Chad interviews Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. The Launchpad II team covers the EMEA area: that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She talks about working remotely for almost the entire time she's worked with the company, her approach to talking with potential customers when she knows she's never going to meet them in person, and what she sees happening to the different geographies that thoughtbot is selling and expanding into.
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Follow Kirsten on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hurleykirsten/)
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. Kirsten, thanks for joining me.
KIRSTEN: Thanks for having me on, Chad.
CHAD: So I've now talked with a few managing directors at thoughtbot about the new team that they're leading. So I think listeners are probably expecting what's coming next which is, you know, why don't you give people a little bit of an overview of what the Launchpad II team, which has a slightly different name than the other teams we've talked to so far, do?
KIRSTEN: Sure. So I guess maybe to remind some folks, so Launchpad I refers to the Americas. So you've already spoken to a few of the managing directors who head up different teams across the Americas. You have different propositions. Over in Launchpad II, which historically was the London studio when we were working in a physical office environment, we are a smaller team than everyone else who was based over in the Americas.
So we didn't quite scale out to be able to have individual teams working on particular propositions. But I think what the team had been successfully doing anyway was working across everything. And we still do work on Ignite-style projects, Lift Off, and Boost engagements as well. So yeah, that's where we've got to. And I think maybe the changes for us is that since we've gone to fully remote working and officially called ourselves the EMEA Launchpad II team, we've started hiring folks from further afield, which is really exciting for me.
CHAD: So not everyone may be familiar with the acronym, although it's fairly common, EMEA. So what regions does that actually cover?
KIRSTEN: [laughs] Sorry. So that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And I should say we were already working with clients pretty much fully across the region anyway. It was just never really official. But I think the more global terminology is Europe, the Middle East, and Africa or EMEA. But because we're thoughtbot and we like to do things a little bit...well, we like to own our things. So we've called it Launchpad II to go with the rocket theme that we had in our rebranding. What was that? The end of last year I think we came up with it all.
CHAD: Yeah. So what has it been like to go from a team of people that were...[laughs] actually, as I ask this question I realized that you joined a week before the pandemic started, and we had to go remote. So I was going to ask you what it was like to go from a team of people that were going to a studio every day all based in London to a remote team. [laughs] But you never really experienced the alternative.
KIRSTEN: [laughs] No. I think the most time I spent with the team as a whole was actually in my interview process [laughs] before I even started in person I should say. That was a pretty interesting week. You had flown over from Boston [chuckles] to spend some time getting me all set up and running. And I think it was the Wednesday where you and I had a bit of a chat, and we were concerned about this virus that was going around and the duty of care that we actually had to our t