The Maestro Mindset: The Partners

The Maestro Mindset is a list of the twelve (12) most important traits we want our team to emulate on a daily basis. One of the Maestro Mindset traits is "The Partners." What does this mean, you might ask. We define “The Partners” as people who leave their egos at the door, are allergic to the “it’s not my job” mentality, and people who put our customers and team ahead of themselves.

We asked some of our team members questions about "The Partners" mindset to give further insight into how this mindset governs how we operate as well as why it is important to our organization. Here are some of the answers they shared.

‍Internal and External Partnerships

Question:

Maestro values true partnership.  Where do you see strong partnerships internally and externally?

I see really close collaboration amongst all the teams. As an engineer, in a lot of other organizations, you’ll likely interface solely with engineering and possibly with one other department such as product or design. But as an engineer at Maestro, I'm talking to people across every department. For example, last week the person I talked to the most was Roshni, one of our enterprise account executives. In other organizations, it'd be very easy for an engineer to say, “I’m an engineer, I need to write code. I'm not gonna talk to sales. Sales can go through the product team if they need me and maybe product can ask me.” But here I hop on sales calls. There's no restriction on what I can do and how I can help. I also collaborate a lot with our Customer Success Managers, talking to customers with them or talking to them about customers’ needs. Doing this really gets the ball rolling more quickly for our customers and allows us to release much faster on the product side.

Externally, the number one thing that is different about Maestro versus a lot of other companies and especially the companies in our space is how close we are to customers and our partnership with customers. We often engage in these mutually beneficial relationships where customers are helping us figure out what's important across our customer base. And We're helping them to make sure that what's valuable to them, gets into part of our road map so that we can help them use the product really effectively.

We've been helping out the SMB AEs as they start to trial Classifiers and KPI Dash to their prospects. When I jumped in to help, I thought it was going to be just me and the AE but what I quickly learned was that everybody was jumping in on this to help. Product and engineering are rallying around customers, both from presales and post-sales to understand what's valuable for them in the product, building it, and making our product better to meet our customers’ needs. The Sales Engineers are jumping in as well helping out with any technical questions the AEs have. My team is doing the same to help the Sales Engineers who need to focus on bigger deals. The CSMs are being tapped in to help with any customers that might be doing something similar to help give ideas of how we can meet this prospect's need or if they want to talk to somebody who's already using our product about their Maestro experience.

Any time there is something that our customers need, everybody rallies together no matter whether it's their core responsibility or not.

‍

Why these Partnerships are Unique

Question:

What characterizes these partnerships and makes them unique/special?

There is this genuine desire to learn more about what is going on. When we show that curiosity and are open to new perspectives, it helps prevent this it’s ‘not my job mentality.’ The walls break down and folks are more willing to move outside of their lane to help out. This, in turn, leads to better customer outcomes.

True Partnerships at MaestroQA

Question:

Can you share an example of a time when someone acted as a true partner and helped you with something that was outside the scope of their role?

It's been really nice having implementations partner with engineering. On the screen capture side, in particular, Sean Matthews is taking on a ton of ownership of getting that rolled out. He is filling in documentation, answering questions when customers have them, and facilitating a lot of the interactions among sales, customer success, and me. That ownership is not necessarily required in his role, but it's helpful that he recognizes the impact of doing that and his ability to shield engineering time, so we can build new things that are super valuable to the company.

David Gunn, one of our CSMs does that a lot. He's proactive about  keeping an eye on the intercom chat channel and he'll always jump in right away if he can help with anything. His role is technically customer support for his segment, but monitoring Intercom is not typical for the CSM role.

Susan has been a real CX champion from the engineering side of things. She’s always looking to help us get the tooling and enablement that we need to better troubleshoot our product and help our customers. When I started there was a lot of data validation and querying that I couldn't do because I didn't have access to or knowledge of the different tools. Susan was always so helpful any time that I had a question or made a mistake. She also did it with such compassion. She never made me feel bad. Instead, she helped me level up. These were things she didn't have to do but because she did, they helped me get a lot stronger in my role.

Being a Partner to Others

Question:

What’s an example of a time when you helped someone with something outside the scope of your role?

I work very closely with the sales team on trial calls and even support them with additional documentation if needed after those calls. For example, one of our sellers, Palley,  had a prospect that needed some handholding to get them up and running with the MaestroQA platform. I created introductory Loom videos for them, walkthroughs of our automations, and shared additional information on how to get them up and running within their trial time frame.

Customer and Team Above Ego

Question:

Can you think of an example of a time when someone put the team and/or customer ahead of their personal interests?

We have an old shout-out tool that was causing some problems for the engineering team. We decided to deprecate it. The customers did not like this decision as they felt it was an impactful tool for their teams. Suzan worked really hard with our customers to re-write it, take away the bugs, and made sure it was easier to monitor. This is not something we wanted to do initially, but ended up doing in response to the customers’ interests.

‍

Impactful MaestroQA Partners

Question:

Who is someone you consider to be a true partner to you at Maestro? How do you work with them and how have they impacted your work/experience?

Robby helps out a ton with Maestro knowledge sharing. The Product Question channel used to take up a lot of my time, but since Robby joined he has been taking on those questions for me. He spends a lot of time troubleshooting and working with customers to make sure engineering time is spent really wisely.

Matt Wang is always willing to assist even if I have a ton of questions. He’s quite knowledgeable about our product. He’ll walk me through several scenarios to help me solve an issue no matter how long it takes or how complex of a concern it is.

‍

Final Words

We believe hiring and having team members who wholly adopt and believe in The Partners mindset is crucial to our success as a company. Only when we value being partners to each other, will we then in turn be able to provide true value and partnership to our customers.

‍