No external leadership hires, no org KPIs: the unique management style of Fabien Pinckaers at Odoo
I’ve probably listened to over a 100 founder interviews at this point in my life. The recent 20VC episode with Fabien Pinckaers is easily in my top three. Fabien is the founder and CEO of Odoo, currently a $600 million ARR company. His description of the culture and management philosophy is unlike anything I’ve heard and so is worth paying attention to. Here were my favourite bits:
> Odoo is extremely protective of their culture and they NEVER hire external leaders. They only do internal promotions. Fabien: “We are a startup that grew super fast. So we have a culture that is very strong. One way to keep the culture alive is to avoid having these external managers and team leaders coming with their habits. They’re probably good habits but they won’t be suited to our environment.”
> They have over 5000 employees globally, but the average employee is … only 26 years old! Fabien believes that young people are more capable than they’re given credit for and that they can be coached to become very good at their job.
> People retention is key to growing your business. The productivity of an employee who has stayed for 4-5 years is more than double of what they did in their first or second year. So keeping people in the company for longer is extremely important.
> Hiring in tier 2 cities is a great hack for better employee retention. Fabien says about their Buffalo office: “… when you are next to Google and Microsoft and Apple. How can you get the best people with that? And then you have a higher turnover than in other cities. In Buffalo, we have no issue. Nobody is leaving. People are happy. They have a very high salary for the area. Retention is very good.”
> Odoo’s geographical expansion strategy is peculiar. They first find the right person to lead a new office and then basically set up the office wherever that person wants to go. Again, the emphasis is on the right person and culture fit more than anything.
> Team leaders at Odoo are not there to manage people. Their main goal is coaching and helping the team become more productive. Fabien: “What I expect from a team leader is to just make your team become better. That’s the only objective I have for a team leader. And so in order to do that, you have to be the best of the team. There is no way you can make a team of developers become a better developer if you are not the best developer of the team yourself.”
> Fabien thinks KPIs are overrated, especially in product and engineering: “When you work with people, you know who’s good or not. You don’t need to put a KPI.”
He discusses a story of how in the US office, some of the team members were struggling with a few consulting projects. So he got his best guy from Belgium, where the company is headquartered, to come in and help. The then Director in the US was someone who was insistent that the best way to manage the team was to have KPIs and measure individuals based on their performance. “So, I couldn’t convince him to drop his KPIs, and so I waited to see what happened. He did his KPI, and after three months, the guy who had the worst KPIs was actually the top expert I got from Belgium to deliver all the projects. And it was obvious – it was obvious for the whole team that this guy was the best, yet on the KPIs, he was the worst. It’s just that we gave him the worst projects.”
> On how to recruit young people: “We don’t look at resumes. We assess them on the core job. So if a developer, we’ll ask him to develop. A salesperson, we’ll ask him to do a demo and pitch the product, just that. We also do an IQ test, and it’s the second best predictive KPI on the performance of the person.”
Watch the whole episode here: