Leader Spotlight: Prioritization strategies in veterinary software, with Ian Evans

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Ian Evans is Vice President, Product at Vetspire, a tech company that develops veterinary practice management software. He began his career in consulting and worked for companies like Deloitte and Financial Synergy before joining Brightstar, a mobile device lifecycle management company. Ian then joined the executive team at CEVA Logistics and later became a national practice manager at Thomas Duryea Logicalis. Before starting his role at Vetspire, he served as Senior Director of Platforms and PMO at Orangetheory Fitness.

In our conversation, Ian talks about his experiences building a SaaS org from the ground up and how prioritization, especially when it comes to software features, is one of the hardest components to address. He discusses his philosophy for self-governing teams and how Vetspire focuses on empowering employees as a way to push the company forward. Ian also shares how his team looks at new technologies like AI, and evaluates potential impact, revenue generation, automation, speed, and accuracy before considering implementing it.

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Choosing investment areas strategically

Given your experience, can you take us through your process for building a SaaS business?

It always starts with a good product that is in demand, and that’s what we’ve achieved with Vetspire. It’s central to what we build our business on. The company was founded in 2017 and acquired by Thrive in 2021. They were crucial in ensuring we continued to build a good product, and to this day, continue to work closely with all of our clients and users to improve the platform.

This helps us prioritize the development and the features required to maximize and improve the operation. That’s really at the heart of it. One of our main goals is to deliver software that makes veterinary medicine easier.

In addition to having a great product and making sure you’re implementing the right features, how did you set up the organization so it could be easily scaled later?

We had to concentrate on controlling and monitoring our spending from the start. We needed to be very strategic in the areas we invested in, and we knew that if we could get the customer-facing services, i.e. sales, customer support, etc., then customer experience would get where it needed to be. That, in turn, drove the marketing value of the platform, establishing Vetspire as a strong product. Excellent customer service helped that growth continue.

In the beginning, it was really important for us to not only manage our money and be very strategic in what we spent but also show owners and investors the ROI. That further justified more investment to keep growing the business as well. Generally, you have to be very careful with budgets and make sure you’re spending money in the right areas.

In early-growth companies — especially in SaaS — the possibilities are endless but the resources are limited. What frameworks have you found helpful for prioritizing initiatives?

We try to keep things simple. At Vetspire, we acquired a SaaS business with a number of growth opportunities, but we needed to make smart, strategic decisions with limited resources. Specifically, we had few processes and limited cash. We needed to make sure we were getting those basics right and setting realistic goals while still stretching the team.

Communication was vital. Internally, we established logical meeting cadences — whether that be town halls, senior management meetings, team meetings, or 1:1s. We improved communication and customer service by investing in our service desk. One thing we didn’t have the resources for was an account management team, which can be really helpful as you build the software, get more clients, and expand. Since we didn’t have that, we had to narrow in on improving communication all around.

We also focused on improving planning. We were able to plan in a very detailed and accurate manner and evaluate what we were doing each quarter. We’d sit down and say, “Look, we really want to accomplish X, Y, and Z this quarter. We need to make sure the teams understand the goals, what we need to do, and the time box around that.”

Promoting an environment for self-governance

What was your approach to getting your teams aligned and marching in the same direction?

We used product roadmaps for both internal and external intentions. We’d lay out all the big bets that we wanted to get done in the coming year on a roadmap and share that with our clients. To this day, this helps our clients know what’s coming and allows them to share feedback. This helps us better understand what work our clients have in front of them, as well as how they rely on us for pieces of functionality that we build out. This helps us meet many requirements proactively over time instead of finding out about new requests at the 11th hour.

As you scale, do you find it challenging to also maintain the agility of the smaller team?

We don’t want to grow into a behemoth of an organization with a lot of red tape. Nothing is worse than when it takes 52 layers of decisions to change something. We really concentrate on agility within the business, i.e., our ability to be flexible and push regular, incremental improvements for us and our clients.

We understand that our clients need us to continue to move the ball forward. This doesn’t necessarily imply big jumps, but as long as they can see incremental value and improvements to the system, they’re satisfied. We’ve worked hard with the different teams we’re growing to implement agile ways of working.

It’s easy to say we’re being agile but it’s another thing to actually do it. We try to maintain constant communication by having the daily standups within the team, doing a lot of work in advance for sprint planning, etc. It’s important to promote an environment where the teams are self-governing, self-managing, and understand the goalposts they have to work in. They understand high-level goals, but it’s up to the teams how they deliver them.

How do you ensure that your teams feel empowered to make critical decisions and that their decisions remain aligned with overall business goals?

Empowerment is really important to us. At a senior management level, we all understand that we’re going to hire and build a bigger team. You can’t scale and grow without adding more headcount, more structures, organizational structures, org charts, etc. There’s a hierarchy. As a management team, we believe that the best way forward is to build empowered teams.

I’m a big believer in dividing and conquering. When I hire, I know that I’m hiring professionals so that when we set expectations, they know how they’re going to perform, and how they choose to get that done is up to them. I’m not going to get into the minutia and micromanage them on how to do something.

