right now. We’ve got job listings out there even at this moment. And we’re hiring. I think we just had three new people start Friday. So, or the [inaudible 00:42:18] here. So that’s one option. The other thing is that you can go out to Twitter, and that’s twitter.com/invisionapp. So you can go out there.
We have our LinkedIn profile up, so you can contact us in a whole variety of ways. We love interacting with people in the community. I would love to hear from you too. You can hit me at twitter.com/jma245. I would love to talk to you if you’ve heard this and if you have any additional questions about the things that are going on and the experiences that we’ve had. So, lots of ways to connect with us and we would love to hear from you.
Jovian: Awesome. Jennifer, thank you again for your time.
Jennifer: Thank you so much. It was great chatting with you.
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