Jeff chats with Adriana about scaling Acquia with experience of 100% growth year after year and the type of organization she needed to build to support that. Also covered:

- Discussing the concept of creating product/service packages
- biggest lessons learned from working at Acquia
- alignment between the sales team and the services team
- how to hire an account manager that can deal with the complexities of working within a startup company

Transcript:

Jeff  00:13

Right this is Jeff Kushmerek from the getting services done podcast. Here to talk about the the next episode you're about to hear with Adriana Zeman, we had never worked together. For those of you who have worked in product companies that need professional services, when you're in hyper growth, it's really hard to build a big team and you never want them on the bench. So you usually wind up getting a bunch of partners that you trust to be able to do a big chunk of your work or percentage of your work, you never want to look like you have this massive services team either. So we get into a little bit of that during the podcast, so Adriana was working at a company called molecular became isobar. And they were they were just doing really great work for us. And then and then you know, just to follow her career. Along the way, she went over to Acquia and build a really big team over there. And we got kind of deep into how to build the team how to structure it, you know, lessons learned. One thing that aqui did a lot of is they used mostly partners to deliver a lot of their work, they were doing some Drupal work and building out large systems and had a very interesting structure that we got into but also, what I always love talking about is creating product and service packages. So we got into that. And just from there, one of the things I really respected, she basically said, kind of, I've hit not the peak, but I want to go do something else now and then went right into customer success. And has been doing that now for a few years. So we got into that pivot, we also got into some of my favorite topics on hiring and what makes the best people and what's the best for your organization versus other organizations. So just overall, just a really great chat was talking about metrics and best practices and just sort of how to navigate through the world of a new job when there's not really an instruction manual, which we've touched on a bunch. So sit back and enjoy and love to hearing feedback. And we'll talk next week. Record button, and we are recording. So, Adriana, thanks for joining me, we had some logistical issues and some catch up stuff that we don't necessarily always want to record. But I've known I was trying to think like, what 2005 I'm trying to think when you were working at isobar slash molecular. And we were introduced, then you're kind of working out of our office, like a day a week, I think is that was my memory. I was there full time. Oh, almost a year. You know, it's so funny. I always use the example. And here's, like immediately off script but like I always use the example of how in DECA kind of treated or handled molecular as a what not to do. And I tried to insert certain things. I mean, like, like, after a few years, right? And I'm going through this actually right now with a large IoT vendor in Boston, where you find that you say, here's the deal. You're, you're you're a software company, right? And you never want to build a massive professional services team. Right? Or your it's, you don't want to build out a big batch basically. Right? So you find trusted partners. And we found you guys and molecular great team still keep in touch with a lot of people to this day, and everything's great and you're doing great work for us. And then suddenly, it's like, well, why aren't you bringing us into any of your deals?

Adriana Zeman  04:54

Yep, yeah, yeah, it's definitely the change.

Jeff  04:58

Yeah, and I feel Funny thing is I keep bumping into all these software companies in Boston where they're like, Hey, we really like you to, you know, we'll give you just a consistent flow of work. However you semicolon, we'd also like you to, and I love your perspective on this. But like, We'd also love for you, too, we also need you, in order to give us give you that work, you're gonna get a quota for selling our software. And I'm sort of like in tell me where I'm wrong in this because, you know, I get my headstrong way. It's like, is your problem sales? Or is your problem delivery and success and getting customers launched successfully?

Adriana Zeman  05:35

Yeah, that's a really good question. So we went through when I was running professional services at Acquia. Yep, we had sort of that same dynamic, where we had partners. You know, Aqua was a little bit different open source. So the entire model was, was based on having really good partners that could deliver the work, right? That said, there were sort of two, I ended up thinking about our partners and sort of two ways. One was, you know, there were partners that just weren't going to have the capacity to bring us or the ability to really bring us a ton of new business, because that really wasn't where their strength slide. But they might have had really great technical teams to work with. And there were partners that were really great commercial partners, and needed our support in getting their skills up to speed to be able to handle some of the more challenging work, we had both sets of issues, not both sets of issues. But really, we were looking at our channel to provide sort of both sets of things for us. One was to help us with delivery, because we needed in Drupal to get sort of a broader adoption, delivery for right to compete against the Adobe's and all that. And then we also needed, you know, partners that were going to help us in the same way to sort of get that commercial expansion.

Jeff  06:56

Yeah, you know, I've kind of just rationalize it all to that channels get run through sales. So sales will tell the channel guys to, to do that. Excuse me, but I did. When I did, I did have a couple really great channel, guys. That break of the kind of knew the difference. And they knew that here's my guys that will sell and here's my team that will go just help deliver and things like that. So yeah, I don't know.

