Build your product to make sure Onboarding is successful with Cait Porte of Zmags.

Jeff is joined by Cait Porte, who is leading Product and Global Services for Zmags, including Product Management, User Experience, Customer Onboarding, and Customer Support. This is a unique blend of responsibilities, and the topics discussed are:

- Building Product to enable Customer Success FAST in a SaaS world that is easy to do

- Getting consensus and alignment in presales and scoping to make sure that prospects and customers can get fully onboarded in less than 30 days

- Working with Customers to get consensus on success metrics during the onboarding phase

- Balancing UX and Design with what are the most usable features for customers

- Building Custom features in a SaaS world

- Timeboxing the Onboarding Phase to make sure the customer's time to value is maximized

- When to add Implementation fees, and why it works

Listen to the podcast here

Transcript:

Jeff  01:10

Hey there, it's Jeff from GSD. Thanks so much for joining in for another episode, I was talking with Cait Porte in this episode, who I've known for a long time, we were both part of the Boston product Product Management Association, the bpma as we call it, and we we've just been friends for a while always going back and forth on best practices and was really focused on a lot of product knowledge for a long time. And then I recently saw that Kate had taken over Customer Success and Support and everything, which is the topic that I've been trying to find somebody actually to talk about. So I think you guys are gonna love this Cait's super detail oriented, she gets a lot of stuff done, and is very passionate about our work and always wants to do the right thing, but also wants to do the right thing by the customer. So give it a lesson. And we're looking forward to hearing any feedback. Thanks. There we go. All right. So Kate, we are recording. I'm joined by Kate port who? Wow, again, this second podcast and I'm trying to think how long we've known each other. We've never worked directly which you should be proud of that. But um, I'd say it's probably been at least 10 years,

Cait Porte  02:24

I think I think about 10 years. Yeah. And so the

Jeff  02:27

quick background on that is that I was doing my on again off again stint as a product person. And I joined the Boston product mentorship and a Boston product. Oh my god, I'm the worst just to

Cait Porte  02:41

be PMA them. Yeah,

Jeff  02:42

I just think the PMA process and product management association, which is great. And I'm still a mentor. But I do feel though at this point in time, you know, in Dancing with the Stars, when they don't get those, the dancer that they want to dance with, like, that's how I feel like when they get paired up with me in the mentorship process.

Cait Porte  03:00

Yeah, it's a it's an art. To get them.

Jeff  03:04

Yeah, yeah, no. So. So um, so the funny Oh, she is another thing that you're laughing and I just had to edit one of my latest podcast, and it's a drinking game for when I say it's funny, because that's my like, new transitional thing. So I'm going to mark one right now.

Cait Porte  03:21

So I got one in the tally. Yeah, I

Jeff  03:24

got one in the tally here. So I just will die laughing every time I say it's funny. But however semicolon. One of the reasons why I reached out to you, you know, we certainly go back and forth on LinkedIn and things like that. I so I store all my, like, podcasts, blog ideas, you know, things I used to do in my business on a Trello board. And I've had this thing sitting in my backlog. Pardon the French, but it says how not to fuck up your product in your implementations, right? And so. So what does that mean, for me? Well, usually when I'm helping startups are part of a startup, the implementations can be a pretty brutal process, because there's just it's like the last thing thought of like, okay, let's get a lot of features out there. It's, you know, you're trying to win the feature game, and I totally get it. But then there's this point where implementation should be pretty smooth. And they should be pretty fast. So you can get that fast time to value. We're talking SaaS b2b stuff here. But it's not and there's all this stuff missing, which I wanted to kind of go through, but I actually don't have that exact background or Well, I should say, I'm not running product management. So I wanted to talk to somebody who's in product management, but then when I saw that you had taken over, not taken over like in a coup, which is an interesting word these days, but, but you were started focusing as well on customer success and like that's it that is the perfect combo right there. So that's, that's how we're gonna sort of talk you know, for the next half hour or so, but I would love for you to give sort of a quick minute like how did you get to where you are And then what are you currently doing right now? XEmacs?

