I work at a company called Braze. We’re a customer engagement platform for marketers. In a nutshell, we help marketers create strong relationships with their audiences through highly-personalized, curated app and web experiences.‍

I’ve been at Braze since 2015 and have watched us grow from roughly 50 employees to over 1,000. I started at Braze as a Content Marketing intern and have since been a Producer of Special Projects while on the Marketing team, and then I made the jump to our award-winning Customer Success team as a Customer Success Manager and Senior CSM before moving into people management.

I’m currently a Senior Manager of Customer Success, Enterprise for our East team of CSMs based in Chicago and NYC. We have a variety of customer segments at Braze, and I manage the Enterprise and Strategic Enterprise teams overseeing customers with 1,500-10,000 employees like NASCAR, Grubhub Seamless, and IBM. 

My role is to hire, empower, coach, and retain a team of top-performing people leaders and CSMs, and our primary objectives are to maintain a specific client retention rate, promote customer happiness and advocacy, and support customer expansion through increased product adoption and sophistication.

How big is it?

I currently manage a team of 12 including 2 Team Leads (people managers) and 10 Customer Success Managers ranging in title from CSM II to Strategic CSM.

Where are your teammates located?

My team is located in New York City and Chicago, and I’m now permanently based in Kansas City after spending five years in our NYC HQ. That means that I’ve had the privilege of building the foundation of my team in person, and I’ve been amazed at both the incredible talent we’ve hired and the culture we’ve created during our time apart due to COVID. Many of our team members hadn’t met in person (or visited a Braze office!) until just recently, and the genuine and substantial relationships they’ve forged are a testament to their resolve.

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

My team is responsible for individual books of business, and they provide post-sales strategic and technical support for our clients. More specifically, the majority of our team’s time is dedicated to providing consultative and product-specific support to their Marketing and Product team end users. Given our product is a lifecycle customer engagement platform, many Enterprise brands look to my team to inspire and educate them related to innovative and inspiring digital marketing use cases that you might see out in the world shortly thereafter.

There are four main pillars that I believe make up a strong remote culture: communication, clarity, consistency, and compassion. ‍

Communicating effectively and in the way that your direct report responds to most is incredibly important when you’re not physically in the same space. Similarly, a lot can get lost in translation or misconstrued depending on how and when you’re making a request or sharing information so doubling down on the clarity of your message is vital. ‍

A strong culture isn’t built overnight but is instead forged day over day and experience by experience, so showing up and consistently following through on what you say is a way to build trust and to meet and manage your team’s expectations.

Lastly, and most importantly, treat your team with respect and compassion. We’re all human, and I like to lead with the premise that everyone on my team is doing the best they can with the resources they have. 

We often spend more time with our colleagues than our families, and my intent is that it’s never questioned that the folks on our team recognize that they are important to our department, have a perspective that we can benefit from, and whose careers we’re investing in.

I can’t compel happiness, but I can promote a workplace where individuals are celebrated for their wins, given credit for their ideas, coached privately when there are missteps, encouraged to try new things, and inspired to step into leadership opportunities where they can shine.‍

I care about their wellbeing and take note of the things they share with me. Is a family member ill and they need to take PTO? Check in after to see how they’re doing, encourage them to step away from work, and remind them that the team is thinking of them. Did they set a personal goal to complete a marathon? Send them a note the day before to let them know you’re sending good running vibes. Are they interested in a specific development path? Recommend resources or courses you come across that you think could be meaningful based on their career aspirations. Put simply: pay attention and follow through.‍

It’s often been the small things that have made me feel most included, welcomed, and valued on a team, and I like to keep that in mind with anyone reporting to me. 

Lastly, I look to others for mentorship so that I’m continuing to grow and improve. I’m constantly looking to learn from those that have done this before (or people who are on or lead teams I admire) so I can benefit from their experience.

From a people perspective, I’ve found it challenging to get to know each new team member as efficiently as I previously did when we were in person and could go grab a coffee or get lunch together. If the majority of your meetings are tactical 1:1s then you miss out on who they are as an individual, so I set aside recurring breakfast time with them to talk about anything other than work. I’ve found that those meetings are some of the most valuable time spent per week.‍

Tactically, I found it challenging to ensure that each team member is ramped up and onboarded effectively. I’d originally had the hypothesis that in-person onboardings were going to be required to get my team up to speed, but this past year has proven me completely wrong. Our leadership and operations teams spent the last year investing in the creation of a scalable, repeatable onboarding program that couples on-demand lessons with in-person learning sessions, and the result has been a new class of remote CSMs that have had some of the fastest ramp times in my team’s history.

We’ve tried a variety of remote events, but we’re a bit “virtual happy hour-ed” out (as I’d imagine most teams might be). I’m lucky to be a part of a wildly creative team, and we’ve done some really fun things together even when we’re in different time zones. We’ve done a museum murder mystery night, tons of trivia events, Codenames tournaments, and more, but there are two unique events that have been the most fun.

A Customer Success Team Lead in LA, Suzy, found an Airbnb event where our team met a llama named Cadbury at his farm in Australia via Zoom. We then learned how to draw cartoon llamas by his owner who started her career as an animator for Disney. It was hilarious.

We also did a Crockd pottery-making class focused on building a space for meaningful conversations while we got our hands dirty, and it was a nice way to connect with the team while also learning something new.

The Braze CS team loves icebreakers. A Customer Success Team Lead in our New York office, Jennifer, is the queen of icebreakers and has built an entire repository of good questions to ask when we have new team member lunches or pod standups. Some favorites:

• What is your quasi-useless superpower? (Mine is recognizing when people get haircuts.)
• If you could only have two condiments for the rest of your life what would they be? (Barbecue sauce and garlic aioli.)
• Who would you want to play you in a movie of your life? (Emma Watson!)

We’re big fans of Kudoboard on my team. We love to celebrate big and small milestones, and having a collaborative card with personalized notes and hilarious GIFs has proven to be a nice way to commemorate celebrations. I’ve also sent curated Happy Boxes for Employee Appreciation Day, gifted team members Airbnb Experiences as thank yous, and am always on the lookout for unique and fun ways to surprise and delight my incredible team.

I’m a big believer in continued focus on growth and development for both my team and myself, and there are a variety of resources I leverage:

• Books: Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo, Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson
• Podcasts: WorkLife, Hidden Brain, How I Built This
• Misc: SuccessHacker, General Assembly, Catalyst‍

‍

Most importantly, actively seek out mentorship! Being vulnerable and asking for guidance and learning from others has been massively important to my growth as a leader.