Adriana Zeman  07:22

Yeah, we had a good partnership with the channel team and the channel team at aqui, has done really amazing things and sort of developing both sides of that. I think we got to see that. I think that you're right, where, where things were kind of got a little bit tricky in that relationship way back in the day was trying to make your really great delivery partner trying to all of a sudden become a really great channel partner,

Jeff  07:42

right. And I always be the, you know, to bring it back to isobars. Like, thank God, these guys are around, we've got too much work to do. And they do great work. So why are we messing? I get it, you know, I guess I'm grown a little bit. But

Adriana Zeman  07:59

if I get it to, though, right, because, you know, as a services company, you know, the thing that you really like the way you reward a services company is like giving giving them services work. Right. All of those really great channel partners wanted the services work to Yeah,

Jeff  08:13

good point. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, yeah, and I'll stop that topic. I know. I'm boring to tears, but so it's funny. I was wondering, so we were on Acquia. I have a bunch of questions on that. That was a big, like, I would say, like a big ass organization that you ran, right? Like, can you just talk a little bit about that? And then how you structured it, so that you could at least maybe sleep four to five hours a night?

Adriana Zeman  08:41

Yeah, so the thing about that big ass organization at Acquia is that it didn't start out nearly that big. Okay, I first got there. I started with a team of about just under 20. Oh, yeah, just under 20. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So we ended up growing that team organically. And basically, we were on that pace that we were growing like 100% Every year, until ultimately, by the time I left, it was a team of like, almost 100. I think it was 135. Yeah, I

Jeff  09:16

think I remember you saying well, whoa, like, yeah, that's a big team. Yeah.

Adriana Zeman  09:21

Yeah. So the way that we ended up structuring that team at that time, the way it made sense was I had. So this one's actually an interesting one, because I've given a lot of thought about sort of why I did it that way, and why it worked at the time that I did it that way. Because I've had a lot of time to think about that one. But, you know, one of the so my metrics at the time there, you know, I had performance metrics that I had a need. There was, you know, there were bookings metrics, there were margin metrics. There were revenue metrics, and because of that, bookings metric We ended up creating a team that was sort of mimic the sales structure, we were sort of mirrored it as a way to achieve that goal. So that we had directors that were partnered directly with directors on the sales side, and sort of broke it down. Instead of thinking about it as one massive team, we started to break it down into regions. And I think that was one of the big keys to success in that process. The other thing that we ended up doing so one of the big challenges that I, you know, that I, that we encountered at aqua, when I first got there was that we were transitioning into as we started to sell the big enterprise customers at the time when because there wasn't a ton of organizations that were built to deliver Drupal in that kind of an environment, right? there just weren't right. They didn't have

Jeff  10:48

that actually, that makes complete sense. Because I bumped into that a little bit where when PHP was fading away. And like, you know, everyone's like, well, that stands for Personal homepages, like and I remembered. And then suddenly, Drupal is powering, you know, enterprise systems and everything. So and it's based

Adriana Zeman  11:05

on PHP. Yeah. So So, so part of the reason we had so the challenge was, hey, we were starting to deliver to these large enterprise customers, and we didn't have partners that really had to scale to do it. So we needed to find a way to build some of that scale and build that expertise. But also, because of the model that we worked with partners there. You know, we had all of this, we held the contract. So ultimately, aglia was responsible for the delivery. And when we were running into delivery challenges, we weren't structured at that time to be able to lean in and support the partners. So I had both of those challenges kind of come up at the same time. So those were the two things that kind of drove how we built, the team wanted to have a closer relationship with the partners and you know, sort of have the ability to kind of lean in more when we needed to. But also, again, we had we were growing so quickly, that we also needed to find a way to maintain that growth. So we broke everything down into these regions, and then started thinking about the delivery, like what were the two delivery sides that we really needed to get a handle up, there was the technical delivery. And then there was sort of the project management, business management, client management. And that was the sort of that was those were the two sort of guiding principles. And actually, that's, that's

Jeff  12:20

great question. Yeah. So were you I didn't realize that were your were you taking over the client relationships at that time as well, or were sales still kind of maintaining? Or they were just hunters, and you guys were, you know, this is because around that time where it all the model just started getting changed and everything? Yeah, so

Adriana Zeman  12:39

we manage the client relationships on a day to day basis when we were going through projects, you know, those those builds. But some of those builds, you know, were pretty significant. So sales always was structured as new business, and then sort of the new business team, you know, would stay somewhat involved. But that's when they also started introducing account management, and sort of global account management, especially to large accounts. So those were pretty. Those were complex accounts that had sort of multiple stakeholders, where, you know, the professional services director was a part of it, there was, especially for the large customers, there was sort of a global account manager that was partnered with that director, because, you know, these were really significant initiatives, because these were big re platforms. This was, you know, you know, these were large global organizations making a bet on a very different technology, and trying to create the structure internally to be able to do it.

