Executive Business Partner working session scenario

• Interviewer(s) Greg Bastis, VP of Sales

• Duration: 60-minutes.

• Details: The goal of this working session is to give us all a sense of what it would be like to work together. Below is a hypothetical situation that we would like to play out during this 60-minute session.

  You are new to the role (30 days) when Greg asks you to meet and discuss organizing an in-person event for the sales/marketing teams. The idea behind this event is to build strong relationships among team members and align on goals.

  Your objective in this meeting is to:

1. Gather all the information that you need in order to be successful at planning and executing this event.
2. Provide recommendations, share potential ideas, and discuss solutions with Greg.

Our advice:

• Don’t go overboard on preparation or detail.
• Clever ideas are awesome and appreciated.
• We are also looking for your process/framework/principles.
• If you need to take notes, we usually use Google Docs!

Some background info:

• Team org: Sales team and Marketing team
• Publicly referenceable customer logos
• Everything at Sourcegraph and our handbook should be assumed to be accurate and up to date.

A few pointers:

• Ask identifying questions about existing gaps on the team
• Be ready to identify immediate solutions
• Be prepared to have a dynamic conversation to uncover nuances about the teams you will be working with

BizOps: Director of Data & Analytics take-home project

• It’s 2021, and Sourcegraph is growing at a rapid pace. With the launch of Sourcegraph cloud and significant growth in sales of the existing self-hosted deployment option, the VP of Operations is asking you to prepare a plan for upgrading our data infrastructure to be prepared for the next several years of growth.
• We have a complex user journey that can touch a number of websites, apps, and integrations:
  • Data sources:
    • Websites
      • About.sourcegraph.com: Sourcegraph’s marketing website (pages include: a splash homepage, our blog, about us, contact us, press, careers, terms of service, etc.)
      • Learn.sourcegraph.com (learning and tutorials about code search)
      • Docs.sourcegraph.com (documentation)
      • Custom SEO landing pages
      • And more…
  • Core products:
    • Sourcegraph.com: The cloud product, used for searching across the universe of open source code and users’ private repositories. Can be used as an actual product destination or simply as a demo as needed.
    • Self-hosted Sourcegraph instances: Self-hosted webapps, using the same codebase as Sourcegraph.com, but deployed on-premises or in our customers’ private clouds. An example would be Uber’s private Sourcegraph instance—only accessible to Uber employees and contractors, and only containing Uber’s code. It would be accessible to Uber devs on an internal-only domain, like sourcegraph.uber.com.
  • Integrations:
    • Sourcegraph browser extensions: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox extensions that add Sourcegraph features to other websites where users view code (e.g. enhanced code views on sites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and more).
    • Sourcegraph editor extensions: downloadable plugins for desktop code editors, such as VS Code, Atom, and Vim, that add some Sourcegraph features locally.
• Key notes:
  • The expectation for privacy is much higher for our downloaded products and self-hosted Sourcegraph instances. E.g. the customers who opt to host Sourcegraph themselves expect us not to track their users’ actions. Instead, we only collect aggregated telemetry from self-hosted Sourcegraph instances, with no individual user-level details.
  • Consumers of this user journey data include nearly every part of the company, from product (core app engagement and product usage data), engineering (application performance data), marketing and sales (top of funnel data and user engagement data for outreach), customer success (customer health and engagement), and more.
  • Our current traffic is ~100k monthly website visitors and cloud product users and ~40k monthly self-hosted instance users.
• Deliverables:
  • Please design a high-level, conceptual data pipeline that would serve our business’s needs. Please name specific recommended tools (or options) to serve at each step of the pipeline. No need to write descriptions of every step, but please be prepared to answer questions about them.
  • Please describe the basic structure of data at the beginning(s) and the end(s) of the pipeline, and be prepared to discuss the data transformations that take place along the way.
  • Finally, please draw or describe (no real data required) the dashboards or reports that you would recommend providing to the CEO, the head of Product, and the head of Marketing each month.
• We recommend that you spend approximately 2 hours on this case study. Please feel free to reach out with any questions!

BizOps: Product Analyst take-home project

This exercise should take 2–3 hours to complete; please don’t take more than that!

