Before the pandemic, Forward Financing’s upbeat office environment, monthly team-building events and weekly catered lunches played a critical role in building the company’s collaborative culture.
“And then in March, all of the ways we used to connect stopped,” Justin Bakes, the co-founder and CEO of Forward Financing, said.
Sounds familiar, right? The same scene played out at almost every tech company in the country after the pandemic upended the way we work, collaborate and connect. But it doesn’t mean those very companies haven’t learned, grown and achieved during this uncertain year. Take Forward Financing as an example. When the company transitioned to remote work, Bakes stressed overcommunication, transparency and vulnerability to help ease the personal and professional challenges.
“In doing so, in the middle of a crisis, we’ve learned how to increase alignment and motivate strong performance in ways that we’ve never needed to in the past,” Bakes said.
The same goes for Kensho Technologies. During this unprecedented year, the fintech company increased its focus on remote work support and created a team empowered to progress its diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
“This year reinforced how important it is to be adaptable as a company,” Melissa Whitehead, Kensho’s chief technology officer, said.
Read more about how these five Boston companies leaned into the uncertainties of 2020 — and the new lessons they’ll carry into 2021.
Kensho is a fintech company in Cambridge. The company leverages S&P Global’s data to research, develop and implement AI and machine learning that drives decision-making. In 2020, one of the company’s biggest challenges was balancing speed of delivery with quality of product.
What's your proudest achievement of 2020?
I am very proud of our team meeting a beta milestone of our flagship document exploration tool, Codex, as well as the first direct client sale of our speech-to-text transcription software. These are exciting achievements because they are two big end-to-end milestones achieved after our acquisition by SPGI in early 2018.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
It’s not a new challenge for tech companies, but balancing speed of delivery with quality of product is a constant exercise. Our approach to sustainable solutions has been to create a highly leveraged platform with tooling to enable each experiment, stage deployment and release to the production platform. Our DevOps practices bake in expectations for smoke testing and security checks using consistent tooling so that each product release follows a familiar playbook.
...This year reinforced how important it is to be adaptable as a company.’’
What's the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
While not so much a new lesson, this year reinforced how important it is to be adaptable as a company. We have increased focus on our team’s well-being and remote work support in addition to creating a team empowered to progress our diversity, equity and inclusion goals and hold leadership accountable. Our parent company, S&P Global, has led the charge in putting people first by establishing awareness groups, focused sessions and extending wellness resources. Even as we hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy in 2021, we will continue to keep our team’s well-being a top priority.
Dynatrace is a software company in Waltham. It provides software intelligence to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. An important lesson the company learned in 2020 was the value of nurturing personal connections with frequent communication.
What's your proudest achievement of 2020?
I am most proud of my team’s resiliency during the pandemic. I joined Dynatrace in January. By the first week in March, the entire company pivoted to remote work. My team adjusted seamlessly to their new manager (me) while never losing focus on year-end hiring targets. Throughout this uncertain and unprecedented time, they maintained productivity while managing their personal lives. The team learned to support new positions for which they had limited experience recruiting while working with new hiring managers and reprioritizing their time with existing client groups’ future hiring needs.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
Dynatrace entered 2020 in a strong financial position and double-digit growth expectations, which required a significant ramp in hiring. Like most tech companies, we pivoted in early March to an all-remote working environment. While we believed we entered the fiscal year in a strong position to weather the impact of COVID-19, we knew that there was a strong possibility that many of our customers and prospects, who were operating under very challenging circumstances, may reduce or re-evaluate their spend.
To defend against the financial impact of this obvious global uncertainty, we reprioritized hiring to account for business disruptions and increased investment on employer branding. We also sought to improve the candidate experience by connecting candidates to authentic employee testimonial videos and targeted social advertisements.
Maintaining relationships with one’s network is smart for business reasons, especially when the market turns.’’
What's the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
The first lesson centers on the importance of nurturing personal connections with frequent, candid and relevant communication. Although the job market is coming back, it remains fragile for many companies and candidates. This is as true for folks who are currently employed as it is for those many individuals who wait on the sidelines, and to no fault of their own. Maintaining relationships with one’s network is smart for business reasons, especially when the market turns. But it is also the right thing to do, human to human.
Forward Financing is a Boston fintech company that provides fast working capital to small businesses in the U.S. When it’s staff shifted to remote work in the spring of 2020, the company learned how to be more agile and creative.
