YouTube Product Lead on Team Building

Team Building: Culture of Humanity

When I worked at SurveyMonkey, our management team was rooted in the culture of humanity. Our CEO (Dave Goldberg) was very proud of that and was focused on team building around a group of people that had family commitments.

Dave would leave the office every day at 5:30 so he could have dinner with his family. As a team, we made sure to operate with a true work-life balance. This is a vital part of creating a company that is built to last.

When Dave started his team building process at SurveyMonkey, he didn’t know the subscription business very well. He also hired leaders in key roles (product, engineering, analytics, growth) who were not subscription business experts.

This created a wonderful sense of being excited about learning. Our day-to-day mantra was “we’re going to learn it.” We came together to learn the mechanics of how the business worked to move SurveyMonkey forward to where it is now.

As a result, this culture of humanity built great confidence in our team. Based on our own experiences of starting as outsiders, we knew that we could bring in people who were not experts in our field and over time become a big part of our business.

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About the Video:
Speaker: Will Aldrich