How to Build a Modern Growth Oriented Organization
C-Suite leaders from Taplytics, Happynest, Algolia, and Foundersplace.co discuss how to build a modern, growth-oriented organization. Watch the webinar here.
Todd:
We’ve got three fantastic speakers and what I love about this session more than anything is it’s three C-suite voices altogether. Oftentimes we get the CMO talking into how to talk to the C-suite or the CEO. We get the CEO saying how they want to work with the CMO, but seldom do you get all three of these voices of executive, marketing and revenue altogether in one topic.
So we can talk about what it’s like to build this growth modern organization. I’m going to let our speakers introduce themselves and then we’ll get in.
Jeanne:
My name is Jeanne Hopkins and I’m responsible for revenue at Happynest, which is an on-demand laundry service pickup, and next day delivery. We’re in 25 states plus DC. I’ve been a CMO at many companies. I’ve been at the executive level and what I like to do more than anything is build teams. I really like to build the team with the culture to create a legacy for the business, so that’s something we’re really excited to talk about today.
Aaron:
My name is Aaron, I’m one of the co-founders and CEO at Taplytics. Taplytics is a feature management and experimentation platform that works across any channel whether it be mobile web or otherwise, and we power growth for modern growth-oriented consumer-based businesses. We work with some of the largest companies in the world, and I’m excited to share what we do internally and how what we hear from our customers powers our view.
Jason:
Hey everyone, I’m Jason. I’m the CMO of a company called Algolia. Algolia is a search as a service company. Before that, I was a CMO of a company called Domino Data Lab, CMO of a company called Heroku that was acquired by Salesforce. And before that spent a ton of years over at Adobe building out what became a lot of their marketing cloud and creative cloud businesses.
Todd:
We’ve got three really great speakers. There’s always this blend of, is it strategic or is it tactical? And we struck a blend of about 70% strategic and then we’ll get into some of the tactical, but we really wanted to do it since the C-suite is all about vision. We wanted to make sure that we sure shared that vision with all of you. The three pieces that we came up with were process, people, and profits and we’re going to talk a lot about those as a theme. So to start this off, we’re going to start talking about process. This seemed to be a big point with all three of you.
Some of the topics were how to start thinking about bottom-up development, how to do software augmentation, how to put yourself in the shoes of the customer, and what all those processes look like. As we all know, COVID has been so disruptive in terms of how this all fits together, people are in different locations, your processes have changed. You’re doing things remotely, everything’s up in the air and now we’re trying to come back to a new sense of normal that won’t be like it was before. So this idea of process is really pressuring for the times now.
Aaron, start us off a little bit on some of your thoughts. You were really keen on this idea of being able to move and being really agile. Why don’t you start off with that?
Aaron:
I think one of the things that every company that’s had to transform itself or reinvent itself through the last 18 months has seen is that their resources are limited and it’s usually not a function of capital, it’s a function of people. And then what can those people do inside of those organizations to both reinvent what you’re doing as well as to keep iterating and understanding how to do whatever you’re doing better. So there’s just a tremendous depth of different ways of tackling that.
Some of the really interesting things that are catching our eyes and I think making a big impact on our customers is this concept of no-code and really combining the best of what can be done on the development side of the business. Then enabling everybody who’s not a developer to participate and push the business forward in a similar way and almost increase the size of your development team and actually increase the size of your marketing team by combining the two together.
Jason:
The way I see the world evolving over the next couple of years is companies have to build fairly custom personalized experiences for their audiences. Consumer demand and even sort of B2B demand is you’ve got one second to capture my attention and show me the right experience or else I’m moving on to the next thing.
I don’t see most of the tools being there for a pure, no-code. I do think that that’s the Nirvana that we’re going to, but I think the reality over the next two or three years is you’ve got to be somewhere in between.
So the way I think about it is like micro bits of things that are easy for developers to build on so you’re not having to build code from scratch. You’re not having to go to some big SaaS solution and go how do I customize this white label off the shelf thing that all my competitors are also using.
