Blog: AI at Menlo - We’re Still Figuring It Out

Upcoming Events

Lean Solutions Summit - September 15th-17th

This fall, Rich will be a keynote speaker at the Lean Solutions Summit in Grand Rapids, Michigan happening September 15th-17th!

This year’s theme, Better Together: People + Innovation, is all about how empowered people and strong systems create meaningful, lasting progress.

Rich's talk, Winning with Humanity: The Joyful Culture Imperative, will dive into a topic he's been pursuing for the last 25 years: what happens when organizations stop treating people as a variable to manage and start treating them as the point of the whole thing?

We'd love to see you there! You can use this link to learn more and register, and use code Rich100 for $100 off registration. 

Shingo Discover Excellence Workshop (Virtual) - October 7th-8th

We are excited to announce that Menlo will once again be the host site for a virtual Shingo Workshop this fall! Discover Excellence is the two-day, foundational workshop in the Shingo Workshop Series. Through engaging discussions, real world case studies, and virtual Go & Observe tours of Menlo, participants will explore how to align culture, systems, and leadership to create lasting results.

Learn more or register here!

Trees, Babies, and Very Long Term Planning
And what all three have in common

This month, we’re sharing an article discussing the importance of not just planning, not just long term planning, but very, very long term planning. Charlotte Hajer from The Long Now shares the story of the oak beams at New College in Oxford. Founded and built in 1379, the school’s historical dining hall features oak beams that support its ceiling. Over the past century, the beams started to rot. However, the original builders had anticipated this; it was discovered that the college’s foresters had planted trees on the college’s grounds to replace the rotten beams when the time came. This plan had been passed down from forester to forester for over 500 years, and it finally came to fruition! 

While the historical accuracy of this tale may be debated, its message remains relevant: it’s important to think about how the decisions made today can be sustainable over long periods of time. At Menlo, we approach our processes as ongoing experiments rather than fixed solutions. We know the world will continue to evolve, so we continually evaluate, refine, and adapt our ways of working to ensure they remain effective and sustainable for the long term.

Recently, we have been looking at long term planning in a new way, as we prepare to welcome some new Menlo babies into the world! Menlo baby #34 arrived this week, with #35, #36, and #37 expected soon. We are super excited for our team members who are starting these new chapters of their lives, and while 2050 may seem a long way off, we'll be ready when it's time for the next generation of Menlonians to join us!

Read the full article here!

The Ann Arbor Advantage
A closer look at what makes our community unique

Recently, our CEO, Rich Sheridan, was interviewed as part of a Purpose Jobs article called "Ann Arbor's Tech Talent Advantage" to highlight why Ann Arbor is a great place to build a tech team. As a company that has been in Downtown Ann Arbor for the last 25 years, we may be a little biased on the benefits of Ann Arbor, but with the help of Ann Arbor SPARK and Natalie Fang of Nochi Studios, this article highlights many benefits of living, working, or starting a business in our town!

Ann Arbor offers the kind of ecosystem every team hopes to find: deep talent, a connected founder community, walkable downtown energy, strong schools, and a quality of life that helps people put down roots. Whether or not you're in tech, if you've ever considered moving to Ann Arbor, we'd recommend checking out the article below. 

Read the full article here!

The Gales of November
The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Author: John U. Bacon

Recommended by: Lisa Ho, Head of Delivery and Principal Project Manager

While we typically review business-related books, summer is also a time to read for fun. This month I read a gem of a book from local Ann Arbor author, John Bacon. I couldn’t help but convince our Menlo Bits team to let me share it with you in hopes you might enjoy it as much as I have.  

The Gales of November is a historical non-fiction book that tells the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald (“The Fitz”) – a Great Lakes freighter that sunk in Lake Superior during a massive storm in November of 1975. Bacon is our history teacher and his curriculum for the reader includes subjects such as:

• The Fitz: Not Just any Freighter – What Made This Ship Special
• The Roles and Responsibilities of Working on a Great Lakes Freighter
• Exploring the Ins and Outs of the Great Lakes Shipping Industry
• Risks and Rewards of Working on the Great Lakes
• Canal Locks: A System for Transporting Ships from One Great Lake to Another
• Re-enactment of the Fateful Journey – What May Have Caused the Fitz’s Demise?

As a Midwesterner, it was appealing to me to learn so much about our Great Lakes and how vital the shipping that occurs on them is. For example – did you know that the Great Lakes contain 20% of the world’s fresh water? Did you also know that during World War II the Great Lakes shipping industry was crucial to delivering ore to produce the aluminum needed for the war effort?

This story is a hard one to tell, as it deals with the loss of 29 lives. Bacon, however, does not take telling this story lightly and honors each victim and their living family members. The reader is introduced to each crew member, what his role on the ship was, what was important in his life, and what led him to serve on the Fitz. Bacon’s storytelling is informed by the vast number of interviews he conducted with family members and those who knew the crew. He received their blessing to tell this tale and help people to remember the crew for who they were as family men, young men seeking adventure, or those who fell in love with being on the sea.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in local history and learning new things. Now, for those of you who are left saying, “I was expecting a business-related book review,” – let me also share that John Bacon has published many books and quite a few are business books. I will offer up a leadership book he authored called “Let Them Lead: Unexpected Lessons in Leadership from America’s Worst High School Hockey Team” as one to consider adding to your reading list. If you read either of these books, I'd love to hear what you think.

Grab a copy here!

If you know Menlo at all, you've probably heard about our unique, hands-on hiring process. Traditionally, it includes three steps: the Extreme Interview, a paid 1-Day Interview, and a paid 3-Week Trial.

The Extreme Interview allows us to observe many candidates working in pairs to assess cultural fit, while the 1-Day Interview pairs a candidate with two different Menlo team members to evaluate both technical baseline and culture fit. As we've recently been hiring for more senior talent, we found we needed to find a way to evaluate both technical and cultural fit quicker than an Extreme Interview or individual 1-Day Interviews would allow.

So, we decided to run a new hiring experiment called "Flash Pairing,” which combines elements of both the Extreme Interview and the 1-Day Interview. The goal was to conduct a deeper assessment of both technical skills and pairing skills before committing to a full-day interview. We invited 6 Senior Developer candidates in for a 3 hour "Flash Pairing" interview. Each candidate rotated through 45 minute pairing sessions with 3 different Menlo developers while working on the same development story card. This format gave our team the opportunity to quickly assess how candidates approach technical problems, as well as how they perform in a paired work environment.

We ran this experiment for the first time earlier this week, and it was a success! Within the 45 minute pairing sessions, our developers felt they were able to get a good read on the candidates pairing dynamic and "kindergarten skills." They were also able to begin assessing technical skills, including how quickly candidates could navigate an unfamiliar codebase, outline an implementation plan, and troubleshoot challenges in a condensed timeframe. We're excited to continue running and iterating on this experiment in the near future! 

Have an experiment you'd like featured in the Menlo Bits?
Email us!