• Getting setup: You’ll be using Mode Analytics public datasets to complete this take-home project. Here are the steps to getting into the SQL workspace: _ 1.Create an account if you don’t already have one _ 2.Click the green+in the top right (‘Create report’)to access the workspace * 3.We’ll be using the following Mode Public Warehousetables to complete the exercise:tutorials.playbook_users,tutorials.playbook_events,tutorials.playbook_experiments,tutorials.playbook_emails
• Prompt: For each of the following questions please create charts and/or tables (within Mode or by exporting to a spreadsheet tool if that’s easier) to show your findings. We’re not expecting a slide deck or document to explain your findings, but quick summaries of charts, if needed, are just fine. Keep in mind that in most cases there are no “right” or “wrong” answers; we’re more interested in your approach and thought processes. _ 1. What company is most engaged with the product? _ 2. We ran an A/B test (experiment) to increase ‘like_message’ actions users are taking. Which variant would you recommend going forward with, if any?
• When you’ve completed the project, share your results via static run links along with some availability you have over the next week to review the project with a BizOps team member. When reviewing, you can expect questions about your approach in getting to know the data, the process you took to find the results, results themselves, and how you decided to communicate your findings.

Legal: Corporate & Legal Counsel take-home project

The goal of the assignment is to give you a chance to demonstrate how you think, write, and negotiate while tackling issues that are top of mind for Sourcegraph and our customers.

• Please see the attached MSA redlines (we will provide this to you if you get to this stage in the process) from our prospective customer, a CA-based tech company. Deal summary:
  • On-premise instance
  • 100K USD ACV
• Will you respond to the redlines and include comments to the customer explaining your reasoning for any redlines that you reject or modify? Please accept any redlines that you suggest that we agree to with a brief comment explaining why.
• In addition, please draft a short, casual note with your assessment that you would send to the account executive. Include a short issues list, with the prioritization of issues made clear.

TechOps: Tech Ops IT Engineer take-home project / Technical Interview

The technical interview should be approximately:

• 25 min for questions from Nicky and Dan M
• 10 min questions from you to us
• 10 min to discuss a short take-home project (3 min presentation and 7 min discussion)

Project:

• We have a fully remote team. Tech Ops wants to ensure that our Team Members are appropriately protected from security threats. As part of the onboarding process we want to provide all new hires with a Security Checklist. What would you put on this checklist?
• Please be prepared to present this recommendation on a detailed level in 3 minutes.

Hiring Manager

During this interview you will meet with the hiring manager on the team. They will seek to gain an understanding of your customer-facing experience. Specifically, your pre-sales technical experience as well as what your career aspirations are. You will have an opportunity to ask any questions about the team, role, company, or product.

Cross-Functional Peer Collaboration

You’ll meet with a potential peer in an adjacent team with whom we want to understand how you build relationships and partner with other leaders and how you manage across adjacent teams.

Technical Interview

As a leader for a technical team, we’ll get a sense of how you approach technical problems and challenges as well as your working knowledge of the developer ecosystem.

Leadership & Team Management with 2 IC team members

You’ll meet with two individual contributors on the team to learn about how you build relationships within a team and how you lead, mentor, and develop others.

Hiring Manager Interview

During this interview you will meet with the hiring manager on the Customer Engineering team. They will seek to gain an understanding of your customer-facing experience. Specifically, your pre-sales technical experience as well as what your career aspirations are. You will have an opportunity to ask any questions about the team, role, company, or product.

Take Home & Live Interview with a Customer Engineer

For this interview we want to give candidates an opportunity to learn about our product and assess your capabilities working in the developer tooling ecosystem! Sourcegraph has a public version of our product available here to let users get a sense of product capabilities—it’s connected to public GitHub repositories. We’ll use this instance to guide the live project portion of the interview which will be conducted live, via Zoom, with a customer engineer on the team. You’ll also have a chance to ask them questions about the role, team, and company!

Panel interview: live product demonstration

For this interview, you’ll meet with several members of the team to lead a live product demonstration.

Enterprise Technical Advisor Leadership Panel Interview

The final formal interview step is an hour-long panel interview with leadership and a senior member of the team. This is a working session-style interview panel intended to help us understand how you’ll approach customer scenarios.