Cait Porte  05:04

Yeah. So my product management career started out, I think maybe there's a more formal way that people are getting into product now. But back when when I got in, I was sort of handpicked, right? Hey, I think this role would be good for you. I started out at Experian moved over to Reed Elsevier did a little bit of a stint over at name media, which got bought by GoDaddy, and really realized there was a sweet spot there. For, you know, working in a smaller company having a greater impact. I was, you know, newer to my career fairly young had a lot of energy. So it worked for me. And so I've spent some time at Blue port commerce. And then I've done the last almost five years, it's Emacs. And XEmacs has been a really interesting ride. Because I'm sitting, you know, more on the leadership side of the business, which is great for me. I'm not sure how the company feels about, right. But we've we've seen a lot of transition and total impostor

Jeff  05:59

syndrome, Kate, that's them sharing a

Cait Porte  06:03

little bit of that every day, right? In any role, really. And so I've held, you know, bpma has certainly helped shape me as well, I was able to participate in that program and sort of see the mentorship oversee that I was a co founder of The Boston woman and product group with sarap, Attalus, and Vanessa Toronto, so really strong leadership there. And so at XEmacs, it's been really interesting, because we're small, and we've got to get a lot of work done. And so there's all these orphan departments, that kind of crop up in a variety of ways, which I'm sure we'll get to. Right now. My role encompasses product management, user experience, we think about customer success, Global Services, design services. So there's all these, I wouldn't say orphan or redheaded stepchild departments, but it's like, you talk to a lot of companies, and they don't know how to align all of those groups together, right, because we're all really trying to do the same thing. But there's not one strategic individual that's really leading the charge there. And so I stepped in and sort of helped out a couple of years ago. And so we've been doing a variety of things, we've had a variety of folks helping out, I continue to get validation along the way that that's a really nice way to structure it. But it's been a wild ride, product is always going to be bread and butter for me, my passion, user experience all that. And it's really nice to start to get a different side of the business, thinking more about the sales, process implementation, getting customers on boarded, and more the retention aspect of the business.

Jeff  07:32

I think the setup is great. You know, it's funny, when you started, there's the it's funny, again, when you started talking about DPMA I did feel so so I'm uh, I'm like, as soon as the company gets to be about like, 200 people, I started getting a little happy feet and everything in part of that is that and I felt this would be PMA, like very sick, structured processes that I feel is definitely needed for larger companies, like I felt like, a lot, a lot of what I was experiencing, and when I went to a lot of the meetings was it was a, it was a, it was a big thing to run products, like there's lots of these processes. However, when companies are in their startup, and you know, their let's say, series A Series B, or you know, they're in that 20 million, you know, zero to 20 million range, they can't really afford to have all of that. And you do have to structure it in a proper way. And where I see what you're doing now is extremely enlightening, or just like, Oh, thank God, because you're talking with customers every day on the implementation Customer Success side, and then you roll these back to product, and they're like, Oh, that's nice, we're gonna put on the backlog, right? And it's like, ah, but they're just like, these are our customers. And so, you know, bringing that customer centric focus to product, I think is huge. And everybody says that they do. But I think if you're out there every day, in probably, you know, talking with people and getting feedback, and I think you just did a pre sales call. So you're hearing it on the pre sales aspects. That's amazing. And I'm sure do you feel like it's helping shape your roadmap and the items that your team is working on every day?

Cait Porte  09:09

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I said, probably seven years ago at this point is that my goal was to be on no matter what level of an organization I was at, to be on the phone with a customer a day. Now we all know that that ebbs and flows, different parts of the year, different things going on, but it can be very easy to fall out of the this is who you're building this for, right? This is the pain if if a member of our support team comes to me and says, Hey, I'm experiencing this, I don't feel the pain as acutely as if I'm on the phone hearing it from the customer. Right. And I don't want to be pulled into just because of my title, a C level or or senior level conversation. I think it's absolutely critical that you're on the ground and really understanding that so that you can pass that feedback along to the team to say, No, this is why this is a problem, right? Whether it's me or someone on my team that's able to fund Have that I think hearing that and being on the front line really makes it impactful. Like it's the difference between saying, Oh, I broke my leg and actually like seeing it happen. Live in person, right? Oh,

Jeff  10:12

how awful for you, right? Oh my God, that's it, especially in the pre sales process, like, as I say all the time, if you're not, if you're not at the number one company and in the, you know, in the, in the, you know, the diagram of whoever the number one companies are, somebody's taking a chance on you, right? So somebody is like, literally making maybe a career limiting move. They're like, You know what, I'm gonna go with these guys instead. And then suddenly, they're like, this is terrible, like, the tears like, I'm gonna get fired, like, you hear all of that on those calls. And just from my perspective, product doesn't always hear those conversations. They hear us talk about it, and you're raising it up. And, you know, the fun survivor, tribal council, call exec staff and everything. But I digress. So that's awesome. What what is your team currently look like with this structure in place? How is it like teams saw, you know, whether it's 25 or 30? A number, like every sort of how are they grouped? And what type of functional areas?

