Joining Murmur

Highlights

• In October 2020, I'm joining Aaron Dignan and Ariel Norling as the founding engineer to build Murmur.
• Murmur Labs Is a platform for creating working agreements within teams asynchronously and collaboratively.
• We're creating a self-organizing and self-managing team.

On Tuesday, October 13th, I'll be joining the team (as hire #2) at Murmur to build collaborative software to help teams decide how they're going to work together. We're doing this by guiding them through the process of making working agreements where everyone consents if it's safe to try.

Aaron Dignan (author of Brave New Work and Founder of The Ready) reached out to me to talk about Self Management a few weeks ago and he introduced me to the vision for Murmur. When he asked me "what do you think?" the first thought in my mind was "my whole adult life has led me to this moment of saying 'this was what I was made to do.'".

Thankfully, Aaron thought so too, because he asked me if building the Murmur platform was something I wanted to be a part of! As an alternative, he gave me the opportunity to simply give advice about how I would build the software. If I did decide to join, the decisions would be the ones I'd want to make anyways.

I wasn't looking for something new, in fact, I was preparing to dig into my path at Webflow deeper doing this same type of work, but within teams rather than as software. Because I wasn't looking, I had mixed emotions: I knew this was a rare opportunity that I would regret not taking but I had also started to settle in to making an impact at Webflow with people I enjoy working with on a product I think will also change the future of innovation.

After a week of grappling, I told Aaron that I'm all in.

I'm excited to be a part of the inception of Murmur and excited to see what's to come in building software to help teams decide how to work together in a way that puts humans at the center of the process.

Summary

Where are you headed?

A startup called Murmur.

What will you be doing?

Building a platform for teams to collaborate on how they decide to work together. I'll be involved in designing and building the software and helping to create a team.

What's interesting about it?

• This is a stepping stone to helping teams and companies move towards self-organizing. One of my greatest passions at work is helping teams do the meta work of deciding how they work together, work on process improvement and increase clarity.
• This platform doesn't exist today. I'll be involved in helping get the software topology and software systems up and running and building out a team to help it start and help it scale.
• This will be the second self-organizing structured organization I've been a part of but the first one where there's someone who knows what works and what doesn't and how to figure out what works and what doesn't in a way that makes me confident we'll do it the most authentic way.

What's scary about it?

As always, I'll reach for an analogy involving canoes...

Every time I've changed jobs in the past, I've brought my canoe to an existing reservoir and helped clean it up or make it better, but the hole was dug and the water was there.

With Murmur, I'm coming into a plot of land, a map, a blueprint and some shovels and the reservoir has to be dug and filled. For me, that comes with a great amount of responsibility.