The prompt and instructions below will help you prepare for this session. The interview itself will run for 60 mins: 50 mins for the interview content (agenda driven by you) with 10 mins of general Q&A at the very end. Each prompt should last approximately 12 mins. The agenda of the meeting will run as follows:

• 0-2 mins: Intros
• 2-14 mins: Prompt 1
• 14-26 mins: Prompt 2
• 26-38 mins: Prompt 3
• 38-50 mins: Prompt 4
• 50-60 mins: Feedback and Q&A

Note: Keeping the timing of the interview is your responsibility. If you’re running out of time on a prompt, it is better to wrap up the most salient points, and move on to the next prompt. It is important that 10 minutes be left at the end for feedback. Visual aids are recommended, but not required, to help keep the conversation on track.

Interview Prompts

A summary of the 4 prompts are provided below:

1. Champion Building: A key part of the Technical Advisor (Customer Success) role is identifying, building, and nurturing champions. What types of strategies have you, or would you, employ to build and nurture champions? What would you do - what actions would you take - if your existing champion left? How would you strategize with your AE to nurture your champion relationships; what would you expect your AE to do vs what would you do?
2. Account Corrective Actions: While we intend to be as proactive as possible, monitoring and inspecting accounts is a reality of our role. What would your approach be to various kinds of corrective actions that you identify? For example, what if use has declined over the past 3 months? What if our points of contact no longer want to talk or meet with us on a regular basis? What if you’re seeing that your customer has had an influx of support tickets?
3. QBRs: As the team responsible for ensuring we’re delivering value and positive outcomes to our customers we expect to utilize regular business reviews with our champion stakeholders. Talk us through your expected agenda and what other internal stakeholders from Sourcegraph might you want to include in these, and why.
4. Identifying Expansion Opportunities: A significant part of responsibility for this role will be identifying expansion opportunities based on uncovering new needs within our existing customers. What strategies would you employ personally to uncover and identify potential opportunity areas where we can solve new and additional problems for our customers? When thinking about qualifying a lead or opportunities what criteria would you personally use to assess the potential?

Hiring Manager Screen

During this stage of the interview, you will meet with the hiring manager. During this conversation they’ll seek to understand both your exposure to a technical product and audiences and how you lead in a fast-growth organization.

Cross-Functional Peer Collaboration

You’ll meet with a potential peer in an adjacent team with whom we want to understand how you build relationships and partner with other leaders and how you manage across adjacent teams.

Leadership & Team Management with 2 IC CEs

You’ll meet with two individual contributors on the CE team to learn about how you build relationships within a team and how you lead, mentor, and develop others.

Working Session: Leadership Scenarios Interview, Live Working Session Instructions

For this interview round, you will have an hour-long working session with the Customer Engineering leadership team. This working session will cover 4 prompts provided to candidates prior and is intended to help us understand how you approach both organizational and customer scenarios as a leader, spanning topics such as pipeline review, assessing the business, KPIs/metrics, and coaching & feedback.

Content working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• Details: during this stage in the interview process, we try to get a sense of your approach and thought process when reviewing writing drafts submitted by team members. You will be given a blog post draft to review for the first 30-minutes of the session, after which you and the hiring manager go through how you approached the piece and talk about the changes you made and why.

Technical Content working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• Details: during this stage in the interview process, we try to get a sense of how you think about content. You will be given (2) pieces of content to read through for the first 30 minutes of the session, after which, you and the hiring manager will take the last 30 minutes to go through what you liked, disliked, and what you would change about each piece and why.

