3 Leadership Stories of 2015
I am an engineer by training. Leadership is something I had to learn while I was building my company. Today, I am happy to share some of the leadership lessons I learned in 2015.
Leadership Lesson 1: When You See the Opportunity, Go All In
We are a 9-year-old company. Our growth rate is pretty stable now. If someone had told me a year ago that we’d increase our active users by 20% in just a few months, I’d have told them “Get out of here!”
It was around January 2015 that we started getting these weird support requests from a competitor’s users. They wanted our help in transferring their forms to JotForm. We found out that Adobe announced they were retiring their form building tool, Adobe FormsCentral, in the next 6 months.
We had no idea how big Adobe FormsCentral was. It seemed like they were closing shop because they did not get enough adoption of their product. But, “small” for a company like Adobe can mean “big” for a company like JotForm.
The big question was, how many users did they have? Was it worth it for us to go out of our way to help their users? We knew that it was a complex product and building tools to import their users to JotForm would turn out to be a huge task.
I knew that I had to make an important decision here. Two things helped me make up my mind. The first was that I had been noticing FormsCentral ads on some high profile sites. It was clear they tried hard to get users to adopt their product. The second data point was that I knew that Adobe cross-promoted their products to their users. With those two data points, I made up my mind: We were going to go all in.
We dropped all other projects. It was all hands on deck. I made it clear that there was only a single company-wide goal for the next six months: Get FormsCentral users safely on JotForm. We had no idea how huge this effort would turn out to be. We dove in head first.
We were apparently the only FormsCentral competitor with such determination. We quickly became the number one alternative to FormsCentral. We built seamless import tools. Our import bots would log into a FormsCentral account, download all of the data and import it to a freshly made JotForm account. We could make an exact replica of the existing form in JotForm. Users were amazed.
We were so good at rescuing FormsCentral users that many Adobe employees whose jobs depended on their forms made the switch to JotForm.
I remember one user who had 600 forms and tens of thousands of form submissions. Many of his forms had hundreds of questions. If he had to re-create them all from scratch it would have taken months of manual labor. Our import tool did it in a day. There are few words that can describe how happy this made people.
The bet paid off. We imported over 100,000 forms to JotForm and increased our active user base by 20% permanently. Making the decision to go all in was a key moment.
Leadership Lesson 2: Keep Repeating the Goal
It was the amazing robustness of our engineering team that got us these results. My role as the leader was simply to insist that we do everything absolutely necessary to rescue these users. I needed to keep the team motivated and focused for six months by repeating the message every single day.
How do you keep a team motivated and focused for a long time? My biggest trick is to have numbers that can show progress. We tracked our progress with the number of users, forms and form responses imported to JotForm. These numbers were in front of everyone all the time. I repeated those numbers to the team every chance I got.
It is so easy for people to lose sight of the goal and start having doubts. Good leaders have a single-minded focus on what is important and get everyone around them to believe in the goal. Bad leaders have too many high priorities and constantly change directions.
Leadership Lesson 3: Believe in it Yourself First
I meet with our Marketing Team every Monday. The team is in our San Francisco office. When I am not here in San Francisco, we will meet on Skype. One of the goals of our Marketing Team is to get JotForm featured in news. This is especially important when we have a new feature release.
After we released EU Safe Forms, a feature that allows our European users to keep their data only in our European servers, I asked the Marketing team to tell our story to the press. We had no results that week. This was partially my fault. I didn’t communicate to the team how important this news was, and how we are the first example of a change many companies will have to make in the post-Safe Harbor and Snowden world.
So, next Monday, I communicated my belief. I said “We get an opportunity to be in New York Times once a year. This is the one!” They got the message. A few days later, I was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a long feature was written about JotForm’s EU data privacy solution.
Our Marketing Team is extremely good. But, they did not see the opportunity as I saw it in the beginning. The success came only after I communicated my belief to them.
Leadership is about finding the right decision, and once you believe in it yourself fully, it is about getting everyone around you to go after it for a long enough time to get the results.
