Enablement spotlight: Fannie’s people-first path to training and development

Can you tell us a little about your background and how you ended up at Persona?

I found my way to Persona through the people. Some of my favorite colleagues from my four years at Coursera were here at Persona and told me it was a great place that I might enjoy.

My background is what might be considered nontraditional in that I’ve tried a lot of things and worked in many different environments! Here are a few key threads:

• I’ve gravitated towards customer-facing roles where I’m at the intersection of clients/customers, product, and internal teams. Ironically, the first big support challenge I worked on at Coursera was around identity verification for certificates! External-facing roles push me to really know the ins and outs of the products/services I’m engaging with and allow me to solve problems on many levels. I love being this bridge; it’s challenging and calls on me to be creative, flexible, and observant.

• I thrive in fast-paced dynamic environments where no two days are the same. My career to date has centered on startups (four of them!) in high-growth phases where it’s imperative to think about scale. There’s a lot of room to create processes, and then adjust processes. I like that this has forced me to get great at starting somewhere even if it’s not perfect, and then iterate quickly.

• I love connecting with people. I was on a zillion sports teams growing up and still today, nothing gets me going more than working together as a team to achieve something we weren’t sure we could accomplish. Whether I’m captaining my ultimate frisbee team to Nationals with a broken hand, working as a group of seven interns on a farm in Italy to corral the pigs back into their many acre paddock and separate them from the wild boars, or figuring out how to create a new customer segment and build out the best support model for it — people are at the core.

What inspired you to move from a customer-facing role into leading our early career programs and GTM new hire training?

There’s a saying about connecting the dots: It’s easy to connect them when you look back, but it can be hard to understand or see the picture in the moment. That pretty much sums up how I feel about my career. Looking back, my experiences as a life and leadership coach combined with years of growing and scaling support programs at startups, being delighted in people, and being a cheer squad equal a natural fit for this position. In the moment though, I often felt like I was scattered in my career trajectory and wondered how they would all add up.

I love working with customers and imagined I’d always do that, but when the challenge to train a large cohort of new grad hires arose, I said yes to the opportunity because both my interests and business needs aligned. I’m so glad I did. While I miss the day-to-day interactions with customers, seeing the impact these newly trained hires have with their customers has been extraordinary.

What transformations have you seen as folks go through our programs? 

For many folks I work with, this is their first job out of college and often one of the first that’s in-person given the pandemic’s ripples. As you can imagine, there are usually a lot of nerves. In my first 1:1 with a new grad hire, they cut right to the chase and told me they didn’t think they were cut out for this role and especially how technical it was. We explored why together, looked at options, and committed to checking in after a few weeks of training. It’s funny now to look back on that moment and we regularly laugh about it because they are now working with some of our top strategic customers deep in the technical weeds and thriving. 

We hold a high bar. To see folks work so hard, learn so much, and then exceed that high bar (especially when they didn’t think they could but were committed to trying) makes what we do here worth it. That confidence in themself and their ability to learn translates at Persona and far beyond too.

What excites you most about Persona’s future and the evolution of our onboarding and training programs? 

We are getting so much incredible, new, fresh, and brilliant talent infused into Persona! When I worked with customers, I could feel the direct impact I had, but it had a limit because I could only work with so many. It’s incredibly fulfilling to help with all the training and onboarding to see all the different ways each person makes an impact on customers, big and small, all over the world. I tear up pretty regularly at our end of week all hands company meeting when I hear the updates!

Which Persona activity or event has been your favorite? Why?

Every Monday we start a Slack thread on how people’s weekends were. It’s a really simple thing, but it honors that we are all people up to many things in and outside of work. It’s also such a great way to learn about new things! There are often photos shared of incredible dishes people have made or gotten, details about concerts or Personerd meetups that have happened, beautiful scenery from walks or hikes, and photos of friends and family. It’s something I look forward to every Monday that helps ease back into the week.

What’s something people might be surprised to learn about you?

I love setting silly but serious personal goals every year. One year, I wrote a letter a day for a year and stretched myself to write to as many people as possible — including my favorite bookstores! Another year, I slept outside once a month for a year. And a few years back, I set a goal to do a weekly dip in an unheated body of water over the span of a year. While I’m not a big swimmer, I love jumping in cold water. It became such a fun challenge to organize friends and small adventures around. At the end of the year, I had dipped 105 times in 76 unique locations with 121 different individuals. The coldest dip was in March in Hayward, Wisconsin where I struggled to find a way in because of the ice; the northernmost dip was a snowmelt lake near Anchorage, Alaska; and the southernmost dip was off the coast of Chile on a trip to Patagonia. It was a fun, silly-but-serious goal that led to an extraordinary year… and I still don’t like swimming.