I think the next couple of years, the world is somewhere in between where you see the rise of all these companies that are developer-centric, but it’s not hardcore dev. It’s kind of in-between, where you understand enough code of how to stitch stuff together. You can build things that are truly unique to your company and move on and you don’t spend all of your time wrestling with software and rustling with vendors.
Todd:
Jeanne, how about you?
Jeanne:
These are all fantastic points and my experience has been that oftentimes the marketing and the sales team are somewhat separated from the dev teams and the engineering teams. So while you could do a modular approach to a lot of these technologies, a lot of marketers and sales team members go out and buy these point solutions, which may or may not work within your tech stack, or you end up with duplicative technologies.
Whenever I join a company, I like to look at the entire tech stack. The only way you can do that is by going through the budget and going through the invoices and figuring out who’s buying what and how many people have memberships or subscriptions to all these different technologies.
But do you need seven versions? And when you really start digging down, you find that there’s the auto-renewal process on many of those so I feel that marketers and salespeople are still looking for solutions to help them out yet they’re not necessarily working with the engineering or the dev team.
There’s a silo and until that gets integrated, usually through product or product marketing in some capacity to be able to make sure that you’re moving the business forward.
Jason:
I think the days of sales, marketing, dev, product being siloed are over. If your company is still operating that way, your company is not going to thrive. Especially with this product led growth, leading with freemium, leading with credit cards, self-serve, being very dynamic, you really have to operate as a team and sort of iterate. If you’re siloed, you’re just going to fall behind.
Todd:
Let’s talk about that with the silos. Do you think that’s the way it should be? Do you think organizations are really there because I still see a lot of them that have these siloed mentalities. It’s the old school way of thinking and it’s a little hard to change your company into this new mindset.
Everything we’re talking about is spot on, but do you think companies are really ready to go there and if not, what’s the thing that’s going to take to sort of push them into that mode?
Jason:
I think it depends on the size of the company, in the companies that I deal with in the startup world they’re almost all there. Right now all the VC communities are investing in product-led growth companies, companies are sort of found from this, where marketing and product are almost like one unit working together.
If you’re born that way, of course, it’s a lot easier. I spent a good number of years at Adobe, a good number of years at Salesforce and it was really hard. Organizationally you’re so far apart, you could be a product manager and never meet your developer that’s actually working on your product because you’re hundreds of people separate. So for there, I feel like you need to have empowered leaders or people from the top need to bring in some outside DNA who understand how this works and can move the company towards that.
Honestly, some of those bigger companies really struggled because they’ve been so successful in the siloed thing, doing the thing that we’ve been doing for 20 years. How do we bring this new thing in? You gotta bring that outside DNA and run it as experiments and tests to sort of prove the point.
Aaron:
I think that a lot of those, a lot of large companies, especially over the last 12 to 18 months have started bringing in new ideas, fresh talent, fresh thinking from smaller companies into some of those larger organizations to try to bring some of that thinking in there, which has been an exciting thing to watch maybe will help accelerate that trend post-COVID.
Jeanne:
One of the things I’ve done successfully in organizations on the revenue side is actually doing a voice of the customer meeting once a month. 90 minutes, three reasons win-win, three reasons we lose. We have the product marketing team on one side. The dev team, the head of engineering, the head of all these in the departments, and then on the customer-facing side customer service, customer success, indirect sales, direct sales, and marketing. And then go through those individual three reasons we win three reasons we lose once a month for a 90 minute highly controlled meeting, which actually forces people because every product person on the planet gets 9,000 emails, Slacks, and telephone calls from people on the sales side. I need this feature, I need this in order to close this deal to do this.
But what if you start to have a real cadence of communication, the dev team, that product managers actually can hear what our customers are saying. It’s helpful for organizations that are either in the startup phase or have come from other organizations that haven’t done this. You have to be a certain size and you have to have a certain level of success in order to be able to make some sort of contribution.
Jason:
I have found that that works very well. Also bringing the voice of the customer and have the customer tell their story directly. Everybody wants to make life easier for their customers.