Jeff  13:36

Yeah, no pressure. Yeah, no pressure. Bill, I haven't released it yet. But Bill told me the Olympic story, so I got a flavor of some of that. So yeah, yeah. So

Adriana Zeman  13:47

I was I came in at the end at like the tail end of the of that

Jeff  13:51

of that. Yeah. So I got it. That's, that's a lot to manage. Now, what if you were to look at sort of that last management structure that you had when you were at Acquia? Sort of how that breakdown? Like there's you at the top? And then just, I'm just curious, because some people get into, like, how many direct reports and what how hierarchical because I always get those types of questions. And I'm just kidding. As I said, we figure out a lot of stuff along the way, and then think about it later in. Yeah.

Adriana Zeman  14:21

So there was, so from a structure standpoint. You know, there were sort of two pieces to it. Right? There were the sort of there was the business aspect, that we again, we had the business that we were trying to mimic sales. So regional practice directors. Yeah, totally. That makes sense. Right. So I had regional practice directors for each of our major regions. And all of the them there were sort of beneath them were engagement managers. And then we had a small number of project managers for you know, engagements that had sort of multiple like, really, if there were big engagements that had mold Couple tears, then you might have an engagement manager with sort of a project manager that was doing sort of Absolutely. Tracker work, right? Yep. But all of the all of the engagement managers ultimately reported up to practice director of practice director report reported into me. So you

Jeff  15:17

had those regional practices, right, you gotta like, here's the Chicago based practice, you had that sort of same structure. And then you would then mimic and a good way, try and do that, as you as you expect that

Adriana Zeman  15:29

everywhere that that was a structure that was replicated. So on the business side, it was, you know, practice director who was ultimately responsible for both the revenue and bookings in partnership with sales. And they were also responsible for delivery success, delivery success became its own, I wouldn't call it issue, but sort of, you know, there's a lot that goes into that, we ended up having a director that reported to me as well, that literally was just sort of a delivery director over the top, yeah, over the top that sort of was driving process tools continuity throughout and had sort of a dotted line to, you know, the engagement managers had dotted line, and then that director had a couple of regional practice managers, that kind of dove in to the region, that's actually where we had more delivery out. Like if we had the bigger, more complex deliveries, they would kind of lean in.

Jeff  16:23

So that actually makes total sense. And I know some of the not the centers, but the level below that, like a slalom or whatever, that's sort of how they're managing that out as well, where they sort of have the region's in a sort of these cross market specialties for for those types, their works. And we had, that's very similar to how we rolled it out as in deco sort of, they would say, here's our new sales place, and then we would start building up our professional services teams as well, too.

Adriana Zeman  16:50

And then for the for on the technical side, we had a similar structure where actually, I had two technical directors, because we delivered two very different kinds of work. So you know, it, that structure kind of came about, in part because of the team I had. But there was a technical director who was responsible for all of the, you know, we call them, the technical architects, and the technical architects were the ones that were, you know, from a technical like they were the counterparts to the engagement managers, right. They were at the top that the technical team was had more layers to it. You know, we definitely had developers that we, that we had on the team. So there were, you know, a couple of layers of developers you had, you could have a senior developer, and then you'd have sort of an entry level. And ultimately, we ended up also breaking out because initially, when I got there, we didn't even have front end as a specialty. It was Drupal was very much focused on the back end. Yeah. But then obviously, we ended up getting a little bit more advanced in our sort of our evolution. And performance issues can happen a lot with front end code. Yeah. So and then we were doing our customers wanted to do things that were more, you know, visually appealing, and that were sort of more complex had more front end complexity, right. So we ended up adding sort of that front end piece to it. And then there was also a technical director. That was we called it. What was his title? I can't remember. But we ended up having a consulting practice as well. So because professional services did these sorts of small short term engagements they were doing, you know, so that was a totally different kind of practice and a skill set. But it was technical. And there were sort of workshops and different kinds of consulting engagements or consulting, you know, these were packaged.

