Day In The Life: Meet Darryl Wright Of Betterment

Darryl Wright
Customer Experience Supervisor, Betterment
New York, NY
Twitter: @betterment

9:00am: My alarm goes off blaring Early in the Morning by The Gap Band. I check my Instagram with one eye open for about five minutes, mostly catching up on what my friends in other countries are up to (many are in Europe, so by 9am on the East Coast, my timeline is already pretty interesting).

10:00am: My second alarm – Go by Common – goes off. This is my signal to leave my apartment and head to the train. I stop by my local bodega to pick up a raisin bagel with a sausage patty and eggs, my usual on-the-go breakfast. Living in West Harlem, I have a half-hour train commute, which I like to spend listening to podcasts. Today, it’s an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. Other favorites include Another Round by BuzzFeed, WBEZ’s This American Life, and Code Switch.

11:00am: I take the elevator to the fourth floor, give a nod to Pam (the world’s greatest receptionist), and open up my MacBook Air at my desk. I glance at my calendar, and once I have an idea of what my day looks like, I pull up Trello to rearrange the priorities of the day (which live on a board I very creatively titled “Top Priorities of the Day”).

11:30am: I meet with one of our engineers, who’s helping me automate a manual process that I’ve been overseeing for almost two years. Automation and optimization is key from a user experience perspective – and not just for our customers. Especially as we scale, we really value internal automations that free us up to do other things. This automation project involves migrating retirement accounts and assets to our customers’ bank institutions of choice. It’s a really productive and efficient meeting. I leave feeling good about this update, which will go into production soon.

12:00pm: Back at my desk, I sort through my inbox and catch up on messages on Slack, the internal chat system we use. Next up: I prep for a few interviews I’ll be conducting later in the afternoon for open customer experience associate roles. I actually love interviewing; having the chance to sit down with smart, innovative candidates who are excited about us is very refreshing, and today I’m also coaching one of my colleagues who’s about to give her first interview. Betterment encourages ownership and growth, so it’s rewarding to see a teammate excited to take on this responsibility too.

1:00pm: I step out for lunch with a teammate. There’s a lot of great food in the neighborhood. Today we go for some comfort food at Hill Country Chicken.

2:00pm: Time to meet the first candidate I’ll be interviewing. We chat for about 30 minutes; after the interview, I score the candidate using an evaluation product from Greenhouse. It’s interesting to be on the other side of the interview process and hear how candidates approach problem-solving. We look for intelligent people who can clearly articulate their thoughts and have an interesting approach to solving problems. On top of that, we look for personality. Because we work hard and very closely with one another, we need to know that employees can perform well in a meeting while being open to sharing best practices with the rest of the company.

3:00pm: I sit down with our chief operations officer in Radio Station – one of the many themed conference rooms in our office – to discuss team dynamics, current responsibilities, pain points, and our strategy as we scale. In a high-growth company, scaling can be a challenge, and it is key to formalize a strategy to remain as efficient as we are today several months and years down the road.

4:00pm: We have a diversity and inclusion (D&I) meeting in The Pit. This is another highlight. In the first portion of our meeting, which is held bi-weekly, we discuss an article about why organization's’ diversity initiatives fail. The article is particularly relevant to us, as we are in the inception stage of our own initiatives and need to learn from where others have gone wrong. We meet for an hour and brainstorm action items to move our work forward.

5:00pm: I meet with our product marketing manager to learn about using a particular Mailchimp integration to streamline a manual email experience tied to a core transactional aspect of Betterment. The test we created worked, which is a small efficiency victory for the day. I relay this great news back to my team.

5:30pm: I have a one-on-one with one of my five direct reports. Any chance I have to gather all of the pain points of my reports and channel that into productive plans of action is a win for me. Review season is around the corner for us, and my main focus for this one-on-one is to provide a framework around how he should be approaching his performance. We wrap up by setting some concrete goals.

6:00pm: This is the part of the day when I realize that I haven’t eaten anything since 1:00. I hop online and order a kale caesar salad from Sweetgreen for pick up and then walk to go get it.

7:00pm: I get back to the office, grab a beer from our fridge, and head back to my desk to check my productivity board to see which tasks I need to complete tonight, along with which ones I can push to tomorrow. I start packing up but end up deep in conversation with one of our lead engineers about a feature we are thinking of launching. It’s really helpful to understand what features are in the pipeline and what the implications might be for our customers.

8:45pm: I head out with my headphones in, listening to Blue In Green by Miles Davis (a great tune to decompress). I get on the train and switch from Miles to an episode of Radiolab – another one of my favorite podcasts.

10:00pm: Back home, I toss my bag onto the chair in the corner of my room and start to wind down. After a quick shower and an hour of 30 Rock on Netflix, I call it a night.

Image courtesy of Darryl Wright