Sometimes it’s just hard because you’re so far removed from your customer that you’re like, I have no idea what I’m doing and how it actually adds to value. But then when you see somebody and you see a person struggling to do their job because your product doesn’t work the way that they expect it. That has a huge impact for everybody able to see that in real-time.
Todd:
The topic that was really interesting, that we talked on in prep and you just sort of brought up is this idea of being the CEO of your own job. And that’s a mindset shift that I don’t think all organizations have gotten to. Maybe some of the startups have because it’s more within their DNA, but I think it’s a really critical point that I’d love to hear your thoughts on this idea of being the master of your role and thinking of it as your own little domain and how that fits.
Jason:
The world has changed a lot in the last five to 10 years. And of course, it’s changed a lot in the last year where we all own our own careers. The days of I’m going to work for a company for 30 years and a company’s going to take care of me and grow me like those days are over.
So I think all of us need to be very mindful that we’re the master of our resources and think about ourselves as CEOs of our job, where the company hired me for a reason, they hired me for results. They’ve given me a set number of resources.
What are the outcomes that I can drive? So come with solutions and not problems, come with ideas to fix, come with like the idea of I’m going to go drive ROI. Here’s what I want to do. That’s going to help you a lot with your career. Just having that mindset of don’t wait for somebody to tell you what to do.
Don’t wait for the company to take care of you, but be the master of your own destiny. Everybody should think that way.
Aaron:
I think to go along with that from a company perspective, one of the things that companies have to be thinking about is how do you enable your people to do that.
How do you enable your people to come to work every day and do the best work of their careers every day? People have good days and bad days, but you want to make sure that you’re enabling them. I think that’s where the environment, the mindset, that growth-oriented attitude and pushing your teams to deliver on the results, but enabling them to make the decisions to fail fast, to understand and be okay with failure so that you can get to success is so critical inside of these organizations.
Todd:
Aaron, what would you recommend? If somebody finds himself at a company that’s not conducive to that, what would you recommend they do?
Aaron:
I think there are always learning opportunities wherever you are. There’s probably an opportunity there to figure it out and learn how to change that mindset and to really own the change. But, the guidance I give somebody is can you do the best work of your career here? Even if the environment isn’t set up that way, can you learn from it?
Jeanne:
One thing I’d like to encourage team members to do is to learn something new and to learn from each other. So basically we all want T-shaped people. We want people that have a certain depth, but we want them to be able to be utility players as well. This gives them a chance and encourages teams to work cross-functionally, actively encouraging that and showing them that if you learn this area, you’re going to become more valuable. If you look at this certification, you’re going to become more valuable. This is for the long haul. This is not for today. It’s not for next week. It’s not for next month.
You may undergo some pain because I’m asking you to do something that is outside of your comfort zone. However, six months from now, two years from now, you’re going to be able to reflect on exactly what you said. How many people are going to be reflecting on the past 18 months of the COVID, what experience and what did we all learn from it?
We learned a lot and we’re very comfortable now doing video calls where we were kind of comfortable before, but now we know we can connect with people. I think it’s a challenge to get people to own up to the next level in their job. Whether it’s managing people, managing programs, managing contractors, managing relationships is all very key.
I had this huge feedback loop for people about responsiveness. It’s your responsibility to respond to people within your company in a timely fashion and to be a go-to person. You don’t want to push people off constantly. You want to make sure that they know that you’re the go-to and that it takes a little bit of education for some people to be able to learn that.
Jason:
I don’t know if this is a helpful mental nod and maybe it’s sort of a bummer to people, but the more that you realize that we’re all just cogs in a machine and we’re all just like a ratio, right? We’re a math problem.
Honestly, that’s the way it works is like you’ve got to go after growth. You’re going to invest so much in sales, so much in marketing, so much in engineering, you’re gonna expect this much outcome. The more that you can think that way, sort of realize, and be able to interact with your executives in that, which is I understand you’re expecting an outcome.
You’re expecting an ROI. Here’s how I want to hit that ROI. That will open up so many more fruitful conversations between you and your executive because you’re aligned in a spreadsheet.
