Mayank Mondays
Originally posted at VZC Research on May 6, 2019.
The core tenet of Verizon Connect is, obviously, connection. Because we work in the vehicle telematics industry, we are focused on developing products that help connect people to cars, from moms that want to know the whereabouts of their teen drivers to business owners who need to manage their fleet.
As you can gather, our User Experience (UX) team spends a great deal of time researching the needs and wants of drivers. Last year alone, we clocked in over 500 hours of customer interviews and produced 60 research studies.
We’re a pretty lean team (more about them later), so it took a great amount of dedication and vision to get us where we are. I also have to attribute our success to Mayank Sharma. He’s a mechanical engineer-turned-anthropologist who founded the UX Design and Research Director role for our Consumer business and currently serves as Product Director of our Devices Portfolio. He also happens to be our boss.
Mayank in Patagonia, being super cool
As our leader, he has developed a unified culture of creativity and excitement, and this culture has allowed our team to make great strides in transforming and bettering our business.
Connection is also a hallmark of Harvard Business Review-approved management. Connector managers are leaders who round out their teams by building relationships. This encourages skill-sharing, collaboration, and team-based wins. HBR cites that Connector managers are more like coaches than dictators; they provide feedback in their industry of expertise, but they also ask questions and seek council from other subject-matter experts. Impressively, when compared to other managerial styles, Connector managers are three times as likely to lead high-performing teams.
One way that Mayank has built such a connected culture is by teaching our teams to speak the same language.
I mean this literally; he is a catchphrase machine. The reason these “Sharmisms” stick is not only because they’re funny or witty, but there is also a purpose behind them. It’s his unique way to relay overarching business goals clearly and quickly. For instance, when he wants us to re-frame our way of thinking about a problem, he reminds our team that we are the “tip of the spear,” which is code for, “ask exploratory questions, broach new topics and prod information from seemingly unlikely places”. As a result of our spear-like work, we now support research across all lines of our business and are impacting real development decisions.
There are many more sayings that he uses to distill complex direction, like “be annoying,” “always be selling,” and “increase the volume,” so, naturally, we turned it into a game called Sharmingo!
Our Sharmingo card!
During team meetings, a winner can call out, “Sharmingo!” if they make a row of these sayings on their card. This has not only given our team something fun to do during sometimes mundane, corporate meetings, but it has given us a shorthand of sorts, bringing us into alignment on what our team needs to do, and connecting us even further.
This was our inspiration for this series, Mayank Mondays. In the posts that follow, you will meet the members of our team as they use their favorite “Sharmism” to share their work and what they’re most passionate about. And in this small way, now you are connected to us.