What's your proudest achievement of 2020
Creating a great work environment has always been a top priority, and now that many of us are working remotely, we’ve had to rethink how to maintain camaraderie and transparency.
Every two weeks, we track how we’re doing with a short employee engagement survey. Feeling aligned with the company's direction and building strong relationships with managers and peers have remained our strongest categories over the past few months. Despite all of the changes to how we work, I feel grateful that each team member has remained committed to supporting each other.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
Our 23,000 customers are small business owners. So in March, they needed to unexpectedly close their restaurants, hair salons and construction projects for an indefinite amount of time. To brace for the significant increase in customers requesting payment flexibility, we proactively cross-trained employees from across the organization to supplement the customer support team. Across the company, employees have taken on new roles and different responsibilities. I’m proud of the team's agility, creativity and teamwork that helped our customers get their businesses back on track.
In the middle of a crisis, we learned how to increase alignment and motivate strong performance...’’
What's the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
Before the pandemic, our upbeat office environment, monthly team-building events and weekly catered lunches played an essential role in building our collaborative culture. In the spring, however, all of the ways we used to connect had to stop. Overcommunication, transparency and vulnerability with all of the significant challenges were essential in building team trust and morale.
Once we started working remotely, we focused on ensuring no question goes unanswered and that each person knows their value in helping to move the company forward. In the middle of a crisis, we learned how to increase alignment and motivate strong performance in ways that we’ve never needed to in the past.
Alignable is a social media software company in Boston. Its small business network features more than 6 million businesses in 30,000-plus communities. After the spring of 2020, the company permanently transformed into a remote-first company.
What's your proudest achievement of 2020?
Because our mission is to help small businesses succeed by connecting them to each other, we knew we had to help our 6 million members through the hardships brought on by the pandemic. We quickly launched an initiative to poll our members on the impacts of COVID-19 on their businesses, cash flow reserves, federal relief status and so on.
We received thousands of responses that helped us identify significant issues business owners faced accessing funds, which was later used by the House of Representatives and Small Business Administration to structure the next rounds of federal relief. The ability to quickly generate that data and pass it along to lawmakers helped millions of small business owners, many of whom have never heard of Alignable, stay afloat.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
Many of our members had to close their businesses and thus had more time to connect with their peers on Alignable. As a result, our platform activity skyrocketed. At the same time, we were dealing with the challenges of transitioning to a remote work environment. To cope, we formed teams of contributors from executives to interns for each of our COVID-19 initiatives. These teams operated autonomously through weekly meetings and Slack channels. By simplifying ownership and communication, we were able to quickly address problems and launch solutions.
Focus on less to do more.’’
What's the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
Focus, focus, focus. Because our business supports a population heavily affected by this year’s crisis, the list of things we wanted to do to help them was longer than ever. After realizing that working on every great idea wasn’t accomplishing the results we wanted, we decided to focus on fewer objectives. And it worked — we’re getting more done. As we adapt to this new normal and our permanent transition to a remote-first company, we’ll keep the mantra, “Focus on less to do more.”
Hopper is a travel company in Boston. It combines data and machine learning algorithms to predict and analyze airfare and accommodations to save users money. The company’s biggest challenge in 2020 was to find the best way to serve their customers while the travel industry was in flux.
What's your proudest achievement of 2020?
COVID-19 had a huge impact on travel in 2020, but Hopper chose to lean into the pandemic. On the Hopper Flights team, the achievement we’re most proud of this year is Hopper’s VIP Support product. At the start of the pandemic, many customers had been stranded and needed to make urgent changes to their travel plans. Given that airline policies were changing rapidly, we noticed there was a need for a service that granted our customers access to a dedicated service representative to work through all of the complexities with them. This ultimately led to creating this product enhancement.
One of the biggest challenges, particularly from April to May of this year, was keeping up with the rapidly changing news...’’
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
One of the biggest challenges, particularly from April to May of this year, was keeping up with the rapidly changing news and daily information surrounding COVID-19. The news cycle impacted how we were viewing customer problems, whether it was mask protocols, new travel policies or border closures.
We believed that our mission was to provide the most up-to-date, relevant information that customers needed in order to complete their trips safely and reliably. Our teams worked all hours to keep the product up to date.
What's the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
A few important Hopper values have come up over and over again during 2020: being customer-obsessed and truly listening to what the customers and data are telling us. Also, having a strong bias for action and doing the right thing. This year, we’ve focused on serving our customers and have looked at every change, feature and notification through this lens.
