Leader Spotlight: Making a tangible impact for SMBs, with Alo Mukerji

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Alo Mukerji is VP, Product at Wave HQ, which develops money management software for small business owners. Driven by a genuine love for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), she has worked in product leadership roles at Constant Contact, Buildium (acquired by RealPage), Toast, and Privy (acquired by Attentive). Alo’s specialties include creating frictionless product experiences and increasing revenue through pricing models and new product lines.

In our conversation, Alo describes her “rule of five,” — i.e., talking to five people to initiate research and using that as a baseline to figure out what to do next. She describes the innovative bundling strategy she developed at Buildum that both increased revenue and improved retention and how her passion for helping small businesses drives an endless pursuit to reduce user friction to zero.

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The rule of 5

You have extensive experience working in the small business sector and also in tech. What’s your approach to identifying and validating evolving market needs in those areas?

I think my general approach to any of these things is always to start with the customer and with the customer’s needs. And in most cases, you have to go more broad. It’s not about what product the customer needs, it’s about the sets of things that they’re doing across the customer journey. That’s where it gets more interesting.

I never start with, “What other products do you need?” It’s more like, “What are you doing in your business today?” That’s my general approach — not to get narrow too fast, but to get narrow when it makes sense. And then our jobs are around translating those needs into products and features. In SMB in particular, there are just so many different areas of need — whether that’s enabling them to do something that’s happening upmarket, saving them time, or saving them hiring people.

When you’re going through that process of starting broad, what are some indicators for you to know when to get narrow?

When you start broad, you can pick up on patterns and then go down from there. I have a background in market research so, first, I talk to five people very broadly. Five people — that’s my number. I take that and figure out what I want to do next. Do I want to keep doing this or have I found a couple of things where it might be worth going deeper?”

Even from that, sometimes you can say, “Actually, there’s five really good ideas in here. Should I go and validate them?” I always start with that rule of five talk to five people (in each segment) so that we’ve gone really broad. After that, is it time to narrow down or do I feel like it’s still too much up there? Maybe I want to change my questions, whatever it might be. And then, of course, when you need a lot of data, you do more of the quant work.

You’ve mentioned that you really enjoy working with small businesses and building products for them. Could you talk about that?

First of all, the SMB owners that I’ve been lucky enough to talk to and research are amazing people. They wear a ton of hats. They’re working really hard, and to a certain degree, I think they’re driving the economy. When you’re in a recession, small businesses get you out of it.

On the flip side, when you build them something that helps enable their business, it’s so impactful and they’re so grateful. And you, as a product person, see that impact right away. It’s tangible, and there’s such a difference working with them versus in enterprise in what that feels like — both to the customer and you as the product person delivering that value.

The last thing I’d say on this topic is that your products cannot suck in the SMB to consumer market. They have to be good, usable, self-service, frictionless experiences that are priced well. From a product discipline perspective and as a product person, I’m very proud of those products because I know they’re good products. They wouldn’t be successful if they weren’t. And I love that discipline that it holds me to as a product leader.

Launching products with velocity

Do you have an example of a product you launched that was most meaningful to you?

It’s hard not to talk about Constant Contact because that was my first foray into small business. I started there really early and I was there for six years. I saw the whole ride.

Anytime we would have customer interaction — and I still do this when I’m having a bad day. You immediately feel better because it is so palpable what you’re doing for them with simple software. At Constant Contact, email marketing changed how they do acquisition or how they grow their business.

What strategies have you found to be effective when you’re launching new products in markets where your company already has a presence?

To me, time to market is so critical in the software business, and especially with SMBs because, in a lot of cases, you also want to get to them first. Whatever the solution is, SMBs tend to stick with whatever they see first that works. In general, you want to find things that are adjacent to what you’ve got, and that’s in technology or internal assets as well as customer needs.

On the technology side, you are trying to look for things that can get you to market faster. What are the assets we’ve got? Can I reuse them effectively? Velocity is really the intersection of how to deliver faster internally and deliver value externally. You can always look at things like research and your market competition for signals around those areas. I also think getting innovative on design, pricing, packaging, and all of those types of things afterwards is important as well.

Identifying barriers and reducing friction

Could you talk about creating a frictionless product experience, especially in some of the complex areas that you’ve worked in? Are there any key learnings that you could share?