Cait Porte  11:15

Yeah, so we have. So we made the transition from account management to customer success within the last, I would say three years. And I won't say that it was a smooth transition. I think it's a really big shift, especially when you're trying to figure out well, how, what is what does account management, what is customer success, and then what is support and global services. And we were starting to call it enablement and who was doing onboarding. And so there was, there was a lot to figure out there and to go through, but right now we've got product management, user experience, right, which is pretty standard. And then we have customer success and global services. And we're adding in a new arm called design services to the team as well. So there's sort of like four tops, and then design services kind of reports into global services at this point, I wouldn't say that that's the ideal scenario, I think, eventually, we'll we'll put design services on its own kind of trajectory. But you look at all of that being aligned, and there's very strong alignment between customer success and sales. So we don't have a lot of those, oh, throw these deals over the fence, and you sort of deal with it. I mean, we're, we're, you know, just around 50 people, maybe a little bit more than that, as late as of late. But we had that ability, where there's only 50 of us, right? There's not 250, or 2000, or anything like that. So there is a lot of alignment there. I think a big piece of why that structure has been successful, has been communication. You know, we can talk about frustration, there's certainly plenty of it. But we, you know, I think we've done a really nice job of trying to align the right people get the right people in the room so that we're not missing things.

Jeff  12:54

Yeah. I love it. It's, it's I, you know, just from going through a bunch of times, that's what works, right. And I really liked how you said, hey, that's here. Now, it's probably not going to be here in the future. But that's what we're doing to get through this structure and everything. The thing I always say when people are like, Oh, the account management success, I always just come back to like, who gets the Commission on the on the renewal? And that's your answer right there. So yeah, yeah. Some people like oh, no, like, we're success, and we don't want to be involved with that. And I'm like, okay, but it's a cost center, then. And so make sure you do it. Yeah.

Cait Porte  13:32

So our customer success team is responsible for the renewals, that's where the differentiator is between them and sort of onboarding or global services.

Jeff  13:39

Right? Actually, let's talk about that. I'm always looking to see what other people are doing. So we're going in there, we're doing the pre sales deal, you're going in there, you're talking about it, hopefully doing a little scoping to make sure that they're going to fit right into your standard thing. What's your standard sort of onboarding slash implementation? Because they're a little interchangeable these days? Sort of, do you say, hey, it's a 30 day thing? It's a 90 day thing like, what's what's your process look like? And then who's the team that executes on that?

Cait Porte  14:09

Yeah, so I'm with our product, in many cases, if we've so recently, prior to COVID, we ran, we started running a trial process where we actually had customers in the platform, developing content, testing it out, we find that we have we have a very high close rate. We're looking you know, somewhere between six to one from cold call, which is fantastic. And so what we're finding is that in order to make the enablement piece easier on the onboarding team, doing a little bit more work upfront, not only closes more deals, because people are like, Oh, this is true. Like it really only takes this much to implement, but it also has them engaged at the right time. You know, I can come up with and this is where we started. We said, well, yeah, we want to have them publishing content within 90 days. So it was like four years ago. to 90 days is really not enough time to value if you're thinking about a year long contract. So we said we're going to aim for 30 days. But that was our internal process for 30 days, that was all of the calls. And you know, you're going through analytics and you're going through this, and you're, you know, have we checked all of our boxes, but the reality is that the customer views, their success metric is very different as the one that we had. And so we had to come up with some sort of alignment there. Ultimately, what we want to be able to do is, within seven days of kickoff, be able to prove that yes, you can, you can publish content, we have no issues, there's no technical limitations. Very rarely do we come across those. And theoretically, you'd be up and running nice. In many cases, there is a less than 24 hour turnaround for that process. That's how it's fantastic, right? We're really, really lucky. But there's a on the product side of things for longevity, and all that right, you start to think about, well, how can we be more sticky? How can we make it so that it's more difficult to rip us out, etc. So there's a delicate balance that we're playing, they're certainly on the more strategic side. But we do want customers to see that value as quickly as possible, if not, during the sales process.

