How We Build and Sustain High-Trust Teams
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By Jennifer Lau, Senior Product Manager
It always comes back to soccer.
Soccer is a game that I love and have learned from throughout my life. I have been the captain of my high school, college, business school and rec teams. In my role as captain, I relish having the responsibility of bringing the team together, fostering camaraderie, and most of all, creating an atmosphere that’s rooted in accountability and a drive to win.
Doing this means not only understanding what each teammate’s strengths and weaknesses are, but also thinking about how we all play an instrumental role in achieving a victory.
Games are not won by the efforts of one player alone. It isn’t the striker alone who claims the victory — it’s the defenseman, the midfielder and the goaltender. It’s everyone. What you can do as a team will always outweigh the feats of a single individual. As captain, I focus on the execution of the greater purpose, not the stuffing of a stat sheet.
Today, in my role as a senior product manager at StubHub, I bring what I learned on the soccer pitch directly into our office. Our Product & Technology team is an incredibly diverse, talented and ambitious bunch, all of them driven to achieve new and better ways of improving the customer experience.
Win, lose or draw — for me, it’s all about building and sustaining a high-trust team.
The Three Points of the Pyramid
At StubHub, we have a clear north star that is defined by clear customer outcomes and successful metrics. To execute against this north star successfully, there are three essential values for every team I work with:
1. Ownership
Each person, no matter what role they play on the team, needs to feel they have ownership of the end product. When they look at the StubHub site or our app, they’ll remember with great pride the autonomy they had to define the functionality, build the design and help create the code.
2. Authenticity
Employees bring their best selves and their true selves to work each day. Witty, goofy, risky, driven, risk-averse and stubborn — these are a few differences that can make a team stronger. We can’t have all defenders or all goal-scorers on the team, just as we can’t have all risk-taking or visionary people on the team. Valuing our differences is key.
3. Empathy
The team must have empathy for each other, for our customers and for our stakeholders. Respecting one another and understanding where we each come from helps us all move toward the common goal of driving impact for the business and delighting our customers.
To elaborate on these three points:
Embracing ownership means that each person, no matter what role they have on the team, takes ownership over the end product. They have the autonomy to define the functionality, design, or code — rather than being told what to do. When any team member experiences our product as a customer would, they see their work and are proud of it.
For example, within the framework of our Product & Technology team, it’s not exclusively up to me as the product manager to care about the business impact of our work. At the same time, it’s not the designer’s sole duty to care about user needs and it’s not up to the engineer alone to care about technical feasibility. With shared ownership, everyone on the team cares about all these things as a unified group.
Authenticity means bringing your best self to work and having the honesty to admit that sometimes you don’t know the answer. Let’s face it, we’re all making decisions based on imperfect information. True, we have the tools to gather more data to make better decisions. But at the end of the day, it’s a decision based partly on imperfect information.
Here is a real-life example of how I think about authenticity: I hypothesized that organizing the homepage in thematic rows by genre — sports, concerts, theater & comedy — would make it easier for customers to find what they wanted rather than parsing through a random list of events. This was backed by user and competitive research.
However, customers did not respond to the change in our a/b test. As much as the organized carousels were beautiful, the entire organization was excited about the new layout, and as badly as I wanted it to work, I never felt the need to prove I was right because I was making decisions with imperfect information.
Rather than pretending that the neutral results were actually positive by some non-data driven factor, I put my ego aside, we dove into the data to understand why, evolved the solution, tried another test and found a better customer experience that drove value for the business.
The best way to have empathy for someone on your team, for a customer, or a stakeholder is to understand them by way of data and personal interaction. This helps us get to know them and find out what motivates them. As a team, we regularly engage with customers by using tools like UserTesting to get feedback on design and concepts before we begin conduct a/b tests to gauge statistically significant results.
By embracing these qualities, our team can work toward our three main objectives:
- Help our customers find the events they’re seeking with great speed and ease.
- Help them discover a new event they otherwise would not have known about.
- Give them a place to shop that they enjoy and trust.
One Team
I strive to create an environment and team where people want to be a part of what we’re building. The truth is, we’re all talented. Many of us considered opportunities at other great companies. But what drew us all to StubHub is the opportunity to take ownership in what we do. We’re smaller, we’re agile, we’re harder-working and we’re in it to win it.
On the field or off, I believe in winning humbly and celebrating the wins — but I also believe in losing gracefully and learning everything we can to come back stronger.
Are you excited about collaborating on customer-driven products through ownership, authenticity and empathy? Come join us.
