Amp It Up (Book Summary)

Amp It Up by Frank Slootman

PART I Amping Up

1 Introduction: The Power of Amping Up

• What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.
• The five key steps in the Amp It Up process:
  • raise your standards
  • align your people
  • sharpen your focus
  • pick up the pace
  • transform your strategy.
• People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don’t do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way. It doesn’t take much more mental energy to raise standards. Don’t let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.
• Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it?
• Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.
• Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO), which I have eliminated at every company I’ve joined in the last 20 years. If you need MBO to get people to do their job, you may have the wrong people, the wrong managers, or both.
• Think about execution more sequentially than in parallel. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard.
• “Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.
• Leaders set the pace.
• Good performers crave a culture of energy.
• Apply pressure. Be impatient. Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership.

2 My Journey from Teenage Toilet Cleaner to Serial CEO

• I am not so much focused day-to-day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation. Doing everything we can to the best of our abilities.
• Size isn’t everything and often is a liability when things are changing rapidly.
• Hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime.
• Today I am less driven by career ambition than by a hunger for sport, action, excitement, teamwork, and a never-ending pursuit of self-improvement.
• Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader — but that didn’t mean I was right. As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody’s time. If we knew that something or someone wasn’t working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.

PART II Raise Your Standards

3 Make Your Organization Mission Driven

• Three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.
• Snowflake’s current mission is to mobilize the world’s data by building the world’s greatest data and applications platform, not just of the cloud era, but in the history of computing.

4 Declare War on Your Competitors and on Incrementalism

• Good leaders explain that none of us are ever truly safe in our roles for any length of time.
• We got in the habit of saying that “free isn’t free” because products have to be operated and managed, which of course costs money. We used to say to potential customers, “What’s the real cost of something free that doesn’t do the job properly?”
• The more high-achieving people who desert their current employers to join us, the more we are winning.
• A talent drain is the best evidence that a company is in serious trouble and is losing its will to fight.
• Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential.
• Do an unsentimental evaluation of what resources and staff you have versus how much you really need.

5 Put Execution Ahead of Strategy

• “No strategy is better than its execution.”
• Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences.
• A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.
• Operators in charge of each business unit must also be the strategists for their business, and the chief executive officer must also act as the chief strategy officer.

PART III Align Your People and Culture

6 Hire Drivers, Not Passengers, and Get the Wrong People off the Bus

• The first order of business is sorting out the valuable people from the deadweight
• If you don’t act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no prayer of changing the overall trajectory.
• I’ve even told my boards that if they could find a better CEO than me, they should replace me too.
• Create a vetted, prioritized list of possible candidates for each critical role you are responsible for. And make this part of a periodic check-in on the topic: review lists of candidates and their updated status as part of discussion on the performance and status of the people currently occupying these roles.
• Do not rely on acute sourcing tactics such as recruiters and LinkedIn. You will only see the active job seekers, who are unlikely to be the candidates you really want.
• You must staff ahead of need. Recruiting never stops.
• Once you get good at both hiring and firing, you are well on your way to great results and a thriving career.

7 Build a Strong Culture

• High-growth enterprises are not easy places to live. The pressure is relentless. Performance is aggressively managed.
• The pattern in places with a weak culture: lots of fiefdoms that spend their days fighting each other more than they fight the competition.
• R-E-C-I-P-E:
  • R = Respect
  • E = Excellence
  • C = Customer
  • I = Integrity
  • P = Performance
  • E = Execution
• I urged our people to feel empowered to act forcefully on behalf of customers. Not just the big, strategic customers but all of them. No exceptions.
• Trust is the first victim of integrity violations, which set off a chain reaction of negative consequences.
• We pursued former employees — who had nothing to lose — to shed some light on what they had experienced.
• You only get the culture you desire if you actively pursue and enforce compliance.

8 Teach Everyone to Go Direct and Build Mutual Trust

• People get good at managing up and down the org chart of a single silo but flounder when problems require cooperation across silos.
• If you have a problem that cuts across departments, figure out who in those other departments can most directly help you address the issue, and reach out without hesitation.
• Trust goes up when people see that we are self-aware about our own shortcomings and areas for improvement.
• To truly inspire trust, under-promise and overdeliver.
• High-trust workplace cultures tend to correlate with high-performance organizations.
• To set a good example, whenever I realized that one of my decisions had been incorrect and regrettable, I would publicly admit it and declare a fast failure.

