People leaders aren’t the CEO of culture, they’re product managers — Credit Karma’s Colleen McCreary

[00:00:00] CEO's basically have to be like one hit wonder pop stars. They kind of have to keep singing the same song over and over and over because people don't remember, you have new people joining. They haven't heard you sing that song. Companies are just, and founders in particular can be very much like moving on to the next thing.

I'm moving on to the next thing and small company, big company, people don't come along the journey that quickly. So you have to slow down to be consistent. You have to stay on message.

[00:00:32] Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, bounders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company, building advice. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast in depth, you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe today@firstround.com

today's episode of in-depth. I'm really excited to be joined by Colleen McCreary as a repeat chief people. Officer Colleen has more than 20 years of experience in HR, operations, recruiting, and M and a working at a really interesting set of companies through multiple IPO's and acquisitions. Coleen started her career in university recruiting first at Microsoft, and then at electric arts in 2009, she dove into the startup world joining Zynga when it was only 130 people.

During her tenure as chief people, officer the company rapidly grew to nearly 4,000 employees and then went public after leaving Zynga. Colleen served as the chief people officer at the climate corporation, as it navigated through its acquisition by Monsanto, she then consulted as interim chief people officer at  and Twilio.

And then after heading up people at vivo, Colleen left the music video platform to join credit karma where for the past three years, she scaled their systems and help steer the company through both its acquisition by Intuit and the pandemics impact on the business kicked off the conversation today by talking about why code is easy, but people are hard in it.

Just sharing what surprised her most inner experiences scaling startups from early stage EPO. Colleen explains why she designs for the 80% and focuses on clarity, context and consistency. She walks us through some really tactical examples of that work, including how her team approaches compensation at credit karma and why they do promotions quarterly.

Colleen also shares some great perspectives on the role of chief people. Officer, I particularly liked how she talked about not being the CEO of culture or happiness, but rather the product manager of the systems in tools that run the company. We spent the last part of the conversation, digging into those very systems from how rewards and recognition were incredibly different at Zynga and credit karma, to why career growth.

Isn't just about a promotion. In addition to sharing her take on whether we should double down on our strengths or focus on correcting weaknesses when it comes to performance. Colleen we're counts the most valuable piece of feedback she's received in her career. I really enjoyed this conversation because we got to dig into the people problems.

She sees time and time again, as startups scale rapidly. And I think it will be a really useful roadmap for first-time founders and early people leaders. I really hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation with colleagues. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited for this conversation.

Thank you. Now that you've kind of done the chief people officer thing, a ton of different times, super early through IPO and acquisitions. Want to start by maybe exploring what surprised you most about building and scaling the people function across these different chapters of your career? 

[00:04:36] Sure. I think universally founders and early leaders underestimate how hard the people work is.

They think it's really easy. I thankfully worked with a great super senior engineer early on at Zynga who had been around the block a few times. He had always said like, code is easy. People are hard. But I think part of the reason, so many leaders end up with this catch-up that they have to do around their people space is that they just think it's the easy stuff.

Building the product is hard, selling a product to hard. I can handle all of this other stuff. And in fact, on more than one occasion, I've had a CEO say to me, like I spent all of my time dealing with these people challenges, but I don't need to hire someone super senior to handle that, which is just such an ironic statement.

The other thing is that. Everyone assumes that what they've seen before with respect to people, processes is the way it should be done. And so a lot of what you capture, especially when you're scaling is people coming in who are saying, like, when I worked at blah de blah, we did it this way and this is what we should do.

And the practices just continue without ever assessing like, okay, well, what problem are we trying to solve? Or what culture are we trying to build? Or what do we want to put into place at our company? And I would also say that the reverse happens sometimes where it's just a rejection of everything.

Someone saw last company. Like we don't need managers. We don't need job titles without ever really understanding actually people like structure. And that's probably why you see managers and job titles. And then I think finally, like there's just a lack of appreciation. From so many folks outside of, I would say the startup world, that just how hard it is to start and run a company.

I think that there's just this misnomer that it's an easy thing to do that everybody can do it. And then you've only worked at big companies. You join these small companies and you're like, whoa, this stuff's hard. 

[00:06:25] So on the second point, why do you think that people stuff is so difficult? And I agree with you.

I think one of the things that I've noticed in the last 13 years at first round in working with hundreds of companies is once you get to some level of product market fit, 70 or 80% of what a CEO is thinking about or spending time on is somehow people related. It's either getting the right people on the team, getting people off the team, managing people, et cetera.

