I'm Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia. AMA 💞

[brendan (Brendan Schwartz)]

@Vengat

Hi Brendan

thanks so much for taking the time to do this!

Loved reading your approach to goal setting and also the importance of context in building great products.

Two questions:

1. The Wistia approach to the goal setting process across the company… Do you follow a top down goal that cascades to the rest of the org, or do you follow a bottom up goal setting process that may not necessarily be tightly aligned to the company goals?
2. Tell us about some of the things that Wistia does - so that employees have the greatest amount of context possible. Beyond the usual townhalls etc.

thanks!

Thanks Vengat, and appreciate the questions!

1. I wrote a bit about this in my reply to Rajaraman, but the short version is we set yearly goals at the company level, then teams set quarterly goals (most of which roll up to the company ones, but don’t have to), then individuals set goals in support of team goals. We’ve been fairly loose about the individual goals and spend most of our energy making sure the company goals are right and clearly communicated. FWIW, this is a process we more strictly adopted when we were 80+ people. Prior to that we’d try different things each year. I think the most valuable parts of this process for us are: 1) forced prioritization and debate about what’s truly important for success because this leads to focus, 2) having a simple and clear plan that’s communicated over and over is really helpful in maintaining that focus throughout the year. Most companies, even large ones, don’t have laser focus. So if our team of 115 people is all incredibly focused on a single opportunity, we can out maneuver much larger teams.
2. Great question! One of our longest standing all company meetings is a Show & Tell (Explaining Show & Tell — Wistia Customer Showcase). It’s changed over the years, but the spirit is the same. It’s a chance for anyone and everyone to show in progress work, things they’ve learned, etc. It’s informal and fun. We do it twice a month now, and I always look forward to it! One other thing we started doing when we were around 80 people is after our monthly all-hands, Chris (my co-founder) and I meet with each team in the company for 30 minutes. We used to do Q&A in the all hands, but we found not everyone was comfortable asking questions in that setting, especially if the question was about how something affected their team because they didn’t want to waste other teams times. I learn a lot based on the questions people ask in these monthly touchpoints, and the quality of the questions is much higher since it’s team by team and folks have had a weekend to reflect and don’t just have to think of questions in the moment during the all hands.