Mark Andreessen coined the term product-market fit, defined as being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Whilst getting to product market fit is job #1 for a CEO at the early stages, product market fit alone leaves gaps that you need to fill to drive sales velocity. There are some fabulous perspectives about these gaps already. Brian Balfour […]
Last year, Jeff Clavier asked me to present at Uncork Capital’s (formerly SoftTech VC) CEO summit on how to do BD deals with large software companies. I was then CEO of an Uncork portfolio company, but the content here draws on my prior experience as GM at largeco (in this case, SuccessFactors/SAP) when I was […]
Watching the G Suite news coming out of Google Cloud Next 2019, I had my Michael Corleone moment that took me back to my old stomping ground: employee engagement and workplace performance. I was hoping that we wouldn’t see Google trying to out Microsoft at Microsoft’s own game but that’s what we got. “More collaboration insights in […]
A giant caveat: this post is focused on high growth SaaS. Not on mature businesses where you are trying to coordinate the build, sale and adoption of a large portfolio of products. In the world of high growth SaaS, all too often we tend to believe that it is our functional or technical inferiority that will […]
Dave Kellogg wrote a solid post about the three types of Customer Success Managers. Contrasting them as product-oriented, process-oriented or sales-oriented, it’s a much-needed primer at a time where the vocation of Customer Success is still nascent. Dave’s post got me thinking that there is also a need to contrast happy time vs war time CS leaders. During […]
Ok, here is the punch line: No two SaaS functions should be coupled together. Any combination forces conflicts of interest and while you and the board are busy charting out your world domination strategy, this dysfunctional org design will eat the company from the inside out. The long form: Combining Product and Engineering Why it’s a […]
Platform leakage, take rates, buyer:seller ratios, onboarding drop-offs, gross merchandise value. A foreign language for many, but if you operate a marketplace and are trying to out-maneuver the competition in a cutthroat landscape every day, this is what you live by, every day. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a classifieds portal, e-commerce marketplace, a […]