It seems endlessly difficult. And I'm curious why you think that is. I 

[00:07:00] think it's because every individual is different. At the end of the day, you're dealing with unique scenarios now summit, there's a lot of pattern matching that you can do that. Like once you have the experience, you can start to see, oh, this person might be motivated by their ego.

And so I probably have to approach them differently than the person who really is just like, all I care about is solving this one problem type of thing. So there's, there's this nuance of people are all individuals. And I usually ascribe it a little bit like manager training, which many companies will be like, you know, this is the solution to all of our problems.

So if we just a better manage our training and I laugh about it, because I say, I think being a manager is like being a parent because as a parent, you can take as many classes as you want. You can read as many books as you want, but when that kid shows up. That kid doesn't come with a manual directly for them and not everything works that came out of the manual and it doesn't show up exactly how you read it or how it happened in the class.

And, and you just have to live it and experience it. And you have to put a lot of time and effort into thinking about like, oh, what did I just do? And why did I do that? And did that work or did that not work? And could it work again? And is it the person or the situation that's causing this? It's actually requires another level of thought.

And I think people either lack the experience or they lack the internal motivation to understand how people are motivated, why they're motivated about different things. And then how do I approach that person differently? It's just hard 

[00:08:39] with that sort of belief that we're all weird and different and complicated.

How does that impact the way that you think about people systems or. Designing people, organizations or crafting culture? 

[00:08:57] Well, I think the nice part is that there are some universal theories or practices that do tend to work on the whole. You're always going to have these outliers on one end to the other.

It's like anything in life. And, and I find that you really have to tailor what you're doing for the 80%, not the a hundred percent, because you'll have this 10% on each end. I designed for the 80%, but I try to give context to the other 20%. So I think it's very easy to fall into the trap to cater to those edges that people who are always complaining or always cheering about everything, and people get really sucked into tuning into those folks who happened to be loud versus the people who.

I might more thoughtfully have questions or concerns or those kinds of things. And people are somewhat predictable, which is a nice thing to be able to go with. We do know that there is this craving for structure and hierarchy, as I mentioned, and that even starts when people are young. And so you're going to want to provide clarity to people on where decisions being made and who's making them, and how do I get what I need from them?

And that, you know, that people inherently are self motivated around doing things that will benefit themselves. So, Hey, you want to set up the system where they know if you achieve X, Y, Z, this is the outcome that will happen to you. These are the next things that can happen to you. I mean, so much I find with.

The processes and systems and tools are really at the end of the day, just providing clarity and context. And then my third C in this one is consistency because people will react not just to what they hear as we know, but what they're actually seeing in practice. And so you have to provide the clarity of what you're trying to do or achieve and how that works.

And then the context as to how you got to that decision. And then you have to do it over and over again. So, and that will generally work for 80% of the people, at least for the, I show up, I know what I'm supposed to do. I know how to keep my job. And ideally you you've done a broader set of things where people are understanding of why they're there and what the reward system is to keep them there.

[00:11:20] on the idea of clarity, context and consistency. Can you talk in your current role? Like what the systems or things that you actually do as an organization, how they map to sort of each one of them? 

[00:11:34] Sure. So I'll talk about everybody's favorite topic compensation. And when I joined credit karma, when I first got there, they had culture amp for their employee engagement survey, which we still use.

And I think it's a great tool. And only 40 something percent of the employees had said that they felt like their total compensation was fair. And when I first joined a company, one of the very first things I do is I go in and I do a very deep set of one-on-one. So I spoke to a hundred people and my first 30 days, one-on-one when I got there and the size and number of people changes obviously based on the size of the company.

And I have a little formula. Not a big secret. I want to talk to you obviously that everybody in the management team, and then I always want to talk to the people who are considered stars by the leaders. Cause it's kind of interesting to see who those people are. And then I want to talk to the people who've been there, the longest, which are not always the same people.

Sometimes they are. And through all those conversations, I found out that no one understood how they were paid. No one understood how additional equity grants are made or what systems or tools where people didn't understand how they were going to get promoted. And it traditionally had a lot of companies that is, it's just this like black box of like, well, somebody makes a decision and then this money shows up and I'm supposed to decide whether or not I keep it.

I want to stay here. And this is, I keep the money or I don't. And so we spent a lot of time on this is how you're paid. And explaining all of the pieces. I literally, when we redid all of our compensations, I got up on stage and I had an all hands and I walked through, this is how you're paid. This is what Radford is, which is this database of all of the companies who submit their compensation information, just like us.