Jeff  16:07

This is amazing. And I'm so glad because this is I was hoping this is where this conversation was gonna be because from you, we can talk about the work that you had to do as a product team to be able to enable that because I'm used to the admin not being a user, right now, when the product is getting designed. So everything turns into like config scripts, talking to devs oversees conversations back and forth talking alongside each other. Do you mind talking? Or if I'm totally out, you know, if there's nothing there, then they we didn't really do much, but like, how did this influence the product decisions? Because sometimes it might be not building some great sexy feature, but you gotten your customers launched a little faster and using it within seven days?

Cait Porte  16:52

Yeah, so I think um, so we had the product itself, launched about five years ago, right before I joined me about two months or so officially came out of beta while I was at the organization. And one of the principles that it was built on was, we want this to remain a to be an agnostic tool. We want to work with every e commerce platform, we want to enable our customers in the most ways, we're not going to get ourselves stuck to one particular platform, right? We're sitting in E commerce, we're working with marketers, we know that on a regular basis, you're either coming out every platform, thinking about every platform or going into one, right? If you talk to any retailer, that's where they're at, right?

Jeff  17:35

That was like 10 years of my life, and everybody was replac forming Exactly.

Cait Porte  17:39

So we want to accommodate and work with that right at any phase in that lifecycle, we can help you out. And so when we came in, one of the big things that we started to realize is that performance was a challenge. And as we thought about the ways that we would solve that problem, one of the things that I held strong on from a product perspective was we have got to remain agnostic. And it's got to be easy to do. Right, we can't all of a sudden come up with some overcomplicated process where the marketer has to then get the IT team involved and all of this wriggle room. All right. Anytime that we have to do a tech call on the pre sale side, it's actually a blessing in disguise, because it's booked for an hour or sometimes 45 minutes, and we spent maybe 10 minutes. So you know that the IT team is saying, oh, that's all that it is. Okay, we're

Jeff  18:24

going to drop in this one little, you know, domain name right here.

Cait Porte  18:27

And you're good to go. Good, right. So when we thought about some of the new features, we came out of beta with something that we developed in late 2018, early 2019. And if I'm being honest, my personal view of the user experience was like, This is not my finest at work, right? However, we tested it with customers, they were like, This is great. This is all we need. We don't need to go crazy. So you're talking about that MVP approach, right? We really enable that. And you know, our bread and butter product, right? We said that before? I didn't love the user experience. I said, I'm not using it every day. You're not working with this. Let's let's go show it. Right. So funny.

Jeff  19:07

Oh, my God,

Cait Porte  19:08

drinking anything? Yes.

Jeff  19:12

Actually do find it funny that you do. Isn't it interesting that when you work with some UX teams, if they're super creative, I've just seen this 1000 times, they bring in this user experience that looks beautiful. And people like I can't do my. So when I was a company a couple of years ago, I would say like, look, we're designing interfaces for you to use every day, like behind the firewall, who cares, right? Like, is it clear? I'm a non tech user and like, it gets into the product stuff, like knowing who your user is, right? Like, you know, we're not getting awards for design and the most beautiful red button, right? We want to get people through.

Cait Porte  19:54

And that's the thing, right? Is that so you know, we had very strong opinions on the UX side of things. In the design side of things, and trust me, I'm right there, right. That's my passion, I want to make things that are, that are beautiful and really nice to use. But the focus is what's the most valuable for the customer? And how can I get that to them as quickly as possible? Right, so, so when we develop that, so we kept with that and and stuck with it. And while it was a struggle to sort of think about how we could do it, it really changed the game for us in terms of thinking about what really makes it easy. Now, I'll say that there are some we have very, you know, occasionally we'll run into a customer, we've got to do something custom, or there's something

Jeff  20:35

on the list. Let's get to that. That's in a minute. Yeah,

Cait Porte  20:37

there's always going to be something but I think we really think about how we can get time to value as quickly as possible, allow for deeper integration at some point when we're ready when they're really bought in. Right. And we're not throwing everything at you at the same time. So you have to keep in mind, the XEmacs timeline, right, and the customer timeline, which are two very different things.

