Dr Ying Feng, FEHA
Lecturer in Marketing | Digital Anthropomorphism | Technology Innovation | Consumer Well-being
- University of Southampton
- Google Scholar
- ORCID
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Early startup hiring, part 1: hiring strategies
One of the most important aspects of joining a startup as an early employee is helping it grow, and that means hiring. Hiring is probably the most useful and transferable skill I’ve picked up as an early employee. I’ll cover more of the specifics of how to set up good hiring processes in future posts of this three-part series. For this post, I want to start where all hiring processes start: with a decision to hire someone. It’s not obvious to figure out when you need a hire and what kind of hire you need, and in the past few years of mistakes and successes I’ve picked up a few philosophies which I want to share here. ... Read more
Early startup employee lessons learned, part 4: adapting to your changing role
In Part 3 of this series, I wrote about strategies to build a team with a positive organizational culture. That post was about the team; this post is about you: as an early employee, how does your role change with the changing company and how can you gracefully ride that wave? When I joined my company as the fifth person, I knew that if all went well and our company succeeded, I’d have a very interesting path within the organization. What I didn’t know was any of the details of what that meant, and importantly what skills I’d need to gracefully walk that path. This post is about the things I’ve learned over the past two years as we’ve grown from 5 to 100 employees, and as my role has undergone countless transformations in the process of growing our team and responding to the company’s needs. ... Read more
Early startup employee lessons learned, part 3: building culture
A core function of being an early employee at a rapidly growing startup is helping it grow! At my current job, I’ve helped the data science team grow from being just one person doing a little bit of everything (me!) to a team of over 15 people working in three focused sub-teams. Growing the data science team has been one of the best parts of my hyper-growth experience, and I’ve learned a lot of really useful lessons from it. ... Read more
The Boston morning commute time warp
Like many young adults our age, my partner and I did the classic pandemic move of fleeing the city and moving in with his parents. That’s how I discovered I actually really enjoy living in rural New Hampshire, and last December we officially moved in to our own place in southern New Hampshire. ... Read more