And then we get to kit it coming back. We pay at this percentile and this is why we do this. And here are the companies who are in the Saturday night. I spent a lot of time just trying to understand like how compensation works and the context as to how we got to, how we were going to pay people. And then we said, this is when we look at your, you know, we do a market review twice a year.

These are the dates. This is when you can expect to understand that or hear that we continue to reiterate that. And continual meetings, we talk about it at new hire orientation, we have a whole slack channel. That's just about. Compensation questions, equity questions, those kinds of things that people can continue to ask.

We have go pages set up so people can understand it because it's like a fundamental piece of the value proposition of why somebody is at a company and it was taking up so much time. This is the thing. I mean, if you don't provide all of those pieces, all you're going to end up doing is talking about compensation all of the time.

And it's just one of those things. It's important to people. And if they don't have the clarity, they don't have the context and they don't know when things are going to happen or when things can change. You'll end up just instead of working on the things, the product, your customers, those kinds of things.

You're going to end up spending all this time, trying to appease people or to give them the clarity around. Hey, do I believe that I'm being treated equitably relative to the folks around me? 

[00:14:53] That's a great illustration. And so are you constantly thinking about in the different facets of the company, how are we doing on clarity context or consistency?

Or is it just something that's kind of rattling around in the back of your head? Or is it operationalized in some way? 

[00:15:10] I think that I am like the product manager of the systems and tools that run the company. I'm not the CEO of culture. I really not the CEO of happiness, which we could have a whole discussion on that word.

My job is to build the systems and tools that support the work that our leadership team has decided need to get done. And so like any great product manager, I do think it is my job to consistently be looking at all of these are these tools working. And I wouldn't say that I do it. It's not routine necessarily that I go through.

Oh, are we doing this correctly? Are we doing that correctly? Are we doing this? But I do think. Whenever we go through one of these cycles. For example, we always do a retrospective of like, we just went through this market review in February. What could we have done better? Are there better tools that we could have done it?

What are the questions that came up? Can we answer those questions? Can we get ahead of this? I think we've iterated on our promotion. We do promotions quarterly. It keeps us ahead of market. People don't have to wait so long to feel like they've proven things out. It's a lot of work though, to facilitate a promotion cycle with calibrations and trying to do it equitably four times a year.

But we think it's the right thing for our business and for our employees. But four times a year means you're going through the cycle over and over. And so we're continually going back. Every time we do a cycle of like, how could we do it better? How can we do it faster? How could we provide more clarity?

And we've been running like this for at least the promos piece two plus years. Now we just did a whole new manager training for all of our engineering leaders on. Hey, we've streamlined the process. This is the new process. Here's the information session. Here's our slack channel. We're going to post this training up on a deck because we're realizing that every, you know, one of the things coming out of COVID is that not everybody can be there always at point in time.

So it's better when you can record things. So I don't want to say that I'm officially like, oh, every three months I look at these processes, but every time I go through a cycle or we're using a tool, my team knows it's just now habit that we go back and say like, okay, we just finished this. How do we make it better?

How can we improve it? What did we miss? And the same thing on the leadership team, my job is to make sure that all of them, before I roll anything out, fully understand and can speak to it because I can't be the only one who's out there or even just an HR person talking about things. 

[00:17:35] Another thing that you mentioned a few minutes ago that I just wanted to follow up on is when you came into credit karma, you did this listening tour.

You talked to a hundred people and kind of different personas. When you sat down with someone, what did you ask them in those meetings? 

[00:17:49] I have a little bit of a script do some, I mean, some of it is just sort of sees where it goes or it takes off. I always ask them how they ended up at credit karma or at the company that I'm talking about.

Because I think you find out a lot about motivation and what they were looking for and to some extent what they were sold or with the vision. And then I ask, why did they stay. Because then you can see if there's a mismatch between those two things or if they're harboring any, anything around that, people are usually really excited to tell their story.

So it's a bonus in that respect. And then I sometimes will ask where they worked before, just to give it a sense of kind of where their point of view might have been developed. And then I ask what are the things that they think are working really well at the company, which in the tech industry is generally harder for people than to point out what's not working well, which is the next question.

Generally, people are really excited to tell you all of those kinds of things. And then I asked them, what am I not seeing or hearing that they think I should be listening for? And then I asked who else they think I should talk to. And then usually it takes like 30 minutes and I get a lot of information at the end of all of that.

