Process Street is growing like crazy. Every day I open up Slack, there’s someone new to welcome to the team. It’s like a mini virtual party every day with less cake.

Starting at a remote start-up can be tough – especially if it’s your first time working remotely, or at a start-up, or at a remote start-up. All those first-day jitters are magnified by the fact that you don’t even have a friendly work-buddy in the next office to walk you through it.

Well, you do have the friendly work-buddy; they’re just not in the next office. Or even the same country.

With this in mind, I thought it’d be fun to interrogate our newest teammates. There’s nothing that’ll make you feel like part of the team like getting interrogated by someone you just met so they can publish your innermost thoughts for all of the internet to see. Right?

In this post, I talk to Process Street’s newbies about their first month with us. Please give a round of applause for my lovely volunteers:

• Mike Schutte, Engineering
• Karolina Lasocki, Content Creation
• Dyra Manangan, Visual Content
• Brian Ralston, Customer Success
• Logan Herzog, Demand Generation

Let’s meet the team!
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Once upon a time, the word “canceled” was only applicable to objects and things. Like the meeting you didn’t want to attend. The subscription to Netflix or any other subscription-based product. Your favorite TV series (Firefly, anyone?).

But since the mid-2010s, the word has evolved. It’s no longer objects and things that get canceled, but people and companies too.

Kanye? Canceled.

Scarlett Johansson? She’s canceled.

Bon Apetit? Canceled.

Pepsi? Completely, utterly canceled.

The specific reasons why these people and companies were canceled in the first place vary. But it’s ultimately their actions, statements, or sentiments that led them to be canceled by the internet-at-large.

To learn about their missteps — and ensure you don’t go down the same route — here’s this informative, insightful Process Street post where I’ll be covering:

• The definition of canceled and what it means to be canceled
• Cancel culture examples: Ellen, Kanye, and Pepsi
• How to stop cancelation from happening in the first place

Let’s get right into what is cancel culture and canceling.

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This is a guest post by Donald Fomby. Donald is a freelance content writer who works for ClassyEssay. He has spent more than seven years in the copywriting and blogging industries, writing articles, guides, and checklists for small eCommerce businesses. Donald uses his curiosity about online business to write about topics valuable to small business owners.

The product manager’s role is a juggling act.

To fulfill the needs of expectant customers, the product manager needs to work with the sales, marketing, and engineering teams — alongside the rest of the product team — to facilitate necessary changes and improve the product(s) in question.

But that juggling act has gotten even harder as of late.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many product research and management processes that were done collaboratively and in-person have now pivoted online. Needless to say, this change had made it more difficult for product managers to succeed in their role and complete projects in the way they’re used to.

This transition may have caused workloads to build up, task lists to overflow, sprints to stagger, and thus, impacting the rest of the product team.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The truth of the matter is that you can successfully manage any product research or development project remotely with optimal organization.

It’s the key to bettering collaboration with your remote team, and ensuring you and the rest of your product management team are keeping on the right track. If you strategically organize your work, you will also be able to instill and maintain successful collaboration with the people you’re working with, despite the many miles that keep you apart.

Seeing as 86% of executives say that a lack of collaboration is the most common reason for failure in their companies, it’s something that you need to get to grips with, particularly as a product manager.

By reading through this Process Street guest post, you’ll do exactly that. To boot, I’ll also provide some extra tools to help you thrive as a product manager! Just make your way through these sections:

• The 4 must-follow tips & tricks to excel as a product manager
• Product management tools to thrive in 2020 and beyond

Let’s get started.

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Career aptitude tests are powerful tools for both employers and employees alike. They can be used to gain insight into personal tendencies and make informed responses to career and hiring decisions.

Tests like these can differ in:

• Purpose (i.e. for career placement, selection, counseling, or training)
• What they measure (i.e. what they are designed to measure, be it personality type, skills, work approaches, values, or vocational interests)
• What they predict (i.e. performance, quality of work, management potential, career success and satisfaction, your next job)
• Format (online, paper form, in-person)
• Standardization and rigor (how subjective or objective are the test results?)

Some tests are highly structured, with definitive quantifiable outcomes; others are more flexible, and designed to be personally interpreted.

This article will look at six different types of aptitude test, broadly defined, and run through the process of how you can build your own aptitude tests using Process Street.

We’ll cover:

• What is a career aptitude test?
• How to build an aptitude test with Process Street
• The Myers-Briggs / Jungian Types Personality Test
• Free aptitude test template: Big Five Personality Test
• Free aptitude test template: Holland Codes
• Free aptitude test template: Leadership Tools
• Free aptitude test template: DISC Assessment
• Free aptitude test template: IQ Test
• Superpowered checklists

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In this post, we’ll be looking at and learning about performance appraisal.

