Team Craft, Iteration, and Resilience

My partnership with Kerb began when our Product team was re-forming: we’d hired a VP after a long struggle without one, we were moving from a flat team to a much larger, tiered one, and we were defining how to help each other and the company succeed.

Having attended many similar-but-different meetings in my career, I went in with low expectations. I was delighted and surprised to see it become something unique, effective and inspiring. Kerb started from a place of empathy and listening, discovering what each person needed through conversation and incisive questions.

What was unique about Kerb’s facilitation is that we never just achieved the desired outcomes — we achieved our 0utcomes through a journey that brought us together and provided us with shared language to talk about it, tools to help make the outcome real, and an immediate and sustainable shift in how we thought towards positive shared goals.

We left our retreats closer as a team, with a clear mission for ourselves, and a path to success we were excited about. I didn’t entirely appreciate how good a job Kerb had done until later, when over and over, in increasingly challenging situations that were also increasingly out of the team’s control, she would seek to understand and then identify places where we could act, and then help us discover a way forward. Each time, she’d offer a structure, adapt it as we learned by doing, bring tools and ways to think about problems, and help guide the discussion without influencing it, nudging us only when required to help us get unstuck.

As a result of her ongoing partnership with our teams, I saw a cultural shift from finger-pointing and poor results driven by fear and lack of accountability to a unified team where if someone stumbled on the trail, others would help them up and take things off their pack to help.

Derek | Senior Product Manager | Portland, Oregon