Remote Works by Ali Greene & Tamara Sanderson & Matt Mullenweg

Author:Ali Greene & Tamara Sanderson & Matt Mullenweg [Ali Greene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

SPOTLIGHT STORY: Making a Mental Map

Tam was known for a few things at Automattic. Besides being one of the few females in their annual “Tall-matticians” photos at their company offsite, she had a knack for connecting dots across the organization and never dropping the ball.

Words like speed, responsiveness, diligence, and reliability dominated her performance reviews, which would seem normal if Tam were organized by nature. But if you ask her parents, organized is the last word they would have used to describe her. Her room was always a mess when she was a kid (and to be honest, it still is), and half-finished art projects were scattered across the game room. You could find her in the house by the trail of items, like her backpack or water bottles, all left in her wake.

So how can both of these things be true? Well, Tam took a tip from the London Black Cab drivers. To become a cabbie, drivers need to pass the “Knowledge of London” test, which requires memorizing thousands of streets, landmarks, and routes in central London. It generally takes three to four years to study, and guess what—their brains change. The hippocampus enlarges, due to the vast amount of navigational knowledge.

Likewise, Tam made a mental map of Automattic so that she could visualize the company’s inner workings. P2 (internal blogs) served as teams’ knowledge bases (often with fun names, like Hogwarts), and each individual had an avatar or profile image. She formed a mental map with roads between teams that cross-posted within each other’s knowledge bases. Landmarks became certain issues or topics that kept surfacing across the company, with familiar avatars attached.

This mental map came in handy while leading complicated cross-functional partnerships between Automattic (and its subsidiaries, like WooCommerce and Jetpack) and behemoths like Google and Amazon. It helped her keep track of dozens of integrations and touchpoints between the companies and the relevant stakeholders, from ad managers to developers to cloud specialists. All she needed was her mental map and internet access to remember who owned what and who needed to connect with whom.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.