I think research, testing, and design are all super important elements. At Constant Contact, which is really known for its frictionless flows, we were continuously testing. That was just a part of how we did things. We were trying to figure out how we can be even more frictionless. What are the barriers?

The other key learning for me was that there is a lot you can do both in product and, in some cases, out of product. When we focus on cost, we focus on the product and the self-service side, and that is the right place to start. But it’s very important to also acknowledge where you might need people and where those barriers are — even if you don’t address them right away, just know what they are. And when you get tools like AI, you can start applying those things potentially to some of those areas.

What are the most effective ways to understand and integrate real customer needs into the product development process?

Investing in research is really important. That’s another common thing about a lot of the SMB focused companies I’ve worked for: even at a startup level, we invest in research.

Of course, you want to have tools to gather feedback, but you should always start with the data that you’ve got — whether that’s customer experience on the customer success side, sales, your data team, etc. Those are all really good examples of data that you can get to internally before you even have to go externally.

I also make sure that my team and I are taking support calls and, if you have sales, do some sales calls as well. I think that’s critical. In some ways, you have to get it from the horse’s mouth.

Having answers prior to launch

Pricing and packaging have been a focus for you in several of your roles. What’s your approach to developing a pricing strategy for new products?

I like it because it’s not an exact science. You have to use both intuition and data at the same time and, really, the name of the game is value. Understanding where the customers put value and what you can either build or package that gets them to that value as fast as possible.

You’re trying to bring all of these things together. With new products, it depends on how innovative you’re being. But, generally, you’re looking at the market. That’s a good way to approach it.

I think doing some research with your customers, as well as externally (because you want to sell more) was one of my key learnings. Early in my career, I made a mistake where we only talked to our current customers, but we were trying to attract new folks with the pricing and packaging.

In the end, you’re not going to drive to consensus with pricing, so make sure that there’s a couple of people that are making decisions. You’re not always going to be right. You can do all the research in the world, but I always say that when you launch, you never really know what happens. The market can change over time too, so I think it’s really important to have both velocity to market and risk mitigation strategies behind whatever you do. That gives everybody comfort.

Say you roll out something and you’re getting feedback. How do you know when you have enough data to determine whether it’s working well?

We try as much as we can to get those answers prior to launch. That’s where the research comes in handy. You know what to expect and where the pitfalls might be. I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I do try to hedge for the things that I think can go wrong.

The easiest example is, if you’ve priced too high, how fast can you adjust that down? Do we have the mechanism in place to do that, or can we run a promo where we could try 20 percent off? Do we have the mechanisms in place to then make up for it?

Creating no-brainer product offerings

Do you have an example you could share of a pricing packaging initiative that was largely responsible for an increase in revenue?

When I was working at Buildium, we focused on micro small businesses, but we had a desire to go a bit upmarket. That required a different pricing strategy that was focused more on bundling. The problem with that was a lot of us were very passionate about the small business. We felt like we’d be leaving these people behind if we completely took away all these a la carte options.

What we came up with was really innovative. We offered these a la carte options, but then also also had a bundled option that wasn’t available for businesses at a certain size. We offered it to the folks that had a la carte and priced it so well that it was a no-brainer to get to the bundle.

With really small businesses, they tend not to want to try these things because they want to pay for only what they immediately need. But because it was priced so well, we found all this revenue from people that were upgrading from the lower end into the bundle. That helped not only with adoption of multiple products, but with retention. The more products that they’re using, the more they’ll retain.

That sounds like it was very well-received. Do you have any strategies to maintain that customer satisfaction or even enhance it?

I think metrics like NPS and CSAT are really tough because they cover the breadth of so many things. You could have a bad customer service experience and knock down the NPS. You need to invest time into breaking down what’s really going to move the needle on customer satisfaction, whatever the metric.

In a couple of my companies, especially on the research side, I’ve found that when you spend the time on that, it’s so worth it. In a couple of those cases, we were going to invest in people. We thought we had a customer service problem so we were going to hire 10 more people, and that wasn’t the issue at all.

Really breaking that down takes some work. We’ve done regression analysis and different things to do that To me, that’s a well-worth exercise that has not only resulted in higher numbers but saved us a lot of time and investment. I encourage anybody to spend the time to figure that out before you invest heavily in any one area.