Doing Good Work Is Not Enough if No One Understands It

Cristina Cordova, Linear's chief operating officer, learned the lesson during over seven years at Stripe, an engineering-driven company where she helped create the partnerships team. She was closing deals, but she came to believe that results alone did not determine how the work was valued.

Recalling those years, she put it bluntly. Hitting a target was not the same as being valued for it. “It doesn't really have anything to do with how much work you do,” she said. What mattered just as much was how that work was perceived.

As Cordova tells it, the gap was straightforward: many colleagues did not know what the partnerships job was. As Cordova put it, “it also means something different at every company.” So she set out to educate them, one conversation at a time. She would explain who she was talking to, what that partner might add, and how a deal was progressing. Over time, she could point to a partner and say it represented a certain share of Stripe's overall business, and then, she said, people started to really get it.

She found that explaining the work helped shape how she and the function were seen, as much as doing the work itself. She said she worked on communicating effectively depending on where listeners were coming from, whether they were engineers or not, and on how she and the function were perceived over time.

For her, that meant she had to do both: get a lot done and explain what it meant. Alongside that effort to be understood, she also relied on long hours. At 24, with no connections, no network to bring, and very little skill or experience, she believes the only asset she had was the ability to work hard and produce a lot. She stayed in the office late many nights, sitting next to engineers and iterating, with little mentorship and no one holding her hand through the process.