Lessons & Learning in People Ops at the EF by Jose Pedro Cabrita | Devcon SEA

[Music] so good afternoon my name is Jose I work for people Ops at ethereum Foundation um I joined the ethereum foundation around two years ago so this has been an experiment uh we didn't have people operations before I joined thef and um I want to share with you some of the learnings that we got uh for the past two years so what I'm going to talk uh today is our experience as I said for the past two years are go throughout challenges positive aspects and learnings in both recruitment people experience in development and offboarding as well and especially how these differ differ from other traditional organizations um that exist in the field but first I will provide some context on why doing people operations at the f is a very particular challenge full of nuances um mostly because of the way that thef is organized so the way that thef is organized is thef is part of a much larger ecosystem it is uh an organization that exists uh at the frontier of what we have known so far one that supports a blockchain ecosystem without controlling it and what that means is also a work in progress so every day we get to learn more about what thef is and what kind of organization it needs to be for the present and for the future to support obviously ethereum's uh long-term growth if we zoom in a little bit on how thef uh relates to the ecosystem um thef was new and we didn't know the best way uh for teams to organize themselves and to relate to the ecosystem so we prioritize creating an environment where actually different teams could choose to organize themselves differently depending on the goals that they actually wanted to achieve and it they thought it was best for them to achieve those goals so this resulted resulted in having more like a community of teams than actual um a set of typical company teams that are kind of standardized all across the board there are multiple ways in how these teams interact with each other and with the other entities that form the theorem ecosystem so there are teams that work at the frontier of the EF there are teams that work um within the EF uh there are teams that work exter internally uh there are teams that work with ethereum ecosystem entities that are again at the frontier of the EF so there are many ways in which these teams collaborate with uh with one another and with the ecosystem they're largely independent as I said some of them uh are internally some of them work at the frontier so that is very important in talking about the way also moving forward and how people operations works for for these teams these teams are also largely autonomous so they work in a decentralized way um we have and they have a high degree of autonomy some decisions such as for example road maps and priorities are taken by these teams in consultation with leadership but most of them are also made uh independently aside from some prescriptive decisions such as for example uh legal matters which obviously need to uh be complied with all across the board there's quite fair amount of leeway for teams to move around and to actually choose the setting as I said that are more suitable for them to help them achieve um their own goals so having said this how does this actually impact people operations in Broad Strokes in traditional organizations uh people Ops is kind of more structured and has more predictive outcomes um we aim to provide they aim to provide a consistent experience for all the teams within the same organization at the F things are slightly different because these teams work independently and they kind of form their own culture internally we aim to be as diverse as possible uh to make sure it works for everyone but we kind of maintain the same minimum threshold um to that make sure that there's a minimum standard that all teams um can meet talking a little bit about Recruitment and going into people Ops um directly so as I mentioned before teams are independent so different teams mean different subcultures mean a different uh way of working so this means that working for a certain team at the EF can be substantially different than working for other team within thef this reflects on how they communicate internally ranging from how to when to what platforms they use compensation philosophy way of working practices interactions with the adjacent community ethereum community Etc so what we learned from this is that the best way for people operations to actually facilitate the recruitment process is to let them lead the way and we are actually helping and um holding hands to let them do whatever they want to do within obviously some limits um but using our expertise to help them achieve their own goals so this can range from purely Operational Support there are teams that get to us and say hey I know exactly who I want to hire because I have a very close relationship with a community that works around my team and I want to hire that person and I just need to set up the operational process of it and that is fine we can obviously help with that there are other teams who are less sure about what the process looks like so what they usually do is okay so I want to hire this kind of profile which can be more or less defined and then they kind of ask for our help from for do the pro for doing the process from end to end so that goes from defining the profile sourcing the candidate establishing the hiring process running the process helping them run the interviews until the offer so it's fairly common for the EF to hire external contributors as I said um this is also a very good way to lower the risk when we hire someone is okay if this person was an external contributor and was already contributing to the EF as I said before working at the frontier between the EF and the ecosystem that obviously lowers the risk because we know that person from their past contribution contributions so it's easier to just bring them in um and we know that they will have a good fit within the organization another thing that we learned that is probably a challenge for us that doesn't happen does not happen within traditional organizations is that whenever we get a candidate that is a good candidate for a certain position within a team it's much harder for us to share that profile with other teams because as I said teams work and hire largely independently so we are not always aware of their hiring needs so moving one profile from one team's pipeline to another team's pipeline can be substantially different difficult when we talk about people experience and their development there's also a lot to say here so because we are an unstructured well we're a structured organization but we are a decentralized organization um and we don't have we are a flat organization so we don't have job titles it's in traditional organizations it's easier for people to feel progression through changes