I work at Loop as the Social Media Manager. I am primarily responsible for creating compelling content for our social media channels and growing our online audiences.

How big is it?

Our team is 9 people strong, and growing! We have roles across content marketing, demand generation, product marketing, and brand design.

Where are your teammates located?

Our team is pretty spread out. Some on the east coast, a few in the midwest, plus Austin and Canada.

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

Our marketing team is responsible for generating demand for our sales team. This could look like anything from creating interesting brand content, to hosting industry dinners & meetups. My role sits on the side of creating content.

Trust and communication. This is probably a cliche answer, but it’s true. 

We have a few core values at Loop: “assume positive intent” and “clear is kind”. Assuming positive intent is important when you can’t read body language or casually develop a relationship with your teammates. Similarly, clear communication means your team is on the same page about goals, vision and the work you all do together.

We have a pretty autonomous team. There’s no one looking over your shoulder to make sure you are doing Task A at exactly 9:00 am. We hold our team accountable to specific results and give them room to do their best work however they see fit.

In startups, things change fast and often. It’s easy to take for granted all the decisions that are made that lead to the present form of the company.

Keeping clear documentation of what is happening and why, including results from experiments, is challenging. But, it’s necessary to keep the team up to date, and give context to new hires.

We have a bot in Slack that asks a random question every Friday. One week was, “if you ran a restaurant, what would you name it?” Reading people’s responses is always fun. It creates good conversation and tons of laughs.

We also have Weekly Wraps (all-hands) on Fridays. Our host is a comedian and they keep things engaging in what might otherwise be a dull meeting.

We once played a game of Diplomacy. Talk about a nail-biter...

All of our team meetings start with an icebreaker. We had the age-old debate over hot and cold weather. My favorites are music-related ones, e.g. what karaoke song would you sing. Our team has a diverse taste in music - sometimes that means really old music :)

As far as tools go, we mostly use bots in Slack. Outside of that, our culture is generally built through casual conversation—and this is the form most meetings take.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I know it’s not a formal resource, but being able to talk with peers at other companies is valuable. Twitter feels like being in the college cafeteria, every day.