My main goal is to hire a team of leaders and employees who can divide and conquer, move forward, and be able to complete multiple tasks at the same time. If you don’t empower people and instead choose to be involved in every decision, every conversation, every meeting, etc., it elongates the whole process and causes more frustration in the workplace. That’s what I believe leads to unhappy employees, and that’s when people leave. If they don’t feel empowered, they don’t feel like they’re contributing value to the organization.

Incorporating feedback across stakeholders

Scaling also involves continuously adapting and continuously learning. How do you go about integrating feedback, whether it’s from team members or from customers, to improve your products or your processes?

Optimization is really important across the board. We can optimize processes in the way we communicate, design solutions, etc. It’s really important for us to continue to improve, and we have regular conversations about reviewing a process and how we can modify it. This could be because we don’t need a certain step or because we need to add a step to make sure there’s a check and balance in place.

Specifically, within my team, I promote the ability for people to speak freely about change or improvements. I always tell them, “We can make a change. We own our own destiny. We’re in a small enough organization where we can apply a change to a process very quickly. We should take advantage of that and make the change.” I also say that even if we don’t know what’ll happen and a change we made isn’t working, we can reverse it. It’s not a big deal. I want them to think out of the box about how we can improve processes around how we do things.

Customer feedback is particularly important. We garnish feedback through multiple ways and avenues. I recently took a trip to the Chicago area and visited some customer sites. I’ve found that we get the best feedback from customers when we’re physically with them, standing in their location — so much so that we’ve made a certain number of site visits a KPI for our product team members. We talk to the doctors and vets, their clients, vet techs, etc. These are all users of the system who are sometimes on it for eight hours a day, five days a week. They give us both good and opportunistic feedback.

Further, we do yearly customer satisfaction surveys to ask about things like customer service and support. We have features within the application that give the users the ability to vote on a feature or a fix. When a particular feature gets a lot of votes, we take that fix and add it to the next sprint cycle. We’re constantly listening to the user’s feedback and they know that.

Do you have an example of a piece of useful customer feedback that had never occurred to you before?

I always think of bigger things like new integrations or workflows, or applying AI to automate things. One of the very first items that users asked for and received a unanimous vote was improvements to the search bar. It was very simple — they just wanted it moved and actually increased slightly because it was very central to them.

They also wanted the algorithm to be tweaked when it spits out results. This was surprising to me because it was such a light change. I would have expected an unanimous vote to be for a big innovative feature, as opposed to an adjustment to the search functionality.

The importance of communication in prioritization

You deal with multiple stakeholders in your role. How do you manage conflicting stakeholder views?

Prioritization, especially when it comes to software features, is one of the hardest aspects to address. Everyone believes that their request should be considered a priority, particularly in our industry. Veterinarians are passionate about how the system should work because they use it all the time. It’s really important that we listen to our customers.

One benefit we have is our large and growing team. I like to remind them that even if we ask people about what their top priority is, we can still work on multiple items at the same time. We can take the list of the top five initiatives and push them into sprints. We believe that as we add more engineers, architects, testers, product people, etc., it’s important to optimize productivity so that we can work on more items.

In general, regular communication is a huge help. We talk about what we are working on in terms of a roadmap and why. We also started communicating a simple priority matrix, which helps us visualize the most important feedback we’re hearing that we need to implement.

Having a priority matrix and communicating that to people has been a great help to us, especially since prioritization in software is not black and white.

In your prioritization matrix, do you also consider external factors like competitors, for example?

Yeah, absolutely. When we’re investigating new features, we take a look at our competitors and what they’re doing. We understand some of their roadmap and innovative ideas, but mainly we just want to keep a pulse on things. We want other companies worrying about us and what we are doing instead of the other way around. We’ve got our own strategic plans, features, and functions to work on; it’s important for us to concentrate on delivering that to our clients.

Evaluating new technologies

In several of your recent roles, you’ve been responsible for introducing innovative technologies across multiple locations and teams. What’s your process for evaluating and integrating new technologies, and how do you measure their impact on business goals?

Because we’re a SaaS business, we have a ton of brilliant individuals who work within the technology space. There are always shiny new toys or technologies coming onto the market, but we like to evaluate the positive impact on the business before making any decisions on introducing them. Does this new tech make things more cost-effective? Does it make things faster? Does it make things more accurate?

For example, AI is a big buzzword right now. We know it’s going to be around for a while and continue to improve. We’re looking at AI from a couple of different angles, including the ability for it to create medical records rather than requiring a human’s manual input. How do we apply AI functionality to a self-service module within our service desk, for instance?

If we want to move forward with a new technology like an AI tool, we’ll look at items such as impact, revenue generation, automation, speed, accuracy, etc. We zone in on the impact to our client and their operations. Then, we’ll work closely with a pilot set of locations to ensure what we’ve implemented or introduced works as expected. This gives us the ability to see how new technology works in a real-world scenario so we can make any modifications before we do a full launch.