Arwa Kaddoura, the Chief Revenue Officer at InfluxData, has a unique perspective on building culture. As a tech and sales veteran, she reflects on the experiences that made her more attuned to the current state of corporate culture and team-building, and how her background from Lebanon to Silicon Valley evolved her leadership style every step along the way.
All too often in tech – and in many other industries – “alpha male” personality traits are considered the bedrock of a strong sales organization. But Kaddoura is proof that focusing on customers using product-led growth (PLG) shifts importance away from forceful tactics and back where it should be: on the product and the customer; sales simply facilitates the process.
“This approach helps leaders in sales create a culture of success for all salespeople, regardless of their personality type,” she says.
Her experience with InfluxData illustrates how modern go-to-market activities now revolve around product-led growth. When doing so, however, she says it’s vital to first ensure the product is ready for the scrutiny that will inevitably follow.
“The product needs to be accessible, well-documented, and usable without going through the so-called ‘gatekeepers,'” she says. “This makes it so that sales professionals evolve from being product-pushers to business enablers that help customers make well-informed decisions.”
Building a High-Growth Strategy
Time series data lies at the center of today’s modern businesses and industries, including finance, energy, enterprise, and consumer IT. As more connected devices come online, the growing number of associated apps, sensors and systems create a relentless stream of data. InfluxDB contextualizes this time-stamped data and allows organizations to collect, store, and analyze it in real-time.
The rapid and widespread use of time series data created a high-growth market, and Kaddoura explains that a growth mindset requires team members that are open to learning. These individuals must accept that they can’t be good at everything, but also understand they can always get better because the learning journey never ends.
With so much at stake, InfluxData believes that fostering an environment where everyone’s ideas and thoughts are valued is crucial for success. “We have a rule that if you’re going to work here, you need to leave your ego at the door and be willing to consider other people’s ideas and thoughts,” Kaddoura says. “Growth requires collaboration skills and the ability to set others up for success. A growth mindset isn’t about you succeeding at all costs, but about the team working together for success.”
This culture of humility allows for continuous learning and growth within the organization. “It’s all about the ability to recognize your role in an organization and where you can add value, how you can work across a team, and a willingness to push forward, especially during tough times,” she says.
This desire to collaborate and to improve together permeates the entire company. You can see this in its commitment to the open source community. “We value the ability to contribute to something that’s bigger than ourselves and believe in the power of collaboration to drive innovation,” she says. This commitment to the open source community aligns with the company’s values of continuous learning and growth.
Empowering Employees to Succeed in the Remote Era
Working remotely has become the norm for many companies, and InfluxData is no exception. The company fully embraced the remote model, which contributes significantly to the company’s ability to attract and retain top talent. “We’ve removed the physical barrier, which allows us to hire the best people, regardless of where they reside. We’re focused on hiring based on business requirements and skills needed versus what metropolitan city you’re closest to,” says Kaddoura.
InfluxData’s commitment to remote working doesn’t mean individuals work in their own personal silos. On the contrary — despite being physically separated, the company uses daily 10-minute stand-up meetings, hosted by a different department, three days a week. These informal meetings create a culture of accountability and help maintain a strong sense of community and collaboration. “We definitely have a sense of a shared urgency and a shared commitment to one another,” Kaddoura noted.
She also emphasizes the need to understand how to facilitate a work environment based on current circumstances. For example, she says she wouldn’t have known how to effectively work remotely in the first few years of her career. If she didn’t have an office where a manager could physically come to her desk and teach her things, it may have set her back. “When people have 15 or 20 years of their career under their belts, they know what they’re doing – they have a rhythm,” she says. “But what we need to constantly remind ourselves is how we nurture and grow people who are earlier in their careers.”
To mimic that in a remote setting, InfluxData hosts digital co-working hours where people can work together virtually and use Slack and other technologies so people have a time and place to ask real-time questions. “It creates the equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder if they have a quick question to ask.”
Overall, InfluxData’s commitment to remote working helped the company build a diverse and inclusive workforce. With the company’s continued growth, it remains committed to adapting to evolving remote and hybrid work models in the future.
Evolution and Growth through Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging
Finally, InfluxData places a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the workplace and Kaddoura believes that it’s crucial to have a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds represented in the workforce. “It’s one thing to put it on a slide and say it’s an initiative,” she says. “But it has to be the way you philosophically think about recruiting talent and not having any bias around the type of people that will succeed here.”
She also emphasizes that diversity and inclusion are ongoing efforts, and that it is important to evolve and make sure that it is part of a long-term growth strategy. “Diversity and inclusion, honestly, is not an end destination,” she says. “There’s no box that you get to check and say, ‘okay we’re DEI-compliant.’ It’s more about how you evolve and making sure that it is part of your own growth.”
InfluxData is a company driven by its commitment to its customers, the open source community, and its values. Allowing for continuous learning and growth within the company enables it to prioritize a growth mindset, which includes an openness to learning, collaboration skills, and setting team members up for success. These values and principles not only drive the success of the company but also provide a strong foundation for it to continue to grow and excel in the constantly evolving tech industry.