I actually wrote up sort of like an Amazon style. Six pager of here are the big themes that I heard. I started laid all the information. And then here are the things I thought the management team could go after. And then for myself here are the three priorities. I think I'm going to go after, and here's the timeframe I think I can accomplish them.

Sometimes it's normalizing what's going on in the company. That's like the number one thing I find with especially startups and smaller companies is he'd just have to normalize the experience for folks, because if they've never been through it before, they've never seen rapid growth. I've make this comment all the time that like the pain that you have of adding chairs to the deck is way better than the pain that you have of taking the chairs off the deck.

Like the idea of growth, all of the problems or growth are good. I mean, those are the problems you want to be having because when you are a non-growth, those are so, so much worse and so, so much more painful, but no one knows. They only can go with what the experience that they've had or maybe that their friends have had.

And so if all of a sudden, a bunch of people are quitting and no one's talking about it, they don't necessarily know what's going on or why that's happening. So one 

[00:20:07] of the things that this makes me think of as you sort of come in and you do this diagnostic to try to figure out what's going well, and what's not what we should fix, what we should leave alone.

And given you experienced this at so many different rapidly growing companies, I'd be interested to know what have you found that might seem bad, but actually really doesn't matter. And are there any things that you picked up that might seem innocuous, but it's actually really bad and does need to be fixed?

[00:20:37] Well, it's at the second one first. I think that one's easier. I think the, not talking about the problems that are going on in the company and just letting things fester, the attrition one comes to mind. Cause it feels like it's so common that. It's normal when companies are scaling to potentially go through these valleys and mountains of attrition.

And that's just because the company is changing so much. What people signed up to do in the early days is not what they're going to be doing as the company grows and changes. You know, you get to own everything to get to own every decision to get too involved in every decision. And then all of a sudden they don't.

And then it's all about being specialists and being really good and very deep and uncertain things. And maybe that's not what people signed up for, or someone had great experiences and could lead a team that was 10, 20 people. But managing managers is a whole new level of complexity and they're not ready to do that and stuff.

I tried to bring some innovative from the outside. And what companies do is they, they just ignore it. They think that like, everybody sort of knows why people are leaving, or it's not that big of a deal. And, and attrition isn't necessarily bad. It's not, I think it's very healthy, but if you're not talking about it, people assume the worst.

And so my. Coaching is the, I know it's painful. I know no one wants to talk about it. I know you really want to just focus on the mission and focus on our customers and focus on what's going well. But if you're not talking about the things that are not going well, you're really setting yourself up painfully for the longterm as well.

One of the things I just started to do in our all hands meetings was saying like, okay, no, one's asked about X, Y, Z. I know you're thinking about it. Whereas I want to talk about it right now. We're going to talk about that. I think you can't just pretend that you have your head in the sand is each won't have any trust.

So that one is a, I think on that. And then the other question, I think the, the complaining about the snacks or the perks are Google does this, and Facebook does that at all. Like, people spend so much time rat holing around all of that kind of stuff. And like that actually really matters. I always used to say like, look, if the, if the loudest thing that people are complaining about is the snacks you're doing pretty well.

At the end of the day, if the things that people are complaining about are these very peripheral, the tools don't work that well, or the snacks are not that good, or you're not paying for the kickball team this year. I was like, you're doing pretty well. Let it go. You and I both know that that's a big deal that chatter, I mean, people get all sorta or wound up about that.

And then these it's so funny to listen to these management teams, like, but they just keep complaining and we can't afford to buy those drinks. I'm like, oh my God, really? You're going to be fine. It's all gonna be fine. Don't worry about 

[00:23:21] it. You mentioned this a little bit about attrition, but the other sort of adjacent topic I was interested in is, is as if you've seen so many companies go from small to big and have scaled rapidly, what are the themes that you just see over and over again?

How would you group the types of things that you see time and time again? 

[00:23:41] One of the other big things that always tends to happen is I think there's just a general lack of leadership. It's at every company, when people say like, Hey, what's the biggest problem you're trying to solve. I'm trying to solve for a gap in leadership.

And when I'm talking about leadership, it's not about a manager, managing someone, it's people being comfortable, voicing different opinions, pushing back, carrying the water on messages that no one wants to hear finding people with that sort of courage to do that and bring people along on the journey with it, just this incredibly hard finding people who can do that at all levels.

