Introducing: Cross-Functional and Friendly

Dan here. I 'm excited to announce that we're introducing a new podcast at Every: Cross-Functional and Friendly—a show where three seasoned startup veterans from sales, marketing, and product backgrounds discuss how to work together across functions to solve problems as your startup scales. It's an issue that's close to my heart as Every gets larger, and I think Cross-Functional and Friendly can be an essential guidebook for leaders looking to manage that process well.

New episodes come out every Tuesday. If you're curious to learn more, read on for a description straight from your hosts: Kristen Habacht, Nikita Miller, and Stella Garber.

One of the hardest parts to get right in any company is cross-functional collaboration. Marketing, sales, product… sometimes it feels like every team is speaking a different language. Leads, MQLs, OKRs—there’s no shortage of acronyms to learn, either. 

When different parts of a company don’t work well together, it can mean chaos and destruction (especially within a startup!). On the other hand, when these different teams do sync up, things move quickly and lasting friendships are formed. (Trust us, we know 🙂.)

Essentially, what it all comes down to is the relationship between cross-functional leaders and their teams. 

This is where we come in. Kristen, Nikita, and I (Stella) led sales, product, and marketing , respectively, at Trello before it was acquired by Atlassian. Over the years, we’ve built a shared vocabulary that helped our teams work toward one cohesive goal. 

Cross-Functional and Friendly is a podcast where we talk about everything we’ve learned over years of working together across different parts of a growing company. The goal is to help you have more meaningful interactions with your cross-functional peers. (It also happens to be a great excuse for us to spend more time together again!)

Kristen has gone on to become COO of Shogun, Nikita is the SVP of product at The Knot Worldwide, and I’m the co-founder of a new startup called hoop. We’re all also active angel investors and advisors to different startups, and we see them struggling with the same set of challenges: who their first hires should be, how to instill processes as they scale, how to foster great cross-functional relationships between teams, and what to do when things aren’t going so well.

In this podcast, we’ll explore all these issues and much more—sharing real-life examples, actionable best practices, and tweet-worthy hot takes. By the end of this season, you and your cross-functional counterparts will be toasting to the success of your company at an after-work dinner that HR did not organize. 

Meet your hosts

Kristen Habacht

Kristen is currently the president and COO at Shogun. Prior to Shogun, she was the VP of sales at Trello, helping build the team from the first hire through the $425M acquisition by Atlassian in 2017. She then went on to run the AMER/APAC sales team at Atlassian, and later built out and ran their Global Enterprise Development Sales team. She also sits on the board of GuideCX and Passion.io and has been an advisor for various startups around product-led growth (PLG) go-to-market motions and enterprise sales.

Nikita Miller

Nikita has spent her career in product management, building products that users love and teams where people do the best work of their lives. She leads with curiosity, compassion, and trust. Her teams—which have spanned from early-stage startups to multinational corporations and from edtech to enterprise SaaS—have consistently delighted users and outperformed competition. Nikita is currently SVP of product at The Knot Worldwide. She is also an angel investor, advisor, and board member.

Stella Garber

Stella is cofounder and CEO of hoop, a new startup that helps teams make better decisions faster. Previously, she led marketing at Trello from its inception as a company to its acquisition by Atlassian in 2017 and beyond. She is an angel investor in 30-plus companies and advises venture firms and startups on early-stage marketing.

Listen to the first episode

In the first episode, Stella, Nikita, and Kristen tackle a question that they get asked all the time by startup founders. How should they go about making their first hires?

The trio explores how founders should think about making their first marketing, sales, and product hires. They also unpack the immediate (and crucial) next step—how those early hires should interact with their cross-functional peers. This is critical for startups—if sales and marketing aren’t aligned, things are going to get very ugly, very fast. Stick around until the end for actionable best practices.