in their job titles so you know that when you go from Junior something into senior something there is a progression there so you have somewhere to look for because uh maybe someone in the past also did that progression and now you have some kind of role model within the F that does not exist because aside from a few exceptions we don't have drob titles so it's much harder to be like a developer in the same team for four years 5 years and not and feel like you have a progression unless we put some measures in place the good thing with this is that it opens the door to more unstructured uh learning paths so you are actually free to taking the responsibilities that you want to take uh either those are within the current team that you're working for or if those are also within another team that you're not working for so you're free to collaborate with several teams within DF if that is your goal so we tend to focus more on contribution contribution than actual career progression another challenge is that um that provides a more unstructured um path for people which for some uh profiles out there and for some psychological profiles that is not so so easy to cope with um we've learned that for example a good way to tackle this career progression and this feeling of growth is through um feedback rounds so something that we have been working and experimenting with a few teams in the past is feedback rounds so actually we go around the team uh including the team lead we ask some for some feedback things that I did well things that I were a challenge for me in the past and then we nudge the person to establish a few goals um in which they would like to grow in in the future and challenges that they would like to tackle and we help them tackle those those goals so that can mean like they're working on a soft skill such as I want to communicate better or they're working on a hard skill such as I want to learn certain language or work on certain uh topic of research or or whatever so that kind of conveys an unstructured sense of progression and growth U but it needs to be intrinsically owned by the person it's not the Y that is going to Define actually what the next step is and finally when we talk about offboarding that is also somehow different at thef than it is on traditional organizations so as you might have guessed right now uh the process is not the same so we learned that as I said before the frontier between thef and the ecosystem is very porous and we want it to be like that we wanted to keep it that way um we want to promote collaboration we also need to adapt our working arrangements so we need to make them as flexible as possible um people leaving is sometimes a net positive for the ethereum foundation and for the ethereum community because these people might leave these people might go out to pursue their other projects uh in the ecosystem and that obviously strengthen strengthens uh ethereum's resilience um the challenge is that by making it as flexible as possible we also reduce stability and predictability in people's paths within the EF this is also a challenge that we're comfortable uh with taking because for us it's much more important uh the contribution um for ethereum and for the ethereum foundation rather than the work Arrangement per se that we have on paper this is just a glimpse of some of the things that we learned in the past two years we don't know what the future will hold um we are still learning I think this is going to be um a forever work in progress people operations is fairly new at thef um people operations is also I dare to say fairly new in web 3 um we are still inter iterating but what I know is that we have great people working um both in the ethereum foundation and the ecosystem as we were able to see for the past uh few days we have a great team uh in people operations right now at thef as well and we we will change as thef and ethereum changes as well we will keep on adapting and finding new ways to help people collaborate in different ways with collaboration in as a focus and in the center rather than a typical working Arrangements thank you so [Applause] much all right thank you Jose for the amazing talk now we can take some live questions here um do you want to take the most uploaded one yeah what is the one thing you thought needed changed within the EF but then realized you were wrong great question so I remember at the beginning when we um when we started doing people operations one of the things that we started to approach was compensation philosophy and how should teams think about compensation um one thing that was clearly wrong was to give strict indications on how they should think about our compensations that is not something that all teams took very well understandably because as I said all teams have different cultures and one team is very different than the next so what we instead did was okay let's instead turn this into kind of a guideline to teach them how to think about compensation we will not say hey you should think about uh an interval of compensation between this and that rather you should think about how you want to approach compensation is location important to you is skill important to you is experience more important to you etc etc etc so choosing from a set of data points rather than just you know um getting um salary bands or something like that wored much better for us uh next question how do you protect the culture of the EF with a decentralized approach that is also a great question um I feel like um I I'm very lucky to work in this place because this is a problem that kind of solves itself uh one of the things that we do have at the etherum foundation is alignment with ethereum and alignment with the mission I cannot say I cannot think about anyone that works at TF and at the ecosystem that is probably here present today that doesn't feel very strongly about uh how ethereum should move forward or how ethereum is good and the good at the potential that that it has to impact a society so I actually don't need to I never felt the need to try to align everyone and try to protect the culture if things are super decentralized because that is kind of a prerequisite when people kind of work in this space so that work is definitely uh already kind of done compared to traditional organization as well uh we're stretching on time right here so number one lesson you would share with a new web 3 project that wants to work in a decentralized way when thinking about people Ops um okay 10 seconds to respond to this question uh test don't uh don't go super all in in one solution and test and iterate as much as possible go for the MVP which is a wor that many hate but go for the MVP test go around if it doesn't work change and listen to people I think that's that's one thing that we definitely learned and metal learning in in the middle of all this all right thank you so much Jose [Applause]