Jeff  18:47

So consulting was sort of like, yeah, as you said, work product. Yeah,

Adriana Zeman  18:51

it workshops, right. Parts of it might be consulting, some of it was workshops, we would be doing things like security audits, performance audits, architecture, audits, architecture workshops, to kind of define discrete pieces of work. And then as Acquia introduced, its, you know, the more marketing oriented products that supported that, we had to have a whole different kind of consultant, join that team in order to deliver you know, sort of, you know, marketing workshops, essentially to support Aqua lift and all of those products.

Jeff  19:26

And the reason why I laughed is because I'm just like, I would not know what to look for in hiring that verse. Like, here's a marketing person that's gonna work that marketing focus person that's gonna work and professional services and consulting.

Adriana Zeman  19:40

That was actually your you're not far off. It was one of the hardest roles to hire. Not entirely because of that. Yeah, it was more because at the time that we were hiring, it needed to be somebody who was both senior enough to carry a room and to develop that practice, because I wasn't going to be able to tell them, I wasn't going to be able to define the work. shotput Yeah.

Jeff  20:00

So they roll their sleeves up. self motivated to be. Yeah,

Adriana Zeman  20:05

exactly. They needed to both define what that was going to be. Yeah. Delivering.

Jeff  20:09

That's a unicorn. That's not Yeah.

Adriana Zeman  20:11

It's like we found it. Yeah, that's, but it was a hard one to find.

Jeff  20:15

Yeah. You know, you said something that I haven't talked about it recently. But it's just like one of my bread and butter things here, which is that creation of packages. Now, I find the packages come about and sort of, it's organically from two different directions. Did you find that you were doing the same like freakin security audit over and over again, and you're like, hey, costs us 10 was charged 50. It's all margin after that, or was sales coming to you like, you gotta give us some excuse to go out there. And so.

Adriana Zeman  20:43

So I'll give Niall all the credit. And when I got there, there were a number of packages that already existed. And frankly, the development work was the part that I was hired to kind of bring on. Gotcha, because that was really like that was already in place. And it was a really well oiled machine. And and, you know, that was a huge part of how we got the opportunities to get into the other part of the business. So when I got there, there were three defined packages that already existed, we did create more packages. So we created sort of a front end audit that never existed. Again, because you know, as we started to, you know, as we started to see where customers were having challenges, or there might be opportunities to create that kind of get in the door. That's where we did. And then the the other package, the one specifically, that was supporting Aqua lift, that was clear that as a totally different kind of products that the customers that were buying it, we're going to need some guidance in not just how to implement it, but how to really getting value out.

Jeff  21:49

And then how to create the team underneath that's going to realize almost they want to pay awkward to do all their work, you know, they're eventually to

Adriana Zeman  21:56

my goal, there wasn't even to do that right? Off, we are being open source. So my job wasn't to create the biggest consulting practice in the world. I had a really, it was an interesting challenge, because I was trying to carve out what was like, what should aqui be delivering from professional services? And what were things we were never going to touch because we had this really great vast partner network. Yeah, was a key that was a core value. Yeah, I was never gonna hire designers, for example, because we were never going to get into that work.

Jeff  22:27

So you bring in a design group, you'd have a partner when those types of things like, Hey, we got a great group, we're going to bring them in. Awesome,

Adriana Zeman  22:34

we would always introduce partner for that kind of stuff. So it's fine line, right? Because you deliver some service to make the product successful, but not get into the space that was going to be really competitive with the partners, because we didn't want to do that.

Jeff  22:47

That's so interesting. So if you don't mind me asking you, you don't have to say like, I feel like Aqua is running on sort of a different model than your standard SaaS sort of software thing. And usually, there's like a number of percentage of revenue, that professional services should never cross because then you look less like a product company and more like a services company did you have to tow that line as well.

Adriana Zeman  23:10

So aqui at that point, again, like aqueous really evolved, and what they're doing today is very different. And for all good reasons. We were trying to create a market. So we had to create both, you know, we had to build the expertise, we had to also create, like, build that expertise in, in the partner network. Sure. So we did I mean, you know, it was just a different time. And we also had to be able to deliver to these partners, we also had to be able to deliver in the enterprise at the same time. Yeah, it was a very kind of unique time and space. And I know that the approach to Professional Services has been really different since that time, and it was sort of, you know, think of it as like, we were just that was sort of a build period, we were trying to build the expertise in the market, we were trying to build enough demand in the market and be able to deliver it successfully so that it was, you know, so that there would be sort of more demand even for the technology in the market. But not necessarily trying to keep building that practice.

