Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

So let's start with an overview of the five key steps in the Amp It Up process: raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy.

People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don't do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way. It doesn't take much more mental energy to raise standards. Don't let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.

Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It's okay,” or “It's not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn't the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.

Aim for insanely great. It's much more energizing!

When I joined Snowflake, the company was being run as what I would call a pseudo‐SaaS company with a subscription model. But it's basically a utility company for cloud computing with a consumption model. As with your local electric company, you pay only for what you use. Yet, like a SaaS company, our sales force was completely

Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO), which I have eliminated at every company I've joined in the last 20 years. MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show. Because they get compensated on their personal metrics, it's next to impossible to pull them off projects. They will start negotiating with you for relief. That's not alignment, that's every man for himself. If you need MBO to get people to do their job, you may have the wrong people, the wrong managers, or both.

It feels like swimming in glue, moving like molasses. Leaders can do two things that bring almost instant benefit. First, think about execution more sequentially than in parallel. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Even if you're not sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway. The process alone will be enlightening. Figure out what matters most, what matters less, and what matters not at all. Otherwise your people will disagree about what's important. The questions you should ask constantly: What are we not going to do? What are the consequences of not doing something? Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials.

Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day? Start compressing cycle times. We can move so much quicker if we just change the mindset. Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker, and new energy and urgency will be everywhere. Good performers crave a culture of energy.

Apply pressure. Be impatient. Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership. Nobody wants to swim in glue or struggle to get things done. Some organizations slow things down by design. Change that—ASAP.

also causes us to be not good at celebrations. We are so focused on the next thing that victory laps and self‐congratulation are not in our DNA. They feel like we're jinxing ourselves. Instead, we always focus on the challenges in front of us.

I have since always tried to increase our people's sense of ownership so they will act as owners. That mentality needs to be nurtured.

We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime. They will be motivated and driven, with a cannot‐fail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us.

There are times you need to check your own views at the door and bet on the conviction of others.

Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader—but that didn't mean I was right. As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody's time. If we knew that something or someone wasn't working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt. The rest of this book

If you turn your time and attention to the latest shiny object, regardless of how little it has to do with your mission, you are on the path to trouble. Distractions will inevitably pop up every day and need to be fought relentlessly.

I would sometimes say in all‐hands meetings that I was personally committed to help each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company's fortunes. In exchange, I was asking for the best they had to offer. That was the deal: we do the best we can for each other. People sometimes gave me an incredulous look: a CEO who is saying that his goal is to elevate our fortunes? Seriously?

If people don't focus on the mission, they are not really on a mission. We concentrate our resources and bandwidth on the mission, and we avoid distractions. That takes discipline. Distractions that can jeopardize the mission are everywhere, and they often seem well‐intentioned, honorable, and worthwhile.

The mission also has to be treated with urgency. There is a saying in sales that “time kills all deals.” Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants. The faster we separate from the competition, the more likely we are to succeed. Urgency is a mindset that can be learned if it doesn't come to you naturally. You can embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it. More pep in our step energizes the workplace culture, making everything seem lighter, quicker, and easier.

We have to execute on our mission via an organized, orchestrated, and resourced set of activities. We have no chance accomplishing it without a drive for world‐class execution, which includes high standards and efficient use of resources. For instance, a few months after D‐Day, the British had attempted to win World War II by launching the largest airborne operation in history, to take the City of Arnhem in Holland and four bridges over major rivers leading up to it. It failed due to poor execution, with even more loss of life than the Normandy invasion the previous June.

Finally, the mission has to be kept in mind when we devise the strategy that we execute on. Strategies don't change day‐to‐day, only when there is a demonstrably better way to do things or if something just isn't working, unrelated to execution failure. Everyone needs to feel confident that our strategy is in line with the goals of our mission. Going back to World War II, one reason the Normandy invasion worked was that the strategy was brilliant: simultaneous attacks over the water and from the air, opening up five different beachheads, only one of which was heavily defended by the Germans.

