Always Do What’s Human

In our final episode, Shinae reflects on everything she’s learned and asks ReadMe about our last remaining value. Will Always Do What’s Human, be the most important?

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1942051/10097339

Transcript

Shinae Lee: 0:00

Previously, on values

Dave: 0:04

are incredibly complicated to write and publish documentation, and with ReadMe it's not.

Mary: 0:09

We got picked up in John Denver's tour bus.

Kanad: 0:14

It was like a huge lightbulb moment for me because, you know, it made me immediately appreciate what API's can do for regular people.

Kirby: 0:23

For me, personally, I don't think I could choose a particular value and say this one is the most important.

Shinae Lee: 0:44

From ReadMe its values I'm Shinae Lee. ReadMe has six values. And in this six part investigative podcast, we're going to explore the company to figure out which readme value is the most important. And this is our final episode. I've been investigating ReadMe values for more than a year now. But I still find myself wondering the same things. I was at the start of all this, which value is the most important and which one makes the work we do worth it? As I approach the end of this podcast, I found Greg asking me

Gregory Koberger: 1:23

so how are you getting to this podcast? Is there a most important value? Or shall it for every minute mystery?

Shinae Lee: 1:31

Yes, I have an ending. We're going to come to a conclusion today and we're getting there by taking a look at a host of new information on our last value always do a team in this value leads us all around read me and finally to an ending. After I told the company I'd be recording an episode on always do with human. Ryan Openshaw, a former customer success manager of ours, reached out and very humbly suggested that he might have something to say,

Ryan Openshaw: 2:02

you know, when the pandemic first started, I had several customers reach out and say, we are very concerned, we're having a hard time with things shutting down. It's really impacting our business. And I had the opportunity to work with a number of customers to restructure their contract to extend their contract to make adjustments where where we could, and makes sure it was something that was, you know, both mutually beneficial, something that's helpful to them. That's also not going to hurt our business as well. But something that just helps us understand like, Hey, these are real people going through trying times, and we need to do as much as we can to make sure that they're taking care of

Shinae Lee: 2:45

Nataliya Petrov was a sales development rep at read me and she mentioned something similar when she told me about how she's grown during her year at read me,

Nataliya Petrov: 2:53

I have grown so much with, you know, the way that I talk to customers, I used to be so scared and sound like a robot. And now I like laugh, and I have these genuine conversations. And, you know, it just means a lot to the people to feel that connection and feel like they're important to us.

Shinae Lee: 3:14

Doing the human thing for customer facing teams has a lot to do with the way they communicate with people outside, really. So what is the value look like for a team that doesn't talk much with customers? Bill Hummel, Spock was more than happy to tell me about what it's like for engineers. They're a big fan of ReadMe's engineering culture, in large part because of value. They've been scarred in the past by not so nice aspects of engineering, culture and tech, were doing what's nice for others is sometimes de prioritized.

Bill: 3:47

I remember when I first started coding, I think it may have been day two or day three, we had a competition to see who could write code in the smallest number of lines, like we had a task. And we're supposed to like crunch this down as small as we could like, some person got like 10 lines and five lines do lines and like, you know, you're just trying to extract characters out of there just make it even shorter. And part of that made the code unreadable and like, arcane, almost right. Like, you'd have to like, sit there and stare at it for a long time to really understand what even was in saying, and so at the very beginning, it was already like inhuman, right.

Shinae Lee: 4:29

In contrast, at ReadMe Bill has been delighted to find that engineers are excited about accessibility testing, and of course, documentation, all things that make code more human.

Bill: 4:41

You can look up the variable names and they like make sense. Like they're like nice long ones that explain a lot. You write like nice comments or nice functions that make sense. And then you also write dots. In addition to that, make sure that it's explained a lot different places you, you write small pull requests. The other kind of way that we can integrate code into our code base less and small so that way people can understand and better.

Shinae Lee: 5:05

This is great evidence around the impact always do as human has on the product, I still wanted to take a look internally at how it affects the employees that read me. Kara cliff is our head of customer experience. And she cares deeply about the people she manages. For me,

Chiara: 5:24

especially, you know, as a people, manager, I mostly focused on what it means to do the human thing when it comes to my co workers and my team and the people I get to work with every day.