Jeff  24:10

Yeah, no, that's, that's super interesting. I'm so glad we got into it. And we spent a chunk of time there any, like the big learning lesson that you would say, like, you know, I can certainly bring up my my sins of the past, but like, what, what was it because you guys did a great job. You guys killed it, your darlings of Boston and everything for a long time. You guys just kept blowing and blowing up. So they don't have to be bad learning lessons. But I'm just curious.

Adriana Zeman  24:37

Yeah, so my takeaways there were, you know, at least, you know, sort of, like what are the big things I feel like if I go back and think about what I learned there, one was around, you know, I think having that alignment between sales and and services, was part of the reason why we were released accessible? Yeah. You know, we partnered working really well as a team, those practice directors and the regional VPs and director and VP, regional VPS. And the regional directors works really, really well. And that was a big reason why, you know, we we fueled that growth, and I felt like in, and we had that alignment across our metrics, too. So I think all of that sort of cross functional alignment was really important. And having those organizations that where you could develop those partnerships, and also having those sort of cross functional metrics that were in alignment created a lot of alignment, I would take that as a as a key learning from that experience. And then also, I had really, really, really strong directors.

Jeff  25:52

Yeah, that's the most important thing as far as Yeah. Because when you get brought in to do a capability that you don't have any, you know, or not that much expertise over? Or do you just start getting to a point where you're being diluted throughout the week?

Adriana Zeman  26:07

Well, the problem is that we were growing at such a fast scale, that if I didn't have directors that were that strong, I wouldn't have been able to, like, I wouldn't have been able to do my job. Right. And I would say that was the biggest, I think that was not the hardest lesson to learn. Because, again, I started out with a group that was that was strong, I hired even stronger ones to join your team. But it was, you know, getting used to the scale of growth or the pace of growth that we were going through. Sort of letting go was the hard. Absolutely. Right. And the only way I could do that was I mean, I could look around at all of my directors, and pretty much think that almost any one of them at some point could do my job. Yeah, that's that's their job was any easier than mine, to be honest.

Jeff  26:56

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's, they say, That's how you're supposed to hire right? Like, you have to get rid of the whole like, Oh, my God, they're gonna get rid of me and put this person into place, but you need you can't grow unless you have that. I remember for me, it's like, Wait, you don't need me in the staffing meeting anymore? And then I'm like, Okay, actually, that's a good.

Adriana Zeman  27:16

It was a good thing, right? Like, because up until like, employee like number 70, or 75? Yeah, I used to interview everybody. And at that point, I'm like, That's it. I'm done. Oh, yeah. Anybody anymore, the only people I'm going to meet, I will interview not that I didn't interview anybody. But I interviewed practice directors and practice managers. And then I did, obviously, when we were looking for that consultant, person to kind of come in and define that I that was sort of that was one that I hired personally, and kind of dug into their, for engagement managers for other stuff. I might be in the presentation, if I could manage to be in the presentation. But other than that, I had a trust, like, practice directors knew what they needed to hire for. Yeah, I was stepping out of that process, because I was just going to slow it down.

Jeff  28:02

That's awesome. So we'll put the button on on Acquia. And I can tell you really enjoy, because you have a huge smile on your face talking about I know is hard work. We chatted a lot during it. But, but that's great to hear. So let's talk about that transition, which we've seen a lot of our peers doing, which is in moving into the success role where and as always, we were always doing success before there was a success role and things like that. But you you made that, you know you made that turn or that natural evolution just sort of walk me through the first of all, just like the thinking on that, right? Because that's a, I don't know if I can necessarily do that move and letting go of the expertise of the services aspect. And now you're sort of in that world, and I'd love to hear sort of your thoughts on it.

Adriana Zeman  28:50

Yeah, so it's a really good question. So I feel like it sort of different points in my career, I've kind of thought about, okay, well, what's the next thing I want to either experience or learn if I'm going to have a pivot. So at one point, when I went from, you know, isobar, to Kramer, the big sort of driver there outside of sort of personal things kind of changing in my life where I wanted to be around more, my goal and move it and making that change was, hey, I really want to dig into marketing. So I want to, you know, dig into the marketing strategy and really execute on at that level, okay, because I already know that I know how to be a project manager, I already know that I know how to manage client relationships. And I'd started to move into this account management but now I really wanted to get into marketing strategy. When I was leaving off where I was like, Okay, I feel like I've sort of accomplished this. You know, they you know, I birthed a giant set of services All right, so and I already knew that like the challenge there was enough, you know, we talked about that but okay, so I know how to manage customer ers and clients through sort of these point in time relationships. And it's really about, you know, sort of ongoing delivery. Sure. And it's really about sort of a delivery lifecycle. Right. So my, my, my goal, and when I left Aqua was, well, I don't want to do that anymore. But I want to really think about sort of the whole sort of customer lifecycle, the whole customer relationship, and I want to get the opportunity to do that.

