# Testimonies  (Don't Take Our Word for It)

### Don't Take Our Word for It

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* **Jeremy Swarts (SVP Sales)**
  * **💬** "So for me what super exciting is I am a better manager than I was before, literally chalk and cheese. Anything I'm given to do as an assignment now in our group, I have a framework or an ecosystem to be able to take it in a sequential way to fix things, change things, and add value. Whereas in the past, before Remote University, if you'd thrown those assignments to me, it was a little bit of a lottery in terms of what I would do first and where I would focus. So it's made me a better manager."

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* **Chris Steele (SVP Engineering)**
  * **💬** "Beyond that, there's new skills acquisitions that you get. Working with distributed teams, whether they're colocated or not, you have to know how to play and how to talk to people, how to inspect the work and there is just a lot of small things that go into making someone super effective. The way that we do distributed teams here is I think the future."
  * "If you have a passion for learning and for self improvement, there's an opportunity here that you may not have had for a long time in your career. And certainly that was true for me. I was able to get the kind of growth that I haven't had in years and that was just super enjoyable and rewarding."

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*   **Danny Bakhshi (SVP Finance)**&#x20;

    * **💬** "In many ways, I'm more skilled than I've ever been. It's also refreshed skills and talents I haven't used in 20 or 30 years. it's exercising muscles I'd forgotten I even had."
    * "It's been a pretty profound and intense experience.....it's also been the most stimulating, thought-provoking, energizing, and tiring four weeks. The new techniques, the skills, the way of doing things, the culture of the company. It's much more dynamic than anything I've ever experienced before and that's been very energizing. It's meant that I gained skills that I've never had."



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* **Brandy McCormick (VP Sales)**
  * **💬** "This one is highly personal. I am at the Vice President level and in other companies, you need at least a decade of work in there to \[be promoted to SVP]......I just thought that was something I would not be achieving. Another 10 years? That just wasn't in the cards. And I have to tell you......based upon what I've learned and the success I've had from these frameworks, this is now a goal I legitimately have. This could be something I can attain the next couple of years. In my entire two and a half decades of work, this was something I didn't even think was possible."&#x20;

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* **Antoine Acklin (SVP Engineering)**
  * **💬** "Going through the process of Manager RemoteU has been, I would say, one of the most impactful and life changing moments not just of my life, but in my career. There are three things......I use today and I see my self carrying forward until I stop working."
  * "Quality is always what we want to do for our customers and it's something that I take personal pride in. What it allows me to do is give really impactful, direct, and meaningful feedback to my ICs. And not just to my ICs but to my customers....when we have our quality conversations, we don't talk about how many units we ship. We talk about how those customers deal with those units, how they receive them...For me, it's something that I was missing in my past lives....we were missing that quality element."

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* Bhartendu Sinha (SVP Engineering)
  * **💬** "With 26 years of experience behind me, I initially came to MRU thinking it's a requirement we need to do to work at Crossover, but by the end of MRU, I realized that it's something worth doing just for the sake of itself. It added so much value to me as a professional that a. I think it extended my IT career by 10 years.....we've all become generalists right. We could manage at a high level and could not manage at the nuts and bolts, detailed level. And that is something you need in your career."
  * "The visibility that you get in an office. You think that you will not get that in a remote setup. it's actually the other way around. The amount of visibility I got into the work that engineers and doing and how they are doing that work, and how to do it myself, is several times higher than sitting in my office and walking around asking how people are doing."

### Great Articles on the Future of Work

* [The Key Themes that Matter for the Future of Work](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-key-themes-that-matter-for-the-future-of-work)
* [Makers, Don't Let Yourself be Forced into the 'Manager' Schedule](https://blog.nuclino.com/makers-don-t-let-yourself-be-forced-into-the-manager-schedule)&#x20;