Senior Digital Marketing Manager working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• The Goal: The purpose of this working session is to give us all a sense of what it’d be like to work together and make sure we have a shared understanding of the role and goals. This is not meant to be stressful or require a lot of preparation. Part 1: Methodology & Planning (20 Minutes)
• Coming out of our conversations we’ve taken an action item to better understand your campaign planning and activation methodology. - What are your ideas for a long-term, evergreen brand activation across the various digital channels? - What would a successful campaign look like? - How would you monitor and share results? Part 2: Creativity & Collaboration (20 Minutes)
• We’ve just wrapped up our H2 off site where the brand team led a brainstorm about big ideas for a second half awareness campaign focused on quick wins targeting developers.
• Top 3 creative ideas to fuel digital marketing campaigns directed at a DevOps Audience. These creative ideas can be part of the long-term brand awareness plays, or quarterly campaigns
• Include your timeline for concept-to-execution
• What would your goals be for these quick win campaigns?
• What are some key deliverables you’d expect to see from these campaigns?
• Who will you collaborate with and why?
• How would you approach bridging these awareness activities with contact acquisition/product sign-ups?
• NOTE: Please don’t go overboard on preparation, plans, or detail. A Google Doc outline is how we’d do this kind of thing internally, so that’s best. Doesn’t have to be pretty. If you prefer slides, that’s fine. This will be a casual back and forth conversation; not a formal presentation.

Program Manager, Demand Gen Campaigns working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• Part 1: Creativity & Collaboration (20 Minutes)
  • Coming out of our conversations we’ve taken an action item to better understand your creative campaign planning and activation methodology.
  • Problem: We need a meeting maker campaign to support sales pipeline goals. Instead of using traditional activation methods, we want this to be a product-led initiative.
    • Task: Create 3 product-led meeting maker campaigns to drive meetings to Sales
    • Audience: Developer Team leads, leaders, and senior leadership
  • Please include:
    • Your create ideas and what inspired them
    • Include your rough timeline for concept-to-execution
    • What channels will you use to activate?
    • Who will you collaborate with?
    • Do you have any out-of-the-box ways to get these in-market?
• Part 2: Data-Driven (20 Minutes)
  • Your meeting maker program is in-market and showing early signs that it’s going to be successful. The team is asking for data to understand how we’re measuring and planning to expand if it is successful.
    • Choose one of your meeting makers and consider the following:
    • What would a successful campaign look like?
    • When will it be time to change strategies?
    • How would you monitor and share results?
    • Which metrics are most important and why?
    • What are some key deliverables you’d expect to see?
• Part 3: Q&A

Developer Educator working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• During this stage in the interview process, we try to get a sense of your approach and thought process about curriculum and writing. You will be given a curriculum and short tutorial draft to review for the first 30 minutes of the session, after which you and Lisa will take the last 30 minutes to go through your thoughts about that approach and talk about your feedback and what you would add.

Product Marketing Manager working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• The goal of the working session is to give us all a sense of what it’d be like to work together and make sure we have a shared understanding of the role and goals. This is not meant to be stressful or require a lot of preparation.
• First, we’d like to cover some general stuff:
  • Your 20-second Sourcegraph pitch: Imagine a senior eng at your current company asked you what Sourcegraph is. We don’t expect this to be super polished or even 100% correct - we want to hear your spin on what we’re selling and the value proposition.
  • What do you need to be successful? (tools, resources/special budget for anything, specific commitments from other teams, anything from me, etc.)
• Then we’d like to hear, at a high level, how you would approach putting together a GTM plan for the [TBD Product] GA launch.
• This could easily take several hours, but we’re just looking for a 60-min conversation total (including the general stuff above). You don’t need to put together a full plan!
• Please don’t go overboard on preparation, plans, or detail. Clever ideas are awesome, but we’re looking for your process/framework/principles. A Google Doc outline is how we’d do this kind of thing internally, so that’s best. Doesn’t have to be pretty. If you prefer slides, that’s fine. This will be a casual back and forth conversation; not a formal presentation.
• Feel free to reach out to Andy with any questions.

Senior Customer Marketing Manager working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.

• The goal of the working session is to give us all a sense of what it’d be like to work together and make sure we have a shared understanding of the role and goals.

  • Part 1: Driving engagement with our Customer Advisory Board members The first part of the meeting will be with Andy Schumeister (Director of Product Marketing), Victoria Yunger (Product Marketing Lead, Enterprise), and Alex Isken (Product Marketing Manager, Cloud).

  • First, you’ll share your 20-second Sourcegraph pitch: Imagine a senior eng at your current company asked you what Sourcegraph is. We don’t expect this to be super polished or even 100% correct - we want to hear your spin on what we’re selling and the value proposition.

  • Then, we’d like to hear your ideas for how we can drive engagement with our Customer Advisory Board members in-between meetings in order to provide even more value for members.