Jeff  21:00

So it's about your like this, this is 30 days, I know, I'm just gonna get a run a pair of running counter on the website. Yeah. You've got, oh, yeah, sure, this should be 14 days, but the customer is like, Oh, I don't have an hour. Now I don't have this, I don't have that I have had to consult with people and say, when resources start getting stretched and everything, it's like, listen, we can only give you Johnny for 30 days, and then they walk away. And then that kind of helps them focus in a little bit more. It's like, look, we're trying to run a business, we'll help you like, you know, just get that kickoff going, and just given them tasks, which you know, we don't have to get into that today. But you're right, there's your timeline. And then there's the customers timeline. And for me, I'm just trying to make sure that the customers timeline doesn't extend it out, like an additional 90 days, because then you're TTV is you're like contracts up for renewal. And they haven't really used it so much and everything. Yeah,

Cait Porte  21:51

one of the other things that we've added in and I think it's worth talking about because we're, again, I think you have to think about the size, right? We're just over 10 million, we're thinking about, you know, getting into a real shift here, next milestone and V 25 million, we're getting into that critical point where we have to start thinking about some different things. And so recently, we've gotten a lot of really, really strong advice and advisement. And one of the things that they said was, if you're having because there are some customers who sit outside of that implementation, right, we're coming up on renewal for a customer who has used this in over a year. And we say, well, how can we get those folks to really be bought into a timeline for time to value? And we started getting recommendations to say, add an implementation fee. Now I know some people who are listening to this or or hearing about this, they're gonna say, Well, I don't know, we might not be ready, you might not be at the size you are, we only probably got to that point recently, where we could start saying, Look, we're holding you accountable. Right? Yeah, you have this fee that's associated with this, right? We're, this is your target and setting that up in the sales process. Again, we're doing trials now. So they're typically on boarded, before we even get to a close deal.

Jeff  23:04

So there's a lot of other features limited during that trial.

Cait Porte  23:08

So theoretically, yes, they can't publish anything live, or they can't test anything, or some customers can, some can't, we've gotten certain things that can be on or off. So we limit as much as we can, but I would say that we have that's part of our roadmap is to make things a little bit more plug and play with adding those features. And

Jeff  23:27

so on the fee, and you know, I always hate saying this, how it sounds I wrote, I'm super passionate about this, I wrote a big article and got lots of feedback on it. And it does make them value you more. And in being being able to come in and say like, look, we're going to charge you like 10k, whatever, some fee, and this is what you get, and you enumerate everything that you're going to do for them. And in the pre sales process, if you expose that to them, they're like, Oh, this looks real. Now, I'm gonna pay this money, and I'm gonna get this value back. And it also it expires in 30 days, because we're in demand, and we're the best at the value. So all those things, and people are like, Oh, I'm gonna take it seriously versus the like, Oh, I'm gonna blow this meeting off. It's just what those emails guys and whatever, I can just keep that going on forever. It turns into that, you know, term project that you do the last week or whatever. It's like, I only have 30 days, and we spent money on this, and I'm gonna get screwed if we lose the ability to Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah. So I

Cait Porte  24:33

think we're both aligned there. Right. But I think it's just figuring out what the right value is there for for your contract size and all that. But I will say that it was an area that product had on right, which is interesting, because this is where I battle. My product hub says, give it all away for free because it's all valuable. Whereas my business hat says, you know, let's really think about what gets them engaged, how they really retain, right so it's really be helpful to think about product and customer experience coming together. Because in many cases, there's been, I wouldn't say a wall, but like maybe a short wall and gotta climb over to get there, right? Yeah.

Jeff  25:11

In the sales teams usually like, no, don't charge them, it's gonna mess the deal up and everything. And I'm like, well, let's say if you close 20 deals a year. And let's say it's 5k, like 500, that's good revenue. And you tell in suddenly you tell your finance personnel, you can recognize this revenue, the day it starts, and there's just lots of good reasons for that it pays for your staff to be able to grow them as well to, you know, especially if you start getting bigger and working with more enterprises, and suddenly, you need like project management into the fit, it starts adding to those things. So awesome. Yes, we are 100% on line, so don't want me to hammer that nail anymore. I think so. So curious. tool sets, like, what are you using as sort of the general I've like, I was just on a call with somebody, they're like, Oh, we're just COVID. We're using Miro for everything. And everybody's like implementation, we're using either smart sheets, or I use baton on some certain things. I'm curious, your list of tasks that need to get done, that you're working back and forth with a customer? How are how are you, you have to name the tool, but it's sort of like how are you engaging with the customer, giving them homework to do checking in on them every week, making sure stuff's done?