Jeff  30:33

Yeah. I should also know that, yeah, I'm so sorry, there's a slight delay there. For anybody listening, there was no playbook on any of how to do this at all. So how did you obviously got a role you took it on had full on? How did you manage through it without there really being any sort of this is how you do this type of role, right, there was account management, but then success started getting created, and really only thing I think Salesforce was doing at the time. So

Adriana Zeman  31:06

yeah, I mean, so talking to a lot of people, and also kind of seeing, like, what does success mean? Right? So like, if if the services and I think, frankly, it was my time at at Aqua really working with Chris comprado. Because you know, services was a part of, of sort of the whole customer lifecycle. So we had teams that were involved with customers at every phase, right? So there was the, the onboarding team, the Aqua ready team that Rene was running, and they were sort of at the very front of that customer lifecycle, there was learning services that was kind of there as well, then there was, you know, my professional services team that sort of was in there for a longer one. And then there was the TAM organization, that kind of great. So so I'd had exposure to it that way, you know, these were my peers, we talked about it a lot the interactive together, there was all this overlap. Sure. So I'd had all of those experiences and thinking about or looking at, like, what does you know, what is that customer lifecycle look like? What are the sort of key drivers at each point, and the key is in the organization you're in, and then the product that you're working with? Understanding like, what are the pivot points for that customer lifecycle? Because there's some similarities. But there, you're right, there's no handbook that somebody gets and says here is the lifecycle. Like, there's phases, but the key, like how long those phases are, is going to be for every product, what sort of defines how you move from one to the other is going to be different for every

Jeff  32:46

product, right? Because everybody says, I'm so glad to use the term phases. I was trying to put some some words around it, because everybody's like, well, yes, of course. And sorry, I just said, there we go. There's some Hawaiian music playing. So sorry, a little issue with my Mac. But anyways, the but there's so much, there's so much to do before you get to NPS right. And and especially for product companies, and you can't wait until it's a year later. And how is your rollout or anything like that? Right?

Adriana Zeman  33:18

Yeah, yeah, I mean, in NPS, right, like we could have a whole discussion just about NPS, right. Although we use it Yeah.

Jeff  33:28

Because investors will ask about it.

Adriana Zeman  33:31

Well, yeah, you have to and I do think there's value in it. So yeah, I don't want to dig too much. But yeah, you could do an entire trust me. We've done like roundtables.

Jeff  33:41

Maybe we should do that. Well, you and Renee and some other people will do a roundtable on on MPs might can be bullshit at times. But yeah,

Adriana Zeman  33:50

yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry. My, my head, my head.

Jeff  33:55

Oh, great. So I should not be talking. So I'll let you just keep talking.

Adriana Zeman  33:59

No, no, I was gonna say, I was gonna ask you, unfortunately, to repeat part of your question, because my funky thing where it just turns itself off,

Jeff  34:07

okay. And probably not affected by my, my, my my movie starting off. But I was basically saying, because so if you think about I get I hear this from CEOs, occasionally, they're trying to build up this organization. So they try and say like, the classic question of, well, what are the metrics that you're observing from the time that sales is handed off a customer to you, right, they signed the deal, and now you're their new best friend. And also, we can talk about how you structure that too, because you're at a product company. There's some companies need lots of implementation, that it might get rolled out to account management. And as I said, How Renee does it versus how Niall they're all different in Troy, and I'm curious, where you sort of have found some success there. And success.

Adriana Zeman  34:57

Yeah. So I would say that Probably one of the bigger challenges for someone like you or me coming into this role coming having like a professional services background, is that in some ways you kind of have to fight your gut. Yeah, there isn't going to be like, the answer isn't going to be sort of smother them in support, because that doesn't scale. So you have to find the balance between how much support and then how do you use that to teach them to swim? And then how do you think about creating either systems or process or things that can get built into the product? To facilitate that? Right, you just have to identify like, alright, what are the things that so I think from like, you know, having the consulting background is good, right. And the delivery background is good, because you're used to identifying where are the points of friction? Yeah, it's just that the solution isn't going to be what it used to be for you, right? It isn't, you just need to provide more support, it's okay, well, we'll provide a little bit of support, but maybe we need better documentation. Maybe we need multiple different types of, you know, sort of training formats, because there's always going to be a user that's like me who refuses to go through training.