  • Please don’t go overboard on preparation, plans, or detail. Clever ideas are awesome, but we’re also looking for your process/framework/principles. A Google Doc outline is how we’d do this kind of thing internally, so that’s best. Doesn’t have to be pretty. If you prefer slides, that’s fine. This will be a casual back and forth conversation; not a formal presentation. You’ll also have an opportunity to ask the team questions during this portion.

  • Part 2: Setting you up for success

  • Then, you’ll meet 1:1 with Andy where you’ll have a chance to discuss the role and share what you need to be successful: tools, resources/special budget for anything, specific commitments from other teams, anything from Andy, etc.)

Manager of Internal Communications working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• The goal of the working session is to give us all a sense of what it’d be like to work together and make sure we have a shared understanding of the role and goals. This is not meant to be stressful or require a lot of preparation.
• First, we’d like to cover some general stuff:
  • Your 20-second Sourcegraph pitch: Imagine a senior eng at your current company asked you what Sourcegraph is. We don’t expect this to be super polished or even 100% correct - we want to hear your spin on what we’re selling and the value proposition.
  • What do you need to be successful? (tools, resources/special budget for anything, specific commitments from other teams, anything from me, etc.)
• Then we’d like to hear, at a high level, how you would approach putting together Sourcegraph’s 60–90 minute Q1 kickoff this February.
• Q1 company kickoff
• This of course takes hours of planning, but we’re just looking for a 60 minute conversation total (including the general stuff above). You don’t need to put together a full plan!
• Some (hypothetical) updates to account for:
  • We missed our Q4 revenue target and are slightly under for the fiscal year, but current pipeline has us on track to hit Q1 goals
  • We’re updating the company travel policy from one individual trip per year anywhere in the world to collaborate with a coworker, to a regional meetup trip (west coast NA, east coast NA, EMEA)
• Please don’t go overboard on preparation, plans, or detail. Clever ideas are awesome, but we’re looking for your process/framework/principles. A Google Doc outline is how we’d start off content planning. Doesn’t have to be pretty. If you prefer slides, that’s fine. This will be a casual back and forth conversation; not a formal presentation.
• Feel free to reach out to Amie (amie.rotherham@sourcegraph.com) with any questions.

Senior People Partner working session

• Duration: 60-minutes.
• Our working session is designed to give us more insight into how you’d think about and approach typical scenarios you might be called on to provide support to managers on. We’ve detailed three scenarios for you to walk us through the way you’d think and respond to each scenario. For each scenario please walk us through:
  • How would you approach this situation and why? What risks or concerns does each scenario present?
  • Who would you involve, why and how?
  • What feedback would you give the manager concerned?
  • What, if anything, might be changed internally based on this situation arising?
• We will provide the detailed scenarios via email 24 hours before your scheduled interview.
• Note: you don’t need to submit anything (in writing or presentation) ahead of the interview - just structure your thoughts and talk us through it! We’ll ask questions as they come up.

Product manager

Product designer

Product Design Intern

User Researcher

Sales Development Representative:

Enterprise Account Executive

Regional Sales Director

Recruiter assignment

• Interviewer(s): NA—this is a take home assignment.
• Duration: we expect this to take no more than 1 hour.
• Details: we want to ensure we understand your approach to proactively reaching out to and engaging with passive talent. Instructions:
• Step 1. You are the newly assigned recruiter for the [pick a job on our website] role. As a first step, you’ll want to have an intake meeting with the Hiring Manager. What questions do you plan to ask to gain a full understanding of the role?
• Step 2. We have posted the job and have received zero applicants, so we need to go out and recruit the right person. Please identify 5 target candidates and explain 1) how you found them (what search string(s) did you use) and 2) why are you targeting them specifically?
• Step 3. As we know, rarely do we hear back from a candidate after our 1st message or call. Pick one of the above profiles and please describe your outreach “campaign.” What steps will you take to engage with this candidate? Please 1) include example inmails, emails, voicemails etc, and 2) please explain your approach and why you chose to craft your outreach campaign in this way. Your ultimate goal is to secure a call with the candidate.
• Step 4. Good news! The candidate you messaged in step 3 is interested in having an exploratory conversation. How do you describe/sell Sourcegraph to them?