Mike Bland

Déjà vu in fast forward

A lot of my work at Cvent is reminiscent of my past, but my colleagues and I are discovering how to do it faster and better than we did at Google.

- Virginia
Tags: Cvent, grouplets, personal

The short story is: I’ve been busy repeating myself, being redundant, and saying and doing the same thing over and over. Grouplets have been catching on at Cvent far more rapidly than I’d expected or planned. I’ve had to up my game big time to ensure that folks have a positive experience and that all Grouplets clearly demonstrate their value.

When last I wrote, I believe we had only launched three Grouplets. We now have nine, with the potential to reach eleven within a month or so. I’ve evolved the internal version of the Grouplet guide substantially—hopefully I’ll be able to publish it publicly some day. My colleagues and I have developed new models and language that help us communicate effectively and grow the program to fit the Cvent culture.

(Side note: I’ve also stepped up as one of the active maintainers of the bats-core project, a fork of the original Bats framework. Some online collaborators and I created this fork after years of inactivity by the original maintainer. This has been a really fun project; I’ll have more to say about it in a future post.)

Naturally, there’s a lot I want to discuss on this topic, regarding further insights I’ve had into the process of inciting grassroots organizational change. There are both similarities and differences in circumstances between my time Groupleteering at Google, and terraforming a Grouplet ecosystem at Cvent.

For now, I’ll share an artifact that summarizes some of those insights, teases future posts, and is a literal manifestation of déjà vu all over again:

The Cvent Documentation Grouplet's <em>The Stall Seat Journal</em> Episode 5, "Pipelines, Roles, and Checklists"
The Cvent Documentation Grouplet’s The Stall Seat Journal Episode 5, “Pipelines, Roles, and Checklists”, by yours truly.