3 Suggestions to Prospective Astrid Employees

At Astrid, our vision is to help over 1 billion people become happier, healthier, and more productive. To that end, we need to not only be smart about how we build (engineering), but also what we build (design, product), and how to get the good news out to as many people as possible (marketing, PR, business development). While I have provided suggestions for prospective engineers elsewhere, below are some of my suggestions for non-engineer potential employees, interns, and anyone who wants to better understand how the Astrid team thinks.

Get to know our products and current users. Henry Tsai was the first non-engineer I hired full-time to join the Astrid team. At the time, Henry was working at Bain & Company. Not only had he read and watched a number of resources that I sent him (like the ones below), but he also took the time to use Astrid (even in its previous less-than-glorious version) and read what users were saying about us on blogs and in comments. Being from Bain, he shared a PowerPoint deck with a summary of the key features that mattered most to our users and suggested changes based on user feedback. If you want to help us make our products better, you should be like Henry. Start by getting a deep understanding of what our products are and what our users think!
Read and watch some of the people who influence our thinking. Below are some of the people who have most influenced our team’s thinking around designing products and running a startup. I have personally gotten to meet with each of these thinkers for various lengths of time and respect each one of them immensely. I would recommend taking a couple of hours to get familiar with their insights before working for or even interviewing for Astrid.
1. Dave McClure: Startup Metrics for Pirates. Longer pitch here. The goal is to have a good understanding of AARRR: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue
2. BJ Fogg: Behavior Model. Being familiar with Motivation, Ability, and Triggers and how they relate is key. Understanding core motivations and Fogg’s 6 Simplicity Factors (Time, Money, Physical Effort, Brain Cycles, and Social Deviance) is also incredibly helpful.
3. Eric Reis: Lean Startup/Customer Development. I highly recommend reading Lean Startup by Eric Reis and The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, but I don’t expect everyone to read full books before they come in for an interview or internship. That said, being familiar with the concepts from Eric’s blog will be incredibly helpful:http://www.startuplessonslearned.com. You should also read Treat your Organization as a Prototype by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton of Stanford
4. Janice Fraiser: Synergy between the Lean Startup Movement and User Experience. Janice brings together many of the best thinking from Agile software development, User Experience, and the Lean Startup movement. Slide deck
5. Google Ventures Design Team: UX and Design. Some of the designers and UX researchers at Google Ventures share their thoughts here: http://www.designstaff.org
6. Dan Pink: Motivation. Dan Pink’s book Drive has shaped much of how our team thinks about motivating people. The book is worth reading, but for a quick overview check out Dan’s Ted Talk.
Understand how we make decisions and come in with a proposal We know that Astrid is far from realizing its full potential. We have a lot to polish and many bugs to fix – many of which we are all too familiar with. But we know that new people bring new ideas and dreams for new features or entirely new products. We love to brainstorm at Astrid, but once the storm subsides, we need to figure out what we will spend our time building and what we will defer or decline. If you are coming in for an interview or interning, take some time to read through my write-up, How To Make Your Wish Come True and, if you have any ideas or suggestions, put them through the process. Even if your idea is as wild as the example included, learning this process and the practice you get from working through the framework will be helpful.

Above and Beyond:

If you have read/viewed all of the above and still want more you might also appreciate reading some books I regularly recommend. We have many of these on our shelves and you are welcome to sit on our couch and read them whenever you are in our office for a visit!

Productivity

Getting Things Done

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

First Things First

Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us

Usability and Design

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Made To Stick

Purple Cow

Entrepreneurship

Crossing the Chasm

The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE