I Manifested It: Why I Joined SupportLogic

Liz Bronson

VP of People, SupportLogic

Timing is everything, and sometimes the universe gives you signs that you just have to follow. I feel like all of the signs led me to my new role as the VP of People at SupportLogic. The “Support” in SupportLogic is no joke, and this product is supporting enterprise customers and delivering immediate ROI in ways I have never seen in 15 years working with technology companies.

Let’s back up.

After 8 years of consulting and some long-term engagements leading hiring and advising for series A-D start-ups, I felt like something was missing. I enjoyed my role as a trusted advisor, but as a “get things done” person, I yearned for ownership over processes and people decisions. Ultimately I could make recommendations, but when push came to shove I wasn’t on the team. My 2021 New Year’s resolution was to put my desire to go back in-house into the universe and see what happened. In the meantime, I had some awesome consulting clients, a fantastic team working for me, and with the uncertainty of 2020 fresh in my mind and kids going between home and school, I took a “let’s see what happens” approach.

To prepare for this potential shift, I did what Kat Troyer and I preach on our Real Job Talk podcast, I made my “must-have list” for a full-time role. On it included:

• A company changing the lives of their customers for the better
• A commitment to having a collaborative remote-first environment
• Pay and benefits that demonstrate caring about employees
• Smart, kind, and open team members whom I can learn from and teach
• A leadership team who demonstrates an understanding of the importance of retaining, not just hiring, employees
• Open minds and creative ideas around how we can build a people-first organization

Fast forward….this Summer, one of the books I read was Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. It’s about a woman who worked in Support at a few Bay Area start-ups from 2013-2016. She talks about her experiences of sexism, of being put down for not being technical, and the assumptions she had to combat from engineering about Support being “lesser than”.  Having started my VMware career recruiting for the Support team, I knew these experiences were far from fiction. I thought about how hard Support teams work, and how they are truly the unsung heroes to both customers and their companies. Joining a company that is focusing on transforming the role of Support by helping them prioritize workloads, avoid escalations, and reduce organizational stress was very much aligned with my reading reflections and where I wanted to have a positive impact at this point in my career.

Fast forward a few more weeks, and a friend from VMware who knew I was open to a full-time role introduced me to Krishna saying that they “needed my help”. In our first meeting, I saw that this company is different. I met with other company leaders along with long-time employees, and they told me stories of happy customers, incredible results, easy implementation, and so much more.

Throughout my interviews, some with trusted friends like Joe Andrews and Preetham Gopalaswamy, I learned the company can’t continue their mission without great people. How this company views their people leadership position, and how they truly believe that employees are their #1 asset through policies and practices, is completely aligned with how I see the People function. Each leader I met joined this company for  personal growth opportunities as well as the potential for overall company growth. I met people who want to hire well, but who want to lead better, and who are willing to invest the right resources into our people in order to build a team that will grow with us and be a long-term part of our success. 

Easier said than done, but with intentions come actions, and there’s a huge challenge in front of us as we prepare to scale. Having the opportunity to build people programs and processes to support our team and our customers is exactly the role I was manifesting. First on the agenda is to come together to formalize and publish our company values so that we can live by them and make decisions that align with who we are and who we want to be. We need to build a decisive recruiting process, implement HR systems, and formalize our performance norms. We need to make sure that our collaboration is inclusive, and that people have the growth opportunities they need.