superhog_personal_notes/log.md

2023-11-26

Tomorrow is my first day. Yay!

My challenge in Superhog is going to come with a lot more freedom and lot more responsibility than the previous positions I've held. The crown is heavy, and so it's both my time to shine and to not fuck up.

One of the habits that I value a lot, have almost never seen successfully applied in companies, and have seen successfully applied to some degree in Mercad~ao (thanks João) is writing things down. A lot. Everywhere. All the time. Organized repositories of text all over the place. Basically, every time you are about to open your mouth to say something, you should instead or also write it down.

I'll start on the eve of my arrival by writing down some thoughts on stuff I need to do.

• Social wise
  • Make contacts: I need to have a couple of coffees with a lot of people:
    • Andrew and Humphrey
    • Ben Cotte
    • Ben Robinson
    • Nicky
    • Finance?
    • • whoever any of the previous points at as a relevant person
• Business wise
  • Get someone to sell Superhog to me as if was a property owner
  • Experience Superhog like guests do
  • Spend a day with the customer service team
  • Spend a day with whoever sells Superhog to property owners
  • Understand better our business model, revenue and cost structure
  • Get up to date with what are our yearly/long-term goals
• IT wise
  • VPN/Helpdesk
  • Get someone to guide me through existing solutions
  • Understand what is our productivity stack
    • Teams?
    • Office?
    • Internal docs/wikis?
• Data-team wise
  • Take control
    • Set an agenda with Humphrey and Andrew so that they see I'm on top of things
    • Clarify first goals
      • Get to know the business
      • Understand our IT situation
      • Understand what is already built, data wise
      • Set first goals
      • Size human needs, IT needs, discuss budget for both
      • Present long-term things that are important-but-not-urgent
• Personal wise
  • Benefits? Health insurance?
  • Office parking?

Good habits that hopefully can be implemented:

• Weekly/monthly data team newsletter
• Data-literacy company training
• Greenflag culture
• Office hours
• Funny data facts/trivias/bets
• Technical blog

Mistakes from Lola that I want to avoid:

• Repetitive, stupid ceremonies that everyone dislikes
• Siloing and this-is-my-corner feelings. E2E ownership of stories
• Distance with engineering team
• Lack of involvement of product team
• Lack of planned training for data staff

Some good inspiration for data team handbooks:

• https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-technology/data-team/

Now

• Get access to slack

• Get access to miro

• Get access to Notion

• Get access to Confluence

• Get access to productboard

• Get access to Azure Devops

• Get access to Sage HR

• Get access to Keeper Security

• Are there any shared folders in Keeper Security where I should be added?

• Get access to staging environment for backoffice app

• Get access to staging environment for KYG platform

• Set up profile pic

• Ask Nicky about IT equipment policy

• Send a hello email

• Get access to Norskken house

• Learn what employee benefits do we have

• Book time with Ben Robinson + other IT

• Book with HR (Nicky)

• Book time with someone in Sales

• Book time with Matt (Operations VP)

• Lourdes, Louise, Clay

• Ellain (Finance)

• Luisa Legal (has contact with Trust Keys)

• Leo (Sales)

• Get access to the Data Meeting excel from Ben Cotte

• Get access to Data Map from Trust Keith

People I've met today

• Clay Boldt (Product Manager). Is he a relative to Andrew?
• Mike Hayward(IT, what does he do? Lol, he's job title is "IT guy")

Things I've learned today:

• We have six different legal entities
• We have a customer support team in the Philippines
• We have some devs in Egypt
• We are soon opening offices in Australia and US, mainly for commercial purposes
• There's a civil war on whether to use Teams or Slack for internal comms
• Wednesday is the strong office day. Monday and Friday people are usually working remote.
• Our money cows

Meeting with Ben

Products:

• Risk management with two pillars

  • KYG (reduce risk)
    • With multiple levels of verification
    • Check with black lists
    • Check reality of
  • Damage Waivers/Protection (protect you from unavoidable risk)
    • Several options depending on who pays, how much it protects, etc.
    • If all goes wrong: resolution

• Dashboard

  • Panel for both Superhog employees and hosts
  • Hosts can manage everything there (minority)
  • Also integrates with PMS (majority)
    • Some PMS have plugins that automatically integrate with Superhub
    • Guesty, Hospitable, Hostaway
    • Modular presence in booking lifecycle
    • Veriff for identity check
    • Payment partner up until now Acquired. Recently started out with Stripe to check if UX improves and less people drop out of the funnel
    • Product is not happy with current dashboard UX. New platform will be called KYG.
    • Triple funnel:
      • Guest experience funnel
      • Host commercial funnel
      • Resolution funnel
    • Wilbur is the name of the admin panel
    • Athena is a screening as a service to allow PMS like Athena

• Business

  • Waiver is the top product: 52% of revenue
  • Revenue guest fee (user pays for screening) : 5% of revenue
  • SaaS fees (Host pays for screening): 34% of revenue

Ben's opinion on most critical stuff:

• Improve the invoicing/finance reconciliation so that the Finance team works efficiently.

• Scrum vs Deadlines. Culture clash? What's Ben Robinson take on it?