I often ask CEOs about their growth model: how fast can the company grow if they pull all the stops? Can the business start amping up and go asymptotic at some point? When?

Strategy can't really be mastered until you know how to execute well. That's why execution must be your first priority as a leader. Worrying about your organization's strategy before your team is good at executing is pointless. Execution is hard, and great execution is scarce—which makes it another great source of competitive advantage.

At Snowflake, we offer a clear career path and professional development for sales staff. We assign recent college graduates to follow up on inbound leads; their goal is to qualify and set meetings for our more senior salespeople. It's a hard job being on the phone all day, talking to strangers and trying to set up meetings, but it gives them a bedrock foundation for their sales skills.

One of my favorite observations is that “good judgment comes from bad judgment.” Experience may be overrated by some, but it's hard to find a substitute for it.

Perform what we call active “calibration” sessions on critical positions in a group format. In these sessions, executives and managers present evaluations of their direct reports and seek feedback from the peer group outside their chain of command. The idea here is to discern if the manager's evaluation of the person in question is either shared, questioned, or outright challenged by the broader organization. These sessions identify a lack of management congruency on people issues if there is one, but they also serve as a catalyst to address budding or lingering performance gaps. Basically, they create clarity and prompt action on talent gaps.

culture. What does it mean in the context of a business organization? For our purposes, it loosely defines the dominant and persistent patterns of behaviors, beliefs, norms, and values of a workplace community.

We have a saying we often repeat at our companies: Go direct. If you have a problem that cuts across departments, figure out who in those other departments can most directly help you address the issue, and reach out without hesitation. Everybody, and we mean everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. We want the organization to run on influence, not rank and title.

We tend to be “solution centric”—we spend most of our time discussing solutions rather than diagnosing problems. We race to conclusions about what's wrong and what to do about it. We pattern match, reacting to situations based on our individual experience rather than studying the specific situation in front of us from a broader perspective.

So it behooves us to act more like doctors: slow down and critically examine situations and problems before settling on an explanation, never mind a solution.

In meetings, I often object to presentations where 90% of the content is about the solution, not the problem.

Customer Success Is Everyone's Business The alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforce that customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department.

At all three companies, we made our technical support people the organizational owners of customer issues from end to end. We also moved technical support organizationally under the umbrella of engineering, so they all reported up to the same executive, our head of engineering. It is not desirable in our experience when engineering is removed from, or does not feel the effects of, decisions by tech support. Engineering has de facto a support role: tech support has to work with the engineering department whenever they exhaust the limits of their own abilities. It is another form of organizational alignment. While technical support owns customer issues, sales own the customer relationship, which cannot be relinquished to a customer success person. Our business is relationship oriented, not deal oriented or transactional. It is important that salespeople do not delegate part of their role to customer success types.

Selling in these initial stages is more akin to business development than a defined, repeatable sales process. In a business development situation, every aspect is interpreted case by case, and we adapt to the circumstances at hand. Pricing and contract terms are flexible. Selling, by contrast, is a systemic, highly standardized process.

If you offer a partial solution that requires your customers to seek the rest of the solution elsewhere, you are making it easy for a competitor to drive through the gap you left open.

it's always better to attack weakness rather than strength.

People literally never asked me in interviews what I thought I was good at. But that's always one of the first and most interesting questions I ask from the other side of the desk.

Whenever talent is in short supply, as it almost always is in Silicon Valley, betting on aptitude is a great recruiting strategy for employers, albeit a less certain one.

An energetic, engaging personality goes a long way in the workplace, as it does in every sphere of our culture.

A big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities. We valued traits such as strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, and a “no excuses” mentality.

We have found that people who are hungry, humble, and express a “can't fail” level of determination are often a good bet.

First, make sure you're having periodic career check‐ins with your direct manager. Good companies and good managers proactively do this because they want to know what's on your mind and how they can hang on to you as an employee. In traditional companies, this kind of conversation happens once a year. In fast‐moving companies, it's likely once a quarter. But if you never get invited to have a substantive conversation about your career development, that's a red flag. Ask for one.