While we won’t be praising performances of global stars à la the judging panel of the Oscars or Golden Globes, we will be using performance appraisals to assess the conduct of the stars in your workplace.

After all, performance appraisals can be hugely beneficial.

For instance, 68% of employees who receive consistent, accurate feedback are more fulfilled in their jobs, in turn boosting employee engagement. Additionally, 92% of employees believe feedback – including negative feedback, if delivered appropriately – is effective for improving performance, resulting in increased employee output.

For performance appraisals to be successful, however, certain rules and procedures must be followed diligently.

Otherwise, the appraisal could backfire and have seriously detrimental results, including distrust and demoralization.

From a business perspective, this can be devastating.

So, to learn how to provide effective performance appraisals, read through the sections below:

• What is performance appraisal? And what are the objectives of performance appraisals?
• The different performance appraisal methods
• Why a performance appraisal needs to be done correctly
• Using Process Street’s performance review templates

Let’s begin.

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In this article we’ll be looking at career coaching and, more specifically, how career coach Ari Meisel does it.

It does feel a disservice, however, to say Meisel is only a career coach. He’s also an author, speaker, podcast creator, productivity coach, leadership coach, business coach, and entrepreneurial strategist. He’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Refinery29, TEDxEast, and has gained rave reviews from industry leaders.

“I asked Ari Meisel for consultancy because my business was phenomenally successful, but the systems and processes we had, we could not keep up with our growth. He not only sorted us out but inspired us to venture into uncharted territory.” – Michael Hyatt, Founder of Michael Hyatt and Company

Basically, Ari Meisel is the authority figure on getting work done effectively so that your business efficiency, personal productivity, and creativity can thrive. To boot, he advocates for processes as much as we do at Process Street!

If you’re interested in making the most of your career – in addition to getting your hands on 5 of Ari Meisel’s processes – all you have to do is read through the following sections:

• Career coaches provide essential guidance
• What are the benefits of career coaching?
• Who is Ari Meisel?
• Ari Meisel’s coaching leadership style for helping people in their careers
• Ari Meisel’s “Process Playbook” quicklinks
• Additional resources for streamlining your career and life

Let’s get started.

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This is a guest post by Caitlin Reimers Brumme, Managing Director of MassChallenge Boston. Prior to MassChallenge, Caitlin led the Impact Collaboratory at the Harvard Business School, a multi-faceted effort to develop world class academic leadership on the topic of “Investing in the 21st Century” including sustainable, ESG and impact investing. Caitlin holds an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar, and a B.A. with honors from The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Accelerating a startup is like pouring rocket fuel into the tank of some crazy, untested contraption. If the engine is strong and built for speed, there’s potential for an explosive reaction.

It’s the job of accelerators to make sure the company they’re funding and mentoring will create the right kind of explosion. Because funding can hurt a company, and mentoring can go to waste if the foundations of a startup aren’t solid.

That’s why some select accelerator success stories like Stripe, Mopub, and SendGrid have graduated and gone on to raise record amounts, go public in record time, or be acquired for vast sums of money.

It’s also the reason why some never make it.

Accelerators are hyper-competitive because they’re looking for startups that have a lot of the scaling infrastructure or potential already in place. With the funding, mentoring, and connections they provide, a startup with a great idea and MVP can break through from obscurity and see headline-grabbing success in a matter of months.

But exactly how likely is it that your startup will get accepted into an accelerator? What are the processes that underpin accelerator programs, and the resources these organizations offer startups that makes it possible to scale so rapidly?

In this article, we take a look at startup acceleration by the numbers, starting with a brief note on what an accelerator actually is.

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Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.

Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.

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As an analyst, you spend your day designing your organization’s processes, measuring their performance and ironing out the fine details. You focus on the “how”. You’re very good at it, but maybe you’re more interested in the “what”? If you want to move past the nitty-gritty of processes and devise end-to-end models and strategies instead, then you’re looking make the leap to business architect.

The necessity of architects is a byproduct of digital transformation.

“There’s a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech’s used consistently across business units and functional areas.” — Sharon Florentine, CIO

What is a business architect?

As a business architect, you will design the structure of the business as a whole by looking broadly at systems design and requirements. Your aim is to improve the business’ operations in line with goals and strategy. Architects do this by theorizing and testing the components of a system (the technology, the flow of work, the deliverables) and overseeing the implementation of the systems by someone in a business analyst role.

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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