PART IV Sharpen Your Focus

9 Put Analysis Before Solutions

• I am generally not a fan of just trying things, throwing ideas against the wall to see if they stick. We lose time and waste resources that way. Let’s try a rifle shot instead of a scatter gun.
• My preferred tactic is to start with so-called first principles. Break problems down into their most basic elements. Ignore what you think you already know, and imagine you are facing this kind of situation for the first time in your life.
• In meetings, I often object to presentations where 90% of the content is about the solution, not the problem.
• Several times a year we conduct what we call “calibration” sessions where each department head presents to their peers, profiling the performance and potential of their direct reports.

10 Align Incentives for Customer Success

• If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services. The alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforce that customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department. This means that when a problem arises, every department has a responsibility to fix it. Everyone’s incentives should be fully aligned with what’s good for our customers.
• Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.
• At all three companies, we made our technical support people the organizational owners of customer issues from end to end. We also moved technical support organizationally under the umbrella of engineering,
• It is important that salespeople do not delegate part of their role to customer success types.

PART V Pick Up the Pace

11 Ramp Up Sales

• How do you know when to ramp up a start-up’s sales?
• Are you happy with your current sales productivity metrics?
• Are you happy with the metrics of your lead generation pipeline?
• Are you being realistic in your timeline of sales targets?
• Are you being aggressive enough and thinking big enough to outpace your competition?
• Is your sales team buying into your targets and timeline? Are they owning the goals and fully committed to hitting them?
• Figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers before ramping up headcount.
• Selling in initial stages is more akin to business development than a defined, repeatable sales process.
• One big challenge of early-stage selling is insufficient demand, so we decided that we had to give our new reps a ton of leads they could follow up on, right away.
• High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.
• Lead generation wasn’t that expensive compared to the much bigger commitment of hiring and retaining direct sales staff.
• If you can sell a product to companies in New York but not in Atlanta, the problem isn’t your product.
• It’s quite common in early-stage companies for a small group of reps to be driving most of the revenue, while a larger group of flatliners are failing to contribute. The problem in these cases is usually a bad habit of hiring indiscriminately, and a lack of standardized, effective sales enablement.
• Part of the problem was that Snowflake’s recruiting had been mostly outsourced, a mistake for any sales organization in my view. If there is one skill a sales manager must have, it is recruiting. It has to be done in-house because recruiting is so core to successful sales management.
• In a static, low growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development. But in high-growth scenarios it’s a negative metric because it means you aren’t hiring fast enough.
• Never simply throw them into stone-cold territories without a viable plan or support.

12 Grow Fast or Die Slow

• Relatively few make growth as big a priority as it should be.
• For a business to break out and reach escape velocity, it needs a ton of differentiation. It needs to profoundly upset and disrupt the status quo. People yawn when offered merely marginal change.
• Goals are powerful: they change behavior.
• All my experiences have taught me that when in doubt, you should lean in and try to grow faster.
• Your leverage comes from having a strong product and a formidable ability to sell it. If possible, always own your distribution rather than delegate it to a third party. Nobody cares about selling your product more than you.
• Many companies try to continue that momentum by investing heavily in a second major product or service — a sequel to whatever made them successful originally. But most have a hard time being serial innovators. A higher-probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets.
• I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have strong financial oversight and discipline on sales compensation. You may be tempted at some point to make your comp plans more generous to recruit and retain top sales talent, but abandoning financial rigor can be a fatal mistake — not just during the planning stages of each year but every day, literally from one sales deal to the next.

13 Stay Scrappy as You Scale Up

• There is no point in hiring ten salespeople when you don’t yet know how to make even one salesperson productive.
• You’ll know when it’s time to ramp up when customers are virtually ripping the product from your hands.
• I had no idea how much value a topflight finance chief could add!
• The most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start-up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale down as required.
• Your mission as a leader is to figure out how to hang on to your early-stage dynamism and avoid the lethargy of mass and bulk. One technique I use is to challenge key people with this question: “If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?”
• Similarly, I ask our teams what’s the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason?

