I lead Worldwide Sales for InVision.

InVision was founded 12 years ago, and was one of the first fully remote companies. We now have employees in 27 countries around the world and have raised $350M in funding through the process.

InVision made its name helping design teams create the world’s best digital products, and while we still have a significant footprint in that community, we’ve spent the past few years focusing on visual collaboration, expanding our reach to designers and non-designers alike through Freehand. This has helped companies around the world connect their hybrid and remote teams in this new “future of work” landscape. We like to think of “Freehand” as visual collaboration disguised as an online whiteboard. It’s both purpose-built for hybrid and remote teams by integrating with everything from Microsoft Teams to Google Docs, but also designed to inject life back into meetings, making them more inclusive and fun.

Over the last 4 years, I’ve worked in all areas of the business; initially building and leading all of our International go-to-market, before working on a big new product launch, and then more recently, running global sales and joining the executive team.

It’s been an amazing experience, where I get to work with brilliant people who make InVision and its culture a great place to be. We have millions of users and thousands of customers all over the world; the scale of our impact and opportunity to create new value in different ways is exciting.

How big is it?

‍I’m currently responsible for 15+ teams including sales, customer solutions, renewal management and enablement. We’re hiring across all of our geographies and business areas.

‍Where are your teammates located?‍

In my organization, our people are all over the United States, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Ireland and Australia. Despite the broad distribution of our colleagues and zero office spaces anywhere, I’m always amazed by the closeness of our people and the strength of our culture of collaboration.

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

Our mission is to help organizations unlock all of the talent, creativity and innovation that’s realized through effective, cross-functional and inclusive teamwork. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for every company, which is why we spend a lot of time working with organizations to understand their pain points and needs to hone in on the best ways we can help.

This is where Freehand has become an exciting part of what we do here. Where “InVision'' was once a specialist tool for Designers, Engineers & Product Teams, Freehand now powers how every function can run more collaborative meetings, workshops and co-develop plans together in real-time, or asynchronously. This has opened up entirely new possibilities and markets for us to grow in, particularly as new hybrid and remote working patterns continue to emerge.

With that in mind, my teams have a range of responsibilities; from identifying and growing our customer base, to developing those relationships into thriving, long-term partnerships. We also invest in pre-sale teams that help our clients evaluate more technical workflows, as well as Enablement to help our sellers acquire the skills and knowledge to be more successful.

I’d distill a strong remote culture down to the quality of its Leadership, Collaboration & Results.

We’re not perfect in any area, but here’s a breakdown of what we’re aspiring to achieve:

‍Leaders Everywhere‍

Leadership is a choice, not a title. When you trust and treat all of your people as leaders in the business, you cultivate an environment where everyone co-owns the mission, goals and culture. When your colleagues are empowered as Leaders, irrespective of their job level or experience, they learn faster and make better decisions. This helps you develop a strong bench of talent which is critical when you’re scaling fast and seeking to promote from within. All combined, this contributes to achieving transformative business results and a fun, supportive and high-performing team. ‍

Collaboration‍

Over the course of my career, I can’t think of a single key business milestone that was the result of one person's effort. The best results, or the highest performing individuals, are always uplifted by the contributions of others. We work hard at InVision to foster that cross-functional ethos so we can lean into that opportunity more consistently. From investing in clearly defined roles, values and incentives; to running specific enablement that helps our people develop plays that establish expectations and operating plans everyone understands. When you layer the right technologies into the mix, you can unlock speed and innovation for your people and business.

‍Results

‍Work is much more enjoyable when you feel a sense of accomplishment, and where your impact is recognised, appreciated and celebrated. Setting clear and realistic goals help you establish the behaviors, activities and results you’ll need to achieve to be successful. Ensuring everyone understands what success looks like and feels equipped to deliver results is key. That means spending as much time unpacking the activities and behaviors that drive your results as the results themselves.

For instance, we’ve recently re-designed our sales process to reflect our new business strategy and targets. We invested in several days of training: focused workshop time with management first, building out our new customer roadmap together, and then rolled out the tools and processes to the rest of our teams. The Product and Marketing Team actively contributed to the sessions for a holistic view on the buyer's journey, and seeing our teams quickly leverage their new skills and playbooks has been fun.

Beyond the traditional operating rhythms of 1:1s, skip level listening sessions, survey feedback and performance conversations; I’ve found establishing common language and space to discuss people's well being really helps.

For example, we introduced a “Conscious Leadership” framework designed to lower the barrier to people sharing how they’re feeling. It’s a simple line drawn on a piece of paper (or in our remote use case, within Freehand).

