Interview with Borja Prieto, Growth Manager at Databox

Borja Prieto

Growth Manager

Have regular 1:1 with all your team members. “I don’t have time for that” is just an excuse.

Where do you work? What do you do there?

I work at Databox as a Growth Marketing Manager.

I manage all growth-related projects in Databox, working very closely with other marketing teammates and also with the product, sales, and customer support teams to drive demand for A) our product and B) our free services.

My main function is to analyze our data/performance and spot opportunities that can have a short/mid/long term impact on our bottom line.

Also, I’m in charge of preparing and executing all our experiments along with the product team.

Tell us about your team!

How big is it? ‍

For now we’re a marketing team of 10 people now. Most of them are focused on content operations and SEO but recently we have doubled down on two new product marketing roles.‍

Where are your teammates located?‍

Databox has employees across the globe, but our marketing team is distributed across the United States, Serbia, Slovenia and Spain.‍

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

We mainly own the ‘Signups’ metric. We’re responsible for driving more and better (more qualified) new users to the product.

What are the components of a strong remote culture?

Don’t micromanage.
Build and put processes in place.
Narrow your focus on a quarterly basis.
Document every initiative.
Make people accountable for it.
Do regular 1:1 meetings with your team.

‍
I wrote about this on Twitter recently.

Strong remote cultures are built on strong connections.
Strong connections are built with Hailey.

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How do you make sure your team is happy and engaged in their work?

Have regular 1:1 with all your team members. “I don’t have time for that” is just an excuse. Engage with your folks and hear what they have to say.

Don’t micromanage, build and put processes in place and narrow your focus on a quarterly basis.

What's your biggest challenge as a remote leader?

Often, not having regular in-person meetings and/or interactions make it difficult to really understand how everyone is doing and connect to a personal level. But with the points I gave above, you’ll get a really strong foundation.

My Remote Manager Toolbox

Team-building Activities

At Databox we mainly do two: Happy hours and In-person retreats on a quarterly basis.

Remote Games

Icebreakers

We use icebreakers in all of our Happy Hour zoom calls.One of the favorites was when a team lead tried to read the mind of other teammates.

Products & Tools

We live our day-to-day communications through Slack. We have some nice channels to recognize the hard work of other team members. Everyone can post a “quick win” there to recognize what others did.