PART VI Transform Your Strategy

14 Materialize Your Opportunities — the Data Domain Growth Story

• Takeaway 1: Attack weakness, not strength.
• Takeaway 2: Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else’s.
• Takeaway 3: It’s much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one.
• Takeaway 4: Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.
• Takeaway 5: Stay close to home in the early going.
• Takeaway 6: Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
• Takeaway 7: Bet on the correct enabling technologies.
• Takeaway 8: Architecture is everything.
• Takeaway 9: Prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect.

15 Open the Aperture — the ServiceNow Expansion Story

• Ultimately the real question isn’t how broadly you can expand — it’s whether you can hang on to the new markets that you expand into.

16 Swing for the Fences — the Snowflake Growth Story

• If you wait until the need for a strategic shift becomes overwhelmingly evident, you may be too late to address it. Anticipating how markets — and your position in them — will evolve is absolutely essential.
• The sooner you lay the groundwork for expanding into new markets, the easier all these challenges will be.

PART VII The Amped-Up Leader

17 Amp Up Your Career

• As professional people, we are products. So try to product-manage yourself. Develop your product through education, training, and experience.
• Grad students are much less attractive than people who can point to a record of tangible achievements at a company.
• Several short tenures in a row also imply that you had poor judgment in choosing those roles or perhaps that you’re the kind of person who gets into chronic conflicts with management.
• I’m always intrigued by candidates who once crashed and burned with a company and learned something from facing those serious challenges.
• Employers can give you experience, but they can’t give you aptitude.
• People literally never asked me in interviews what I thought I was good at. But that’s always one of the first and most interesting questions I ask from the other side of the desk.
• You can hire people ahead of their own development curve and inspire them to grow into challenging new roles.
• An energetic, engaging personality goes a long way in the workplace,
• A big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities.
• We have found that people who are hungry, humble, and express a “can’t fail” level of determination are often a good bet.
• My style evolved into a conversational mode, as if I’m just chatting and telling stories to a couple of people in my office, rather than in front of hundreds. I start with the messages I want to convey and then fold in stories to illustrate my assertions.
• Whatever you do, never read text bullets verbatim from a PowerPoint slide — that’s the fastest way to lose everyone’s attention.
• You can change your mind at any time about your long-term goals, and many do. But always think about your career over the long haul and make decisions from that perspective.
• In the first ten or so years out of college, don’t worry too much about your salary or job title. Those years are all about building a strong foundation to launch your career.
• Join good companies that have a mature management infrastructure.
• Early on you want to focus on getting a wide education in your field and laying a foundation for future leadership. Both are hard at a start-up, so don’t get too enamored with the allure of hitting a home run via stock options early on.
• Pick a field where you have a realistic chance of rising and turn your less realistic passions — such as playing basketball, sailing, performing music, or painting — into hobbies for your free time.
• Try to take roles and assignments where the rubber meets the road, where hard but essential problems have to be solved.
• Make Sure You Never Fear a Reference Check: Think of everyone around you — bosses, peers, and subordinates — as a potential future reference.
• Most people are, by definition, average performers. It’s ultimately about your attitude and behavior, which is a choice, not a skill set.
• If you don’t collaborate well, if you don’t take ownership for your project, it won’t be long before you’re seen as more trouble than you are worth.

18 Just for CEOs — Dealing with Founders and Boards

• In general, it’s easier to find a start-up founder with good ideas than an operator to execute those ideas to their fullest potential. It’s even rarer to find someone who combines both skill sets.
• Tread Lightly as You Make Changes
• VCs see successful founders as rare and precious, to be backed again and again, but they see CEOs as far more replaceable.
• Your mission is to win, not to achieve popularity. When you win, paradoxically, you will gain popularity with everybody. But if you get distracted because the founders don’t love you, and the company suffers, you will face dark days indeed.
• The board will sing your praises to the skies if the company hits all its targets under your leadership, even if you disregard their suggestions.
• A good CEO will lead a board.
• Preparation is your key advantage.
• The CEO should make the case for appropriate compensation for each senior exec.

19 Conclusion — Great Leaders Have Great Outcomes

• Don’t try to copy or emulate other leaders — including me.
• You can be the most empathetic, charismatic, and popular leader ever, but none of that will matter if your business falls short.