Jeanne:
Ultimately, it’s the profitability of an organization and sometimes trying to explain to team members and helping them to understand that, because you hire a headcount, you need to get some sort of ROI out of that. Being able to look at the amount of revenue per employee, you want to be able to look at that, what else is happening there? It’s remarkable to me how few people know how to budget, how few people truly understand the financial side of the business as well.
When I hear people say this is a great idea. It is a great idea, but how would you prioritize that? And how much is it going to cost and what are we going to get for that? Put it in the backlog, just like dev people. Do you put it in the backlog as an idea, oh, we should be doing a spiff on this. Okay. Why? Those are some of the questions that we need to be able to push back on.
Jason:
I think that running your business, running yourself, running things like an agile backlog to me has been life-transforming. The idea is you’re not telling people no. You’re not saying this or that. Everything gets added to a backlog and once every other week or whatever you prioritize. That’s how you chip away at your big goals. That’s something that I’ve brought into my companies is running the marketing team, running the sales team, we run it the same way as development. It’s a biweekly sprint process. We have a pretty rigorous backlog process. We’ve got a goal, we’ve got key results. Now let’s chunk it up into bite-size work and everyone’s really clear on what everyone’s going to do.
Jeanne:
It’s mostly because most people on the marketing side, especially, are totally reactive. It’s very hard to execute your plan, whether strategic or tactical when you’re constantly being asked, well, what about this? It’s a never-ending stream of requests, but as long as you have a place to be able to put it, and you’re saying yes, and it’s going to go on our backlog and we’re going to put it together and we’re going to prioritize it. However, I’ve got all these other things happening right now. So I think that’s extremely critical and fully recognizing the fact that you cannot do everything that is asked of you every single day.
That’s why you get nothing done. You go to present to the board and you’re not going to give them a laundry list. Well, I wrote seven blog posts and I sent 900 emails, what were the results? And we got to talk about results. Did it deliver revenue?
How many new customers, how many customers did we keep from turning?
Aaron:
I think it’s one thing to get the data in, and I think everybody’s always so comfortable with the data, but it’s those insights that are really at the core of why everyone is there. What does it mean?
Todd:
Jeanne, you were one of the ones that really brought this up in a post COVID world especially for newer people in the marketplace it has been extremely disruptive. I think the people, part of this really fits into those three P’s.
Jeanne:
Well, I have twins who just turned 23 years old. One of them is actually going to have her 2020 graduation on Friday and she’s in graduate school now. But the other twin went to work for a company she had been offered a job in November of 2019.
She was starting in May and it’s been totally remote, it’s a big company. She’s a data scientist and she went to the office for the first time and the place is full of dust. It has not been cleaned, there’s nothing in there. She was going to bring our vacuum cleaner in there and a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels, and make an effort to be able to clean it.
That is a lousy way to have people come o nboard that when they’re brand new. She likes what she does. However, we’ve got young people that are going to go into the office for the very first time after graduating, whether from grad school or undergrad school and we have to make sure that they’re being treated in a way that helps them to inform the culture of the organization. Her manager was there and took her to lunch so I think that was good. That was somebody that she’d worked with totally by Zoom, but now she’s actually starting to get engaged again.
But as managers, as leaders, I feel that we have a responsibility to be able to have coffee with the new people, make sure that you’re very visible in the cafeteria. Try not to hide behind so many meetings, maybe block off sessions for you to be able to have, round tables with different managers and meet different people in the company.
I know that’s been done very successfully prior to COVID. But I think that right now we’re running a risk of losing people that just don’t feel engaged. They don’t feel like we’re celebrating the successes. I mean, just the fact that we’re coming out of this, we do have successes.
We do have a lot of successes and we need to be able to celebrate each other, our culture and our organization.
Aaron:
As we work to empower each individual and push that decision making process down to the furthest level that we can to really empower people, it becomes harder and harder to see and celebrate all of those different wins because there’s so many more happening and they’re happening at a smaller scale.
I think that really putting that to the forefront and building systems, building processes to see them, whether they be monthly check-ins like asking the questions of what were three things that were good and really empowering people and giving them the opportunity to be part of that is so critical.
