"Joy and challenge."

Those are two things Angela Guedes advises it's crucial to find in your work life.

Angela is the talented Head of Customer Engagement at Barcelona-based Typeform.

Angela has risen the ranks through a variety of customer-focused roles: Support Agent, VoC Analyst, CX Manager, Head of CX & Insights, and her current role.

She's constantly posting helpful content on LinkedIn. Recently, she posted this gem:

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Which shows the power of a valued partner in the B2B space—which is increasingly recognised as relationship-first.

We caught up with Angela to find out her hard-earned life lessons.

In only 426 words, Angela shares:

• What she wish she knew before starting...
• Why her biggest professional failure taught her to never value paycheck over satisfaction...
• Her advice to new industry professionals...

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Hey, Angela.

1. What's your work routine?

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I'm most productive in the morning, so I preserve the first hours of the day for thinking. Normally, it's reviewing articles, blog posts, or book notes that I collected recently and see in which ways these learnings could be applied at work: improve processes, how we communicate with customers, even inspire new projects.
From around 11am onwards, my time is mostly spent on meetings (1on1, project update and a few ad-hoc), following up with Slack and email requests and helping my team with customer and project escalations.

2. What do you know about your work now that you wish you’d known when you first started?

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I wished I had complained less about not having the shining tools or the fancy dashboards. Don't get me wrong, they are very important and can exponentially improve our impact. But when we're starting something new, without having previous experience, looking for the best tool or dashboard will probably prevent us from testing quickly and learning fast. Start manually and then scale.

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3. What did your biggest professional failure teach you?

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Never work for just a paycheck. The only time I was fired was because I really didn't enjoy the work I was doing. So I had no motivation to do a good job or improve. I would gladly take a pay cut now than work again in something that didn't bring me any satisfaction.

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4. What would you tell your younger self if you could?

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Preserve your time more. I know I got where I am today for saying yes to most projects and requests for my time. And yes, that's important to give you exposure and help you find out what you're good at. But at some point, it prevents your ability to go deep. Expertise compounds over time, so we need to start focusing at some point to reach a high level.

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5. What book has helped you the most over your career?

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That's a very tough one, as I'm an avid reader. So I'll go back to the very first book I read when I started working in Customer Success: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. His passion for creating amazing experiences for his customers and empowering his employees to do what was needed to reach that goal was the first sight that I was in a exciting industry.

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6. And your parting piece of advice?‍

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We spend a lot of our time at work, so it's crucial that we work in something AND with people that bring us joy and challenge us in a daily basis.