It continues to boggle my mind, how challenging that really is. I think there's another note on. The whole five or engineer there's this whole belief system that's somehow wrapped up in Silicon valley. If I just find this one person, they will magically save me. They'll save the whole company. If I, if I just had 10 of those engineers, everything will be so different.

Or if I had 10 of these people and it's never that at the end of the day, yeah, people are critical. They are the lifeblood of the company. It is the most important thing. It's usually your biggest cost. It's whether or not you're going to succeed or fail is whether or not your talent can create the products or the experiences that your customers or members want.

But if you are solely wrapped up in like these 10 people or this handful of saviors, You're never going to make it. You just won't scale. It's just not true. It doesn't exist. It's fake. It's not going to be that different. And then I think the other piece is the, oh, if we have this big IPO, everybody will want to work for us and everybody will want to be here.

And it's all about this big, huge financial outcome or perceived outcome or those kinds of things, which I also think are like, you can't hang your hat on that, but it is a small company, big company thing, because when you become a public company, if you don't really focus on what matters, people will hang their hat on the stock price as being the determinant of success.

And it's just hard to unwind. I think early, you have to focus on why you're here, what you're doing, why it matters and. CEO's basically have to be like one hit wonder pop stars. They kind of have to keep singing the same song over and over and over because people don't remember, you have new people joining.

They haven't heard you sing that song. And then you can add song number two, once you really feel like everyone understands song number one, which is your mission and why you're here and what you're trying to do. And then you want to add this other thing. You can add song number two, and you know, all of us go to concerts.

And we know like when I go to Bon Jovi, I want to hear living on a prayer. I don't really care about everything else. I want to hear living on a fair, the companies are just, and founders in particular, it can be very much like moving on to the next thing. I'm moving on to the next thing and small company, big company, people don't come along the journey that quickly.

So you have to slow down to be consistent. You have to stay on message and you have to give employees what to believe and how they're going to define success. And if you use IPO or stock price, something that you really do not control. You're going to be in for a lot of pain later when things get Rocky.

And unfortunately I've learned that the hard way I've lived that. So I'm exceptionally sensitive to it. 

[00:27:08] On the point you were just talking about around leadership that there's often a void when you define leadership and kind of an interesting way. Some of it's being willing to tell people things they may not want to hear, who were the people that were like 10 out of 10 in your career, if you were to score them on leadership and what did they do, or what did it actually look like?

[00:27:30] The first person that comes to mind is a man named Mike stern. At the time I met him, he was a 26 year veteran of Monsanto. It only worked at Monsanto PhD and he had run their biggest business at Monsanto, which is the seed business. And it was like my second week at climate Corp. And he was sent in to take over as the COO of climate corporation.

We had just been acquired. And he knew nothing about technology. And Harry has been sent from St. Louis, Missouri out to San Francisco to this billion dollar acquisition they had just made. And I piled up a pile of books for him on like, here's how tech companies work. Here's how startups work. You should listen to these podcasts.

They'd be super helpful for you. And he was a rapid study very quickly on the business and who we were and how things worked, but he was incredibly thoughtful. And he's the person I learned the most about the context setting. Like if you just slow down and give the context and let people follow you on the journey and he was willing to make hard decisions, but he very much lived up to the.

Don't give people more than they can handle in one setting type of thing. Another very young founder, bill Clara, co, he was the founder of, we pay really just proved the point that it age doesn't matter, that you could be empathetic and have this growth mindset about learning and surrounding yourself with people who are better than you.

And one of the hardest things as a CEO is having to get rid of somebody or having to cut a line of business or telling people things aren't going well, and how you do that and how you build trust and how you bring people along in the journey. They're just a lot of people who are not very delicate about that.

And then my current CEO, Ken Lynn is actually pretty great. I don't necessarily want him to listen to that and hear that, but he is pretty great. And it's why I stay at companies. He sucked me into credit karma, both with the mission of the company, but also he is somewhat introverted and very collaborative and very thoughtful.

A little slower to make decisions because he wants to hear every point of view. And he was not like any of the founders I'd ever worked with before. And that was basically the sell to kids. Me to join was like, come work with me. You've never worked with anybody like me before. And I really hadn't, he's committed.

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This episode is with Colleen McCreary, the Chief People Officer at Credit Karma and former CPO at Vevo, The Climate Corporation, and Zynga. Colleen shares why she thinks of her role as the product manager of the systems that run the company, flagging problems founders are likely to run into and detailing her approach to compensation, performance, rewards and recognition.

People leaders aren’t the CEO of culture, they’re product managers — Credit Karma’s Colleen McCreary

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