Jeff  36:17

And I'm also getting a strong parental metaphor, where it's like, you know, I don't care if they beat each other up, they're gonna figure it out.

Adriana Zeman  36:26

It isn't quite like that. But it's like, okay, like, let's give them really good guardrails, exact meaning in right, like, let's just give them really good guardrails. And let's put all of these sort of breadcrumbs of support. It is almost like having kids, right? In some ways, you're like, Alright, where do I leave all the clues? They're going to be able to find and use on their own? Yeah. And who are the people that I need to work with that way? Or, hey, how do we streamline things? Should we make things simpler? Is there a reason why we need complexity, cheer for there? When do we introduce the complexity? Because in some cases, you do want the complexity, but you have to think about when you introduce, it doesn't make sense to introduce it upfront. Probably not. Yeah, like, let's interrupt.

Jeff  37:11

After the first invoice goes out after the first invoice. It's a good time to introduce the what now I'm just kidding. So it's

Adriana Zeman  37:17

really, so it's Oh, yeah. And in SaaS, that first invoice might be the last for the year. Yeah, but there are things like that, because you're like, Okay, well, do we introduce it, you want them to be really comfortable in the product, but you don't want it to be too late in that process. Because at that point, if it's too late in the process, frankly, you start introducing complexity at a time where they're start thinking about renewal, really the time you want to introduce and introduce friction at that end. And you also want to introduce it maybe earlier so that they can get more advanced use of the product to really kind of dig in. So those are the kinds of things you start sort of mapping out, well, what does it look like when somebody's on boards? How do you know they're on boarded? What does that mean? And I specifically was looking so because in between, you know, my first stop after Aqua was another product company, but the product was far more customized, because of the, you know, the industry that we were servicing it required more? Yep, I actually, then I made the concerted decision, I was like, I want to go to a product that has less implementation in it with a complaint, like where where that ramp up piece is going to be different. And then you can really think about how you manage that lifecycle.

Jeff  38:34

Yeah, no, that's, you know, 30 days, here you go, you know, not we're not going in and implementing for yeah, that's, I totally understand that. Actually, when you start bringing up the complexity pieces, and when you introduce it, when not to, it really struck my head. How do you hire for those roles? Right? Because just to get my opinion, the classic account management piece doesn't really like dealing with that super complexity, right? And so it's a little project managing and a little, so tell me, I mean, we all this is more back into the gut thing. But I was telling Renee, somebody walks by walk by a conference room and I see an interview, I'm like, Nope, they're not going to make it, get them out, walk them out right now. But like, you just kind of get these tells about people when you're talking to them.

Adriana Zeman  39:20

It's really that's been the hardest, you're right, because these are such hybrid roles, and there isn't a playbook for it. And frankly, somebody could have 10 candidates that have had the same exact title, but the job responsibilities might have been really different, because in some organizations, customer success is still just another name for account management. So they have really awesome commercial skills, but they don't necessarily get into the depths of how to really drive that adoption or even into the strategy or, or sort of the analytics or any of that. So it's funny because we're, we're kind of looking at that, you know, I looked at it a different time. And even that, that role might change over time. Right? So what do I look for myself? What do I, in that process? What do I look for? So there's both what do they need to do to be able to do the job? And then, and then you throw in? Do they have? Do they have the makeup to be able to work in a startup? Right? Because, you know, everybody thinks that they're okay with ambiguity and 90% of people are not, right. They're all gonna say they are. So So I look at like, what are the skills, you kind of drive? You know, you're like, okay, in order to deliver this product, in order to drive, you know, that success? What are all the elements? There's a subject matter piece, and you have to route way relatively sort of how much subject matter expertise does somebody really need in order to do the job? Can they learn it? Can they not?

Jeff  40:53

Because subject matter experts, if they're, if that's their thing, they'll they'll ignore the commercial aspects? And there'll be your best Smee in the world. But then you're like, are they going to renew? And you're like, oh, yeah, we're just really focused on, you know, that components or something,

Adriana Zeman  41:10

where they might exactly or they might focus on one part of it, not even just the commercials, but they might not focus on the adoption piece, they might not focus on the building relationships across the organization piece, which is a little bit different. So I look at sort of all of those elements, right? Like, what's the subject matter expert, or expertise, I always so the other thing I learned at Acquia was always include a presentation as part of your, as part of your, as part of my process, we always do a presentation at the end. So we'll do try to keep the rounds. So it's this balance, right, try to keep the rounds of interviews short enough. But you want to, you know, because then we could have a totally different discussion about how hard it is to hire its talent in Boston right now, because there's so much competition for it. So if you move too slowly, you're going to lose good candidates, but you want to be able to assess every aspect of it. So I have, you know, we do have a rubric where we break down, let's assess their delivery skills, let's assess the client management skills, let's assess the, you know, subject matter skills and then sort of go across, but the presentation pieces is always important, because they can't fake that. Yeah. And then they tell you a lot about how they're going to react in a situation like that. Yeah, like, it'll teach you how are they thinking about it, it'll definitely show you where their gaps are, on any side of it. And then you can figure out from there is this, you know, is this workable or not? And it gives you that sense of, can you put them in front of customers, right? That's like the biggest bar, right? Yeah.