Todd:
Jason, any thoughts here?
Jason:
Jeanne touched on a bunch of things that are near and dear to all of our hearts. I feel like the pandemic has been especially hard for more junior employees. Because they haven’t had that mentorship. That sort of human connection of how do I work? How do I show up to work? What’s the expected behavior? Their whole life has been Zoom so that’s really hard. I don’t know what the answer is to try to help bring them along, but just being mindful.
The other thing is people are burned out. Jeanne said, I’m seeing across the board, like this last year has been busier for most people because we don’t have commutes. Therefore let’s have like nine, 10 hours a day of meetings.
I don’t know what the answer is other than recognizing people aren’t necessarily ready to flip the switch and go back to normal. How do we keep delivering but recognizing that people are burned out.
Jeanne:
We’re in a weird place right now where we’re trying to figure out how to resocialize. How many of us are going to go inside to eat in a restaurant or are we going to eat outside? There are a lot of behaviors that we’re dealing with and nothing is concrete in terms of the reopening of offices or people coming back into the offices.
Jason:
There were a lot of tough debates. We’re debating whether you require vaccination proof? Do you not?
Aaron:
And even within that, we’ve all been operating remotely for the last year and a half, but we haven’t actually been operating as remote companies. Remote companies are a combination of a whole bunch of different things to bring people together, to drive innovation, and teamwork. Whether you’re going back or you’re not. You’re just about to start trying to operate in that new reality, which is again, going to change the culture inside of organizations and provides an opportunity to think about how you redo that culture in a way that drives the creativity that you want out of your people. Along with the empowerment to do what they need to do.
Todd:
I’d love to hear your closing thoughts, something that you want the people attending this to really walk away from, especially as they start thinking about what the C-suite is really thinking about these days.
Aaron:
I think one of the biggest things to take away is that in an organization creativity is valued so much more than ever before. None of us are here to paint fences. We’re here to figure out what the future looks like and how to get there.
I think that surrounding yourself and thinking through a framework of how you enable your own success and drive that success and the success of your colleagues, whether it be through a framework like people, process, profit, or something else is so critical to your future success.
Jeanne:
I’m going to say one thing about being a C-level person. I’ve been blessed and lucky enough to be able to work with boards, from a very young age. For people that are on this call or listening, don’t be intimidated by a C-level person. I mean, we put our pants on one leg at the time and I oftentimes had people say, well, you’re too busy.
I’m not too busy to be able to talk to you. I will mentor you. I will meet with you. I will help you out in whatever capacity that you need. That’s my responsibility to you as a leader in the organization. It is something that I truly believe we should always be humble and kind, and just treat people like human beings.
Jason:
To me, it’s the mindset of thinking of yourself as CEO. You own your destiny, you own your resources, you own your outcome. I totally agree with what Jeanne said. People are the most valuable resource if I had to think of everything as resource.
Without every one of us, the company doesn’t exist. Your execs are busy, but we’re people. I think of myself as just a normal dude. I’m happy to hang out. I’m happy to talk. I’m happy if you’re like, hey, I’m thinking about this or that, don’t be shy, speak up.
Todd:
I think one of the things too, commenting off of what you’ve said, Jeanne. If you’re in an organization and the C-suite seems removed and unwilling to talk to the regular person in the organization you’ve got to really think, is this the kind of organization that I really want to put roots into.
Jeanne:
And by regular people, it’s the people that are coming to fill your coffee machine or your bevy machine, or your fruits and vegetables. It’s being nice to everybody. You’re a representative of your brand and you are your own brand, and you really want to be able to make sure that people know that you represent the company, not in a corporate way, but more on a personal level, to be able to recognize that people are human beings.
I know it sounds so trite and yet it is difficult to execute when we’re all just thinking about so much stuff.
Todd:
I will say, knowing the three of you, I know that you’re all willing to at least engage in conversations on LinkedIn. Reach out to them. If you have an opportunity and you’ve got some questions you’d like to ask, but I want to thank all of you, for attending and for everybody here, speaking and sharing all their insights and wisdom.