Cait Porte  26:24

Yeah, um, I would say that. This is where my natural style and my work style compete a little bit. I am by nature, type a person, everything is organized every shot. Anyone that knows me knows that, of course at time, right? But then there's this panic piece that says, Look, you can't you gotta focus on, you know, other things. But I think that the, again, the size company we're at, we're at that critical point where we can finally start thinking about process, which is exciting for me, because what I see out there is just use what you can use what you do, we've, we've tried things like Basecamp, and spark soothe, and we've got all kinds of options there. I will probably, throughout my career, continue to beat the drum that says, I am tool agnostic. If there's something that's working for you, right, we're at the point of the match where we're not hiring a ton of entry level, right? People are experienced, we're looking, we're actively looking for folks who have good process that can help us get from that 10 to 25. Right. So when we think about the tool that we're using, it's really just what can you do to get the job done, we've got the same challenges, right? We're a Microsoft shop, and I want to use Google Docs and Google Drive. And so I'm sure that if you talked to my team, actually, I know for a fact that there's a lot in there. But the big thing is, and we use our CRM to do a lot of like task management. And that seems to work really well with the team. I don't think I know that that will not scale long term. And again, we're right at that inflection point where early next year, in fact, we've got to start thinking about putting some more formal process in place, which I'm excited by, right. But it takes away from that product side of of,

Jeff  28:09

I'll take it to do here. I have a playbook that I usually like, then I'll send that over to you great tool agnostic as well. My whole thing on this is, you know, sometimes you get called in and it's literally like 10 items on a spreadsheet, just let's go over this every week. Just check those off, and it's good. And then sometimes it ramps all the way up into I don't get more complicated than like, a Smartsheet or Basecamp be i Yeah, my thing on that is that it's got to be a tool that the customers really can understand how to use Smartsheet kind of scares the show, sue me, I'm swearing up the snores. But um, my kids right around the corner, but like, it does scare people. So I try and find something where you can you can assign people tasks, and they understand and I'm going to attach the doc here because the Google Drive, the OneDrive, the live all that stuff. Like it just gets into that area, or like, Oh, we're gonna connect you to box now. And everybody's like another tool like, Oh, yeah. And that's that stage where it's just like, how do we get this? So it's easy. You can talk through the pre sales and the people that you know, that last meeting where they're like, we're gonna bring our team in to make sure that they can handle this. And then you're like, Wow, you just go in here. And you do this. And, oh, that's cool. I get it versus like, here's a Gantt chart. And people are like, Oh, some people love that. You know, so you just kind of have to have that in your back seat of like, oh, well, we could do that, too. Because there's some people like that. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Cait Porte  29:37

I think our goal is to make the Gantt chart look as least if we were to have one as least complicated as possible, right? We want to have a limited number of things to do and implementation. Sure, there are avenues that we can go down and paths that we can take, but ultimately, hey, get these five things done. And then we're good to go. Right? We want to make it really, really simple.

Jeff  29:57

Yeah. Right. Because if your value is that you can Get up and live and running in like seven days, you want to be like, Oh, here's a project plan with a lot of dependencies. And I was like, Yeah, but I can just go use X, Y, and Z and put my credit card in. You're like, yeah, so you definitely, it's aligned to match. But you might wind up having some more complicated things. You're like, okay, for these types of things, we're gonna roll this out and stuff like that. So absolutely. Awesome. Right? We go over some of the other things that we said, we're gonna chat chat about. So. Oh, so yeah, I see this huge thing. This, this confounds me to this day. I think it's organization specific. But I will say since SaaS started three times, alliteration right now got my coffee government. And I have not been able to figure this out where I find it's 100%. Awesome. And this is such a problem. Custom work on the SaaS product. Yeah. So who owns it? So here's the deal for anybody who's like, Oh, what is this thing that you're talking about? So you know, early days, CEO, sales team goes in, and they're like, love your product. But if you guys had X, Y, and Z, that's the deal breaker. And we need that, you know, like go CEOs like absolutely will do that. And then sorry, I love CEO, some of my best friends. But they're so passionate, and they believe in their team so much like, oh, well just get that done. By the time you meet guys need to go live, right. I'm shocking. I'm sure you're shocked by hearing any of this. But yeah, so. So oftentimes, so hopefully, most of you are listening to this, your implementation team has heard about this. But implementation teams are going off, let's talk about we're talking about, here's the base set of tasks that you need to get done. Suddenly, they get dropped onto this thing where they're like, You need to manage the product team to make sure that these features get built to merge with your implementation timelines. This is a rat's nest that could go on for hours if we talked about it. But where are you in this right now? Because you're right in the middle of all of it. Yeah.

