Cross Functional and Friendly Kristen Habacht, Nikita Miller, Stella Garber

2022 has been a rollercoaster. As we move on from a global pandemic to what is clearly a harsh winter for the tech industry, making the right professional decisions—or more importantly, having the right frameworks to do so—is essential.

In the last episode of season 2, the trio reflects on 2022 and looks ahead at 2023. They address questions that we all inevitably grapple with in our professional journeys: when is it the right time to leave a job? when should you start a new company? and everything else you need to know about your next career move.

Perfect timing, as we enter the new year.

Managing our careers has always been a valuable skill. What we do happens to be far more important than how hard we work. This is doubly true in an environment where technology and the job landscape are in constant flux.

Charting your professional path has powerful downstream effects. For instance: is it better to be a big fish in a small pond? Placing yourself in a startup, taking on more risk and responsibility? Or is it smarter to be a small fish in a big pond? leveraging the structured growth and stability that a larger organisation can provide?

In this episode, Stella, Nikita, and Kristen address these questions through their own personal journeys. They leave us with valuable frameworks that they’ve used to manage their own careers and professional growth over the years. Tune in!

So you’ve made those crucial first hires, built the right team, and set clear goals. In this episode, the trio unpacks the next vital step: managing performance.

If the sales team isn’t performing, should the product team be held accountable? Great products sell themselves right? Or is it marketing’s fault for not positioning the product correctly? Or maybe they’re actually doing fine but the sales lead you hired isn’t that great after all.

Evaluating whether your teams have reached their goals is deceptively simple in theory, but increasingly complicated when you have to do it across functions.

Tune in as the trio pair actionable advice with their own experiences over the years!

In this episode, Stella, Nikita, and Kristen weigh in on how goal setting works across teams—how they change based on product, marketing, and sales objectives, and more importantly: how they can coalesce around a broader organisational goal.

Are OKRs actually effective? Are monthly reviews better than quarterly ones? If these are the questions you’re dealing with as a founder or cross-functional leader, this episode is for you. Tune in!

The trio talks about how sales, product, and marketing teams should be built, and how to set up systems that enable cross-functional (and friendly!) collaboration between them.

Stella, Nikita, and Kristen tackle a question that they get asked all the time by startup founders. How should they go about making their first hires?