At any moment, people are either “above the line” or “below the line”. Our location describes where our mindset is in any given time or circumstance.

When you’re “above the line”, you’re open, curious and committed to learning. When you’re “below the line”, you’re defensive, closed and committed to being right.

People “below the line” have certain views and tend to behave in certain ways; turning to fault and blame, gossip, clinging to opinions, avoiding conflict; or even seeking it out in pursuit of winning.

People “above the line” believe learning and growing are more important than being right. They believe all people and circumstances are their allies, here for their growth. People here enjoy curiosity, actively listen, speak unarguably, and question their beliefs to test assumptions.

Life can be challenging and any of us can fall “below the line” from time to time for a variety of reasons — that’s understandable and okay. But when we’re there, we’re not in a state of creativity, innovation, collaboration or open to new opportunities or relationships. So cultivating an “above the line” mindset and culture becomes key to building an engaged, happy, and performing team.

In an effort to understand and invest in things that keep us “above the line”, we introduced this concept and facilitated a bunch of discussions across our teams to help people share where they were. It went a long way to building a more open, inclusive, and connected culture.

This common language continues to be short-hand in conversations I occasionally have where people need a safe space to discuss a challenge or frustration. Challenges or frustrations are common at work and in life; the key is that you’re able to identify and solve them as quickly as possible for yourself and others.

This ongoing dialogue has really helped my leadership teams demonstrate our interest in an individual's wellbeing, and our commitment to the health and success of our people.

COVID has impacted so many people in different ways. I have colleagues who’ve been directly affected by the illness, people also balancing busy work commitments with homeschooling and childcare, to some teammates (depending on geography) being back in quarantine who live on their own and miss that social interaction. Supporting each other through this and maintaining our focus on operating the business is a continuous prioritization exercise. Regular, transparent communication and clear expectation management is more critical than ever, but it’s a dynamic situation and an ongoing effort to ensure we’re able to navigate our people and business through this period of time.

Our “All-Hands Meeting” includes recognition, knowledge sharing workshops, and learning opportunities for everyone; for example we give out a “Better Never Stops” Award every month which recognises impact and examples of where people made significant steps forward in their development. We spin up a “Bonusly” thread in our Zoom chat as we make the announcement which can lead to the winner receiving up to $200 in contributions from colleagues all over the business. These can be used on vouchers or charitable causes of the recipient's choice. It’s fun seeing how the teams share in that person's success and the subsequent “Slack” channels blowing up with further shout outs, conversation and recognition.

We had to make a last-minute shift for our Revenue Kick-Off 2 years ago, pivoting a 250 person live event in Orlando to a 3 day fully remote experience due to COVID. As part of that experience, we organized a virtual “Amazing Race” where teammates were solving clues and challenges together. The experience generated a bunch of new relationships, memories, and laughs. The winners were included as part of the broader awards ceremony and costume party we held over the course of the event.

InVisioner’s love a “Cribs” style tour! I live in a relatively small place in London so when I see some of my teammates walking through seafront apartments in places like Miami and Madeira, or teammates leveraging our remote culture to work together poolside in Croatia for the week, I seriously question my life choices!

We’re big users of Slack, Zoom and we love the Bonusly platform mentioned above; where colleagues can publicly recognise their teammates with small monetary rewards. We added a bunch of innovation to Freehand recently: strategy templates, integrations with Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, Figma, Adobe XD + the ability to embed key project documentation. We now run all of our strategic planning, OKRs, roadmaps, prioritization workshops, project management, end of quarter “countdowns” and company-wide presentations on the platform. The new Loom integration with Freehand has brought a new video dimension to our asynchronous communication. This is really useful for me as I’m managing a global team in a U.S-headquartered business from London.

I learn a lot from my network. The most significant advancements I have made to my skills and perspectives have come from people kind enough to share, advise and invest time in helping me learn from their experiences. For example, a previous boss during my several years at LinkedIn named Chris Brown would spend as much time in our 1:1s sharing his leadership experiences running large teams as he would on the more common operating tasks for the week like forecasts and deals. This has been really influential in the experience I aspire to create for my team.

Books like “Good to Great '' by Jim Collins, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People '' by Stephen Covey and “The Innovator's Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen have been impactful reads in developing my business approach and leadership style.

Finally, as an alumni of LinkedIn, I have access to and regularly use their Learning Platform. I’d recommend Dorie Clark’s course on “How to Make Strategic Thinking a Habit” as one I’ve revisited a couple of times.