Cait Porte  32:03

So I take a very hard line at this. Again, I think part of what's valuable here is that I do sit on our leadership team and I do have a very strong, really philosophy about it. One of my favorite Agile principles is customer collaboration over contract negotiation. And I will fight tooth and nail to preserve that, because I am building a SaaS product, we are building a SaaS product. And I don't want to have all of these different versions floating around. It's not to say that we don't have things that we're testing. But by and large, all of our customers are on the same product, they have two options to do publishing, there are certainly customizations that we have to go through. But for the most part, everybody's on the same platform, there's not different versions. And you know, you've got this configuration, and I have to remember this when I released, it's just not a scalable way to do things. I will say that I went on maternity leave for eight weeks, which is not a long time. And what I think it was two years ago, but I remember, specifically, I came back and my team, we were talking our leadership group is Oh, while you were out, we agreed to do this thing. By the end of the year. Now, it was a platform specific feature, right? It was still something that was kind of agreed. Everybody could use it, right. But we did agree to a date. So even in that case, right, I'm not going to just sort of agree to a date to win a deal. I know we've got to do it sometimes. But I try very, very hard for that to be the the one or 2% as opposed to the majority. You know, all of the things that we're really, really lucky our customers are very open with us. I think retailers are loud and vocal, but they're also they want to know what other retailers are doing right there. So it's not to say we only work with retailers, but I will say that, you know, hard and fast they do try to do that customer collaboration over contract negotiation, really building a SaaS product. I think that that keeps us on the straight and narrow, it will become harder in the years to come as we get you know, larger but the customization work scares the crap out of me, and I can't so many product people that I talked to talk about how they're, you know, a workforce to do this. We've got to have better sort of safeguards in place and it's not because I want to say no, because I want to be rigid it's because it's just not a scalable way to build things.

Jeff  34:26

Yeah. It's just the whole like, oh, this customer as these tenants secret flags enabled and they it's i i I couldn't do it at this one. Like it just did not work out not the right guy for the job because basically, it Oh, no implementation owns this you need to project manage these features going through them. Like we don't manage the dev team and the product, you know, the gathering the requirements and all that stuff. It's yeah, it's a

Cait Porte  34:54

nightmare. I'd rather have let's let's talk to 10 customers get 80% of the functionality. And have you know those tweaks either be gaps or things that we do later on. But we're building, we try to build a platform. And for the most part, it's done as well.

Jeff  35:10

I will say, this problem. Like I see this more often than not, I'll just say that, like I could say, it's everywhere. And I think it's in that. So I do. There's though, there's the rush for product market fit. And you're just trying to fill in what your competitors have probably on your roadmap and things like that. But then there's this, like, we've got this red button over here. And if you want our 100k per year, then you need to build that red button. And I'm always will, like, on the corroboration like well, what does that red button do? And it's like, wow, and enables to do X, Y, and Z. And so yeah, so what? What happens if this go oh, sorry, I cut you off. Go ahead. No, go ahead. What happens if you discover this during implementation? Right? Like, yeah, it's like, Hey, we're, we didn't realize this. I know, we tried it out for seven days. And we said, we're gonna go for it. But we really need X, Y, and Z. No, this is yeah, this is the art right here.

Cait Porte  36:12

Yeah. So um, there are, there is a wave coming of, you know, what the next bad thing is related to, you know, flash or performance or whatever it is, right? So one of those things is JavaScript, right? Everybody's like, Oh, I'm so right performance, everyone's thinking about this, we think about it, it's sort of constant, I would say that that's something that's starting to pop a little bit, but our talk track around those types. So that's something that you know, you go seven days, then you don't realize or whatever, right, and all of a sudden, you realize a couple of days in or month in or whenever that you're, you're challenged here. And it's not a surprising conversation, we've got a good talk track around it, we have a plan on our roadmap to address it. I think that what's really important here is being transparent and having those conversations early. And often. I won't say that it works every time for every feature, right? There's always going to be someone who said, Well, I thought it worked this way. And sometimes we get into internal conversations where we're like, but they had a week or three weeks to try to tool like they didn't realize that it can or cannot do X, Y or Z. You know, there, there are certainly times where you hate to disappoint the customer. And we deal with those. No, again, they're infrequent, but we handle them as we need to I think, you know, again, you can't just change your roadmap for one customer, even if they're, you know, we're really we're really lucky at the match where we don't have one customer that's like 50% of our revenue, or that if we lost that business, we would be under I know that there are companies out there that are operating,

Jeff  37:51

that's what happens, they go they go hit the homerun, which means agreeing to all this custom stuff. And then you hear the classic like day on our roadmap now, which, you know, again, if it's if it's going towards where you need to be to compete in your industry, I get it, but it's when you're suddenly like, you know, basically a white label platform for Yeah, yeah, that's, that's tough.