Shinae Lee: 5:35

She says for her embodying the value is often as simple as allowing the folks on her team to do things they're passionate about,

Unknown: 5:42

a customer was looking for how on how to integrate with Bitbucket. And we had someone internally that was like, Oh, I used to work for Bitbucket, and another member of the team saying, Oh, I could help make a recipe for that. And like a doc, and we could make it easier. And so all I have to do, as a manager is say, awesome, they're excited and passionate about this project that isn't necessarily part of their day to day work. All I have to do is allow them time to do that. And then that way I'm giving you know, I'm treating my team in a in a humane fashion, allowing them to do something that they enjoy that's a little bit different from their regular day to day. And we're also doing something to help our end user. So I think it's it's a nice trickle down effect.

Shinae Lee: 6:28

It didn't surprise me at all, when Bill, Nataliya, Chiara and Ryan all told me always do what's human is our most important value.

Bill: 6:38

I think that do what's human might be the most important value,

Nataliya Petrov: 6:44

I feel like it is the most important value. Because you have to have,

Chiara: 6:50

it's really tough to pick a favorite value. But I do kind of think that doing the human thing is our most important value

Ryan Openshaw: 6:58

do? I absolutely do. And I think it's our most important value by a long shot.

Shinae Lee: 7:04

What's interesting about the answers that I got is that even though all these folks said yes, they also started mentioning the other values and their explanations of why they thought it was the most important

Unknown: 7:16

to what's human is probably how all of our values kind of fit together. And work together. That's kind of a good summation of the reason why we do everything at the company.

Shinae Lee: 7:28

That was Ryan. And now here's Bill,

Bill: 7:31

a lot of these are subsets of being human right. So like, striving for simplicity, very important. But if you have empathy for your customer, then you'll make it simple, because that's what's best for the customer. Right? Polishing the product, also very important, but also something you should do. If you care whether you have empathy for your user, because nobody likes having janky website experiences. Yeah.

Shinae Lee: 7:58

So back to Greg's question. Do I have an ending? I asked Greg, how he thought I should end it. And I was surprised to hear he had a definitive answer for me, after being so vague about all our other values.

Gregory Koberger: 8:12

I think all of our values are incredibly important. And we would not be the same without any of them. But none of them exist without this one, can be taken in so many different ways. I mean, so many different things. But to me, it's the core of absolutely everything we do here. I mean, if a coworker has something going on their personal lives, that always always, always comes first. I think sometimes we just forget the company's image of humans, both our companies and the companies we interact with. And so we see it all business without realizing it and feel proper and generic and scale and all that and the other set of every email, every support response, every sign of every sales call every Slack message, whatever else is out there. It's just another human being. And I just really love the reminder to be genuine. I know it's simple, it seems obvious, and it's a little cliche, but in a world where everything is about scaling and automating skilling more, I feel like putting a bit of human effort is such a breath of fresh air. You know, I'm a bit biased of course, but I definitely think that always do it human is by far Miss value.

Shinae Lee: 9:06

Where does this leave us on our quest to find the most important Remi value? Ryan, Nataliya, Chiara, Bill and Greg are sure this is the most important one. But remember back in our first episode when Benak and Amy said Be the change you seek was our most important value. Or when Emily told us err on the side of whimsy was her favorite are countless people along the way, who said there's no one most important value. If you asked me whether I thought always do what's human was our most important value. I wouldn't be able to tell you no, but I also wouldn't be able to say no about any of the values. What I have found out is that declaring the most important one isn't my responsibility. Each value has to be interpreted by the individuals who work at read me because they mean different things. means to everyone. The important thing is that it and all our values make the work we do better. These six values together are the perfect framework to define the work we do here because everyone embodies and naturally, nobody is forced to be the change they seek or add a dash of whimsy. It all comes with being a part of ReadMe. When Greg first asked me to look into our values, I thought finding the most important would be so attainable. I had my favorite and I knew others who had theirs would simply be a matter of adding up all the favorites and seeing which arguments were the most compelling. But along the way, things got messy. And when I talked to one person about one value, they bring up one or all the others, and nobody uses just one value day to day. Now I know we'll never find the most important and that's okay, as long as we've got all six of them. Values is written, produced and edited by Angela Vang and me. production and editing help came from Gregory Koberger are a huge thank you to the whole staff of ReadMe, especially those who took the time to interview with me and to Greg for giving me his idea and letting me run with it. Our website where you can find all our episodes is readme.com/values. And if you're interested in joining us at read me You can find more information on what that's like and view our open roles at readme.com/careers. We're looking forward to hearing from you