Tips for new employees

What we’ll look for

1. Acquire one customer

Everyone on the business team is expected to sell to customers.  We’ve found a correlation between those who convert a customer in their first month and success at our organisation.  I suspect it demonstrates that you understand our product and have worked hard enough to convince someone else to use us.  This spells goodness for us.

2. Pick up hard skills quickly

There’s a basic set of skills required to be at Xendit, including Powerpoint, Excel, Postman.  The faster you learn how to use this the way we expect, the better you’ll perform.  We’re sticklers for Powerpoint and Excel because we’re ex management consulting and private equity.  Postman you’ll need so you can use our APIs.

We want to see you say “yes” and volunteer to get shit done.  We want you to become an owner on the things we give you, and not rest until they get accomplished.  You’ll get basic points by doing what we ask you on time.  We’ll be pleasantly surprised if you can put your hand up for more things and get it done.  Can be small things like doing some analysis or coming up with a strategy.  

Bring a notebook and write stuff down – I don’t know why anyone would show up to a meeting without paper and pen.  One smart ass once told me they could remember everything to do.  That was disproven in about 30 minutes.  Writing helps you remember an order of magnitude better and gives you quick recall on context and to dos.  

Keep your own to do list – We aren’t strict on a system yet but we do expect you to keep some sort of to-do list.  Many people use Trello, Todoist or paper and pen.  If you don’t have it recorded there’s little chance of you accomplishing it.  This is also in our basic test of ‘trust to execute.’  

Write down what you want to say – for those who struggle with summarising or presenting, you will do much better by writing down what you want to say, before saying it.  Most excellent leaders write down what they want to say before saying it, e.g. Obama and Martin Luther King.  If these orators need to write, you probably should too

Ask for feedback – we’re often so focused on the work we don’t think about feedback until an 1-on-1.  We find our best performers tend to ask an outsized number of questions to solicit feedback and then execute on them.  When you get feedback, pick 1 thing to work on and just try it on for 2 weeks.  If it doesn’t work, iterate and try something else.  I tend to think most humans can’t focus on improving more than one thing at a time.  

Work hard – we put an outsized amount on emphasis on working hard.  We want people who are willing to fight with us in the trenches and beat the competition.  That has historically been partly driven by working harder than the competition.  

Be willing to do anything – we really hate it when people think they are above some task.  I have a standard that I won’t ask someone to do something I’m not willing to do myself.  To date, I think everything I’ve asked I’ve done before in some form.  Point being, to be a leader you have to be willing to do anything.  Those who aren’t don’t really belong here.

Status, Blockers, Next Steps – this is how we do status updates.  It’s a simple and effective structure.  If you come to me without this, I’ll force this structure.  It’s an easy way to meet that structured communications dimension in performance assessment.  

Learning philosophy – Xendit is probably one of the best way to grow quickly.  Whether we’re up or down, we have the opportunity to do things you can’t do in any other job, e.g. grow a business 30% month on month.  Therefore, I think your goals should be to learn as much as you can.  We’ll teach you until you stop being self driven about your growth, then we’ll likely put attention to someone else who is progressing and growing. If you decide that you’ve had enough and don’t want to grow our way, you may still be good at your job.  But you’ll find you won’t be promoted or get more responsibility, and in fact your responsibility may be diminished over time.