Cait Porte  38:13

But I think a lot of times when you when you land, those big deals, one of the things that product people and development people don't really think about getting creative is okay, if that deal is so significant than hire for resources, right, get them in here, build the thing, get them to learn on platform and have it be done. And then once that revenue comes back next year, beauty of SaaS, I've got it next year, I have the feature, hopefully other customers are getting valued. So I think you've got to be a little creative on. Okay, this deal is, you know, for all intensive purposes, it's 100 grand deal. Let's divert, because our average order value is 50. Let's divert 50 of those resources toward or toward resources. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I think you've got to get creative sometimes.

Jeff  38:53

Absolutely. And you're, I feel you're going about it the same in the correct way, which is like hey, sometimes these things pop up and we just got to kind of figure it out as we go along. And you know, the perfect plan doesn't always always work out. I got one last question. Well, too, but when one last business question so now you've had success, product onboarding implementation, What's the toughest one?

Cait Porte  39:17

Um, toughest one for me is customer success. I think primarily because again, at my core, I'm a product person and I want to I as a person right outside of work I want to make everybody happy this is my struggle in product is that I hate to say no, but I say no, a lot. Yeah, right. I have to say all the time. The biggest struggle is when you want to pull things forward on the roadmap or you really want to get that customer success manager to to trust the product team or to rely on them and so Customer Success for me I'm I'm not a salesperson by any means. I don't say that I am I rely very heavily on my CRO when we get into negotiations for con It's just not a natural fit for me. So I'd rather give everything away and get someone to be happy than I would be to negotiate a deal. And I'm well aware of that. That's the that's the thing. The biggest thing is that I'm aware of that that's a challenge for me. But that'll hopefully come through, right. That's the beauty of, of developing your career. And but that's the hardest part for me is that I just want I want customer success to be just that help our customers be successful. But they are saddled with this renewal piece. Yeah,

Jeff  40:29

but it's a big Yeah. And so awesome that you're recognizing that and everything because some people, you know, it's always good to know what your weaknesses are. Right? So yes, great. So we'll wrap up on on a lighter side, what's been your COVID? Hobby?

Cait Porte  40:46

My COVID hobby. I'm

Jeff  40:49

got the breadmaking ah, I'm trying to think of a two year old so um,

Cait Porte  40:56

I have a two year old so that's the thing is that like, oh, COVID So a couple things. We there was a lot of banana breadmaking. Early on, like banana related products we're trying to do like gluten free and all that, you know, no sugar, low sugar. So bananas were rampant in our house for like the first three months of the pandemic. But now not the

Jeff  41:14

easiest, or the least expensive thing to keep around because my kids, my two bunches a week and they're gone by like Tuesday.

Cait Porte  41:21

Yeah, like, they're crazy. Everyone's eating them. And you're like, No, I have to wait until they're actually right.

Jeff  41:27

It shows. By the way, how smart kids are because they recognize it's strange sugar like, oh, that's sugar. I'm just gonna keep eating it.

Cait Porte  41:36

So that was a big one. And then we moved out of the city. So I'm adjusting to suburban life.

Jeff  41:41

I can see in the background there we can see Yeah, nice call leaves. Yeah, exactly.

Cait Porte  41:47

So, you know, those are the two big things. My husband is responsible for everything outside. I'll do the house, but I want nothing to do with the outside. So it's been, you know, COVID with a two year old as COVID Was anyone is hard. But banana bread and moving have been the two big things for us.

Jeff  42:04

Oh, that's awesome. Well, it's my pleasure. I'm gonna ask you to hold on for one quick second. I'm gonna stop the recording. And thanks so much. And we chat again. This has been awesome and we covered a lot of ground. So I'm super happy about that.

Cait Porte  42:15

Thanks for including me.