3 Qualities I Look For When I’m Hiring

When I was 22 and fresh out of college, I sold everything I owned and bought a secondhand Volkswagen van from a roadside seller. I loaded it up with my belongings and set off on a one-way road trip from Arizona to California. My big plan was to learn how to snowboard.

I encountered snow much earlier than expected. Halfway through the journey I hit a nasty snowstorm in Nevada and my van broke down in the middle of nowhere. I remember standing by myself at a closed gas station, screwdriver in hand, tears running down my face, as I tried to restart the van. Luckily, after much trying and crying (is it the right time to mention that I’m no mechanic?), the battered old van struggled back to life and I eventually made my way to Tahoe.

This experience was a blip on the map of my life, but it gave me an invaluable lesson that still proves relevant today: Learning and growing as a person means being uncomfortable, embracing mistakes, testing solutions and never quitting in the face of great challenges.

In my professional life, I have learned that persistence and resilience apply as much to individuals as they do to teams. Today when I build a team, especially a customer experience team, I consciously seek out people who have learned some of these very lessons.

For starters, I look for people from all over the world who come from vastly different backgrounds. In light of their cultural differences, I want them to share certain unique qualities: fearlessness, wisdom, inquisitiveness and the drive to overcome any ordeal. I believe these are the components of a resilient team.

So, what does that look like in practice? It means I encourage my teams to create their own codes of conduct and empower each other to have a voice. It also means creating a climate where my team is not afraid to fail. We must accept that we’re not always right about what our customers want or need. These “failures” lead to more experiments — and those experiments inevitably lead us to more innovative customer solutions.

This also means we can choose how to define “success.” To me, success means learning faster than everyone else. It means curating a deep understanding of our customers — their intents, desires, journeys and outcomes. Doing this requires a smart team. But it also requires a resilient one.

So, what am I looking for as I expand my team? Well, there are three things to start.

You Can Survive Being Wrong

For right or wrong, companies rely on structures that reinforce the behavior of being right. The problem with this design is that we pat ourselves on the back when the numbers go up, but when the numbers go down, we’re confused because no one is willing to own up to the facts and say, “Maybe we didn’t know what was driving those numbers after all.”

I want my group to embrace failing and have the confidence to own up to being wrong. No one is right 100 percent of the time. Fearing failure can lead to procrastination and lack of drive. Embracing failure can lead to a very strong team. I want smaller teams that focus on achieving the smaller milestones. Smaller groups make the work less intimidating and also make learning less scary and more supportive. Eventually, those small victories will lead to major breakthroughs.

You Understand That You Are Not Your Customer

Let’s face it: When launching a product, we often don’t know how our customer will interact with it. There may be hiccups in the UX. The look and feel of the product may be warped. Whatever the problem, your product designer, UX expert and the rest of your team should be focused on performing a root cause analysis to investigate the value chain that leads to evidence of a problem.

One great tool for exploring a problem in context is the Lean Canvas Template, which helps you think through what you’re observing. This exercise will help you ask yourself a series of questions: Who is the customer? What is the customer’s context? What is the customer doing? What is the customer thinking? What elements of the experience were most frustrating? A lean canvas template guides you through the value chain that discovers the pain points in the customer experience.

You Know That People Are (Sometimes) Lying To You

I recently had my team attend an event and interact with customers to see what they thought about our product. The general feedback was that our website was great and that they loved the StubHub experience. Great news to hear, sure, but chances are they were probably lying.

Some key facts: The customers were at an event and were probably psyched to be there. Any small moments of frustration they may have experienced during their ticket purchasing journey are not top of mind right now.

Observing customers in context using your product is always important. Asking carefully curated questions to find the source of the hiccups throughout the process is helpful too. And lastly, when you get an inkling of what those hiccups might be, ask five “whys” to truly delve into the issue — and hopefully come away with directions for a solution.

Our customers all over the world use our product to take their dream experiences from theory to reality — whether it’s seeing a brand new play in London, a modern opera in Shanghai, or a nail-biting baseball game in Boston. Understanding the customer experience from 360-degrees — and knowing that direct feedback isn’t the only way to gain insight — is paramount to our success.

We have a wide range of people at StubHub who all have a seat at the table and have a voice in the process. We’re working hard to return to our start-up roots. We’re doing it by removing the pressure to be perfect all the time and choosing to learn faster than our competition.

After all, if we want to deliver goodness to the customer in the most efficient and rapid way possible, then we have to be resilient enough to weather the storm, diverse enough to understand our customers’ needs, and humble enough to always learn from them.