Jeff  42:48

And that's when I was jokingly referring to my conference room scenario. And I walked past and saw something like, I just know from the way that that person is interacting with the interviewee, I can put that person in front of the customer, front, maybe better for it. And then I by the way, just to show him a total jerk is that that person was going for a non customer. Invite him Wow, okay. It's just a business analyst, that's going to be cranking away through stuff. But that is fascinating. I really love that presentation aspect. Because that's, that's where we get the issues. And I'm so just, I'm still deep, deep in development projects. But we've got Customer Success roles now here, too. And it's super important to see, can you get down into these details? But then how are they fast on their feet, you know, were interacting, like with CIOs and VPs of devs, that if we mess up their job, they're gone like so. You know, we have to test how they can deal with a person who's pretty stressed out if things aren't going well,

Adriana Zeman  43:45

we did. So at Acquia. We did that for both our technical hires, because we didn't have the luxury of having non client facing technical people, everybody was customer facing. And we also did it for I mean, we did it for everybody. Because it did give us a way to say right here, like we would, you know, take some of our favorite scenarios. And, you know, make those are case studies that we gave them. The way that you manage that you figure out whether somebody can handle ambiguity as you build the ambiguity into the case study, because you don't tell them everything you put, they can start thinking about it. But part of that test becomes too they come to me with questions. And one of the questions they have a huge red flag for me is somebody who does not ask any question that process they haven't like that means that they're actually not thinking about what we're putting in front of them because there are holes or holes because I wrote it.

Jeff  44:36

Exactly. That's awesome. Let's I know, I know that we're right up against the clock here. I usually try and ask somebody you know, once especially when we're running out of time, like the one fun thing that you've been sort of dealing with I know the last time we talked it was you know how early Am I getting my kids to sports practices? Yeah, but like what's the thing that you're able to like put work aside Didn't like just totally dig into and have a blast?

Adriana Zeman  45:03

Yeah, so there's sort of the two things. Me personally, I am able to manage my life like 100 million times better when I get to an orange theory fitness class at 515 in the morning, yes. So that's it. And then still on my kids activities. So my son plays, you know, all kinds of sports, and my daughter does dance and theater and sports. So yes, that's pretty much what my time is spent,

Jeff  45:30

I am in the same spot as you. I'm a firm believer in that you do that incredibly hard thing first thing in the morning, and then everything else is easy. And then kind of reduces that stress buildup as well, too. But I have same thing. I've got a daughter that's, you know, in club soccer, like six days a week, and then another daughter, who it's all about the dances and the dresses, and we have our Mother's Day show coming up and all that stuff. So I hear you on that. That's awesome. So yeah.

Adriana Zeman  45:57

You know, when you asked me about making the transition, it's honestly about talking to every single person. I know, a lot of the people that you and I know, together, asked, you know, sort of getting their feedback and thoughts on like, how to think about these different things, and especially other mentors I've had that have either made similar transitions. Yeah, because there are no playbooks that nobody knows how to do this. Like there isn't somebody that's going to if somebody's telling you, they definitively know how to do this, I'd be a little bit wary about it. Oh, yeah.

Jeff  46:26

There's just so many, as you said, you're at a product company. And then but there's a lot of implementation. But by the way, that's like the all the people we talked about these were this meeting started like they're dealing with that right now. It's less success and more services. And in that one type of situation, you have to hire for different people. And then suddenly, the organization moves to be more stable and product. And it's so you're right, there's no right answer. And that's why I love talking with all of you because it's different. And there's different success criteria for where the organization is at that point in time as well. So thanks a ton. I appreciate you getting on there. We'll obviously talk again, and I really like the idea of having some roundtables with some of our friends. So we'll see if we can make that happen one of these days. Yeah.

Adriana Zeman  47:11

Thanks for asking me. This was a lot of fun. Oh, it's a

Jeff  47:15

blast. I'll have a great rest of the week. And we'll we'll get this up soon. Sounds good. Okay.