Matthew Mamet is a Chief Product Officer and leadership coach with over 25 years of experience helping software companies like TripAdvisor, Pearson, and EnergySage scale and innovate. With two successful exits under his belt, he specializes in growth strategy and guiding teams to the next level of operational efficiency and scale.
In our conversation, Matthew talks about unlocking growth and transitioning an organization from a startup to a scale-up. He discusses how founders and CEOs often have different needs when making their first product hire, and how he works with them to turn their visions into reality. Matthew also shares how he’s helped companies launch products in new sectors.
Typically, I like to join companies and teams that are in a period of great change. In my most recent role at EnergySage, we were acquired by a Fortune 100 company and moved from startup to scaling mode. Before that, I worked at a company that had recently IPO’d. The hallmarks of these kinds of moments for an organization involve things getting very complicated very quickly, as well as a need to change what’s worked well on a small scale. It requires a different mindset for people on the team.
With that context in mind, I love bringing people who are builders and doers onto a team. These are people who run toward change and into the fire, so to speak. That usually attracts people who have seen it and done it before. We’re all human, and these types of things get much easier the second time you do it. Bringing in change agents is important — people who can help the team institute better processes and implement responsible change at a steady pace.
Grit and perseverance are important traits. If it was easy, everyone would just do it. Some of the changes I’m referring to take quarters or years to implement. This is where perseverance in leadership and being able to set long-term objectives and continually work toward them is important. Also, I look for the ability to build a case that’s impossible to ignore or refute that their plans are the right move for the team or the business to make. This specific component typically requires a mix of data fluency and being able to make the point that a change is required with the data that they have access to.
When teams go from a version of their R&D organization, which is one engineering team, to something that is more like a multiple set of engineering teams, one of the things that work well is to build agile squads or pods that are mission-oriented. They have a specific customer need, want, or desire that they’re oriented to and a set of metrics that they’re measuring that help them understand whether they’re making the right positive improvements and creating value for those customers.
The previous version is a lot like what folks like Marty Cagan have called the IT model. There’s only one team (usually, the IT team), and the business keeps giving them requests to build things. So, the IT team shifts to more mission-oriented teams where they’re cross-functional. This is when the product manager, UX designer, marketer, sales team, etc., is embedded into these individual mission-oriented teams that have a specific customer persona in mind. There are specific KPIs that have been defined as value drivers for this persona.
I’ve spent a long time in marketplace businesses where we were matching demand or shoppers with a supply of some kind, such as hoteliers, insurance agents, or solar installers. The first logical move is to split the IT team into those hats — there will be a shopper theme and a supply theme. From there, as the value that you’ve created results in revenue growth, you now have more margin to further divide teams and create value.
There is a need to make sure that the moves that you’re making create business value at the same time. This is why defining the right KPIs is so important. The KPIs have to matter to the customer so that the commercial teams can monetize that value and then have a value exchange.
To quote Stephen Covey, it’s important to begin with the end in mind. Not all founders and CEOs have the same strengths. Oftentimes, they have a strong vision, and they’re looking to hire their first product executive to help turn that into reality. Other CEOs are the opposite — they need a visionary to come in and disrupt and change. They’re more like operators.
I’ve worked with many types of CEOs. The ones who I personally build strong relationships with are the ones who need strategy and execution expertise. I model myself as someone who can adopt a vision and then make that come true. Founders are great because they honestly believe that they’re going to change the world with their big vision. Matching up with someone who has a passion and a vision that I share and then being able to turn that into reality is the great beginning step. It makes some of the anti-patterns that you read about less likely to happen.
I find that data comes in very handy, especially when the founder and I disagree on the direction we want to go in. Having a team that is creating a case that’s impossible to ignore or refute helps increase the probability of the founder changing their mind. It’s very hard to change a strong-willed founder if they believe something in their heart, and if you don’t go in with data, then it all seems like a bunch of opinions. Facts and trust are the most important things.
For example, if you don’t have a deep history with the founder, you likely have to do things their way for a little bit. Measure everything, and in that process, you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not. If a certain course of action doesn’t achieve the desired results, you can respectfully recommend trying something different. It’s important to give control to the founder in the early stages of forming your relationship with them while also having a strong point of view that’s backed by data. This helps build trust, and eventually, they’ll lean on you for suggestions.
It’s difficult. Bringing a portfolio approach to the investment of resources into the roadmap is an important foundational piece. At EnergySage, we defined four key categories of investment. The first is keeping the lights on. As a business, that’s an ongoing concern and has millions of dollars in revenue. We want to protect that revenue that we’ve already earned. We’ve already built that value and want to keep that from having to be re-earned or resold.
The second is revenue growth. What will we do to open up new lines of revenue or new markets within existing lines of revenue? Third is profit and efficiency. What will we do to decrease costs and increase the profit that we get on the revenue that we’re currently getting? And the fourth is scaling or innovation. What will we do that is a larger bet that will help us scale the business in a meaningful way, but probably not in this fiscal year?
Outside the R&D org, depending on where you sit in the organization, you’re much more oriented to one or two of those four categories. Sales, marketing, and other commercial teams are focused on that revenue line. The CIO or security team is much more focused on running the business and making sure that as the business and the brand get bigger and stronger, it will not become a target for bad actors.
With those four categories well understood at the executive level, you can then move to this next step, which, at EnergySage, we did every three months. This process can happen in whatever time frame that works best for your organization. You evaluate the amount of cost, which is mostly people in a software organization. You have assigned projects that are aligned into each of those categories. And you check with the business whether that is the right level of investment given the business reality of the moment.
Of course, there are the inputs into quarterly planning, which include business and customer conditions. At a more micro level, a lot of the businesses that I’ve been in are marketplaces that have some level of scale. In that type of environment, millions of visitors come to the site so you’re able to get instant feedback through things like A/B testing, moderated or unmoderated user studies, etc. That way, you can make your case impossible to ignore or refute for what you’re going to bring into the next quarterly planning.
In an ideal world, the R&D team is on a dual track agile — product managers are trying to increase the depth of how far they can shine their headlights further down the road to the future and engineering is focusing on solving a defined problem that was brought into the quarterly plan for those customers.
New sectors can almost be treated as little startups within a bigger startup. If you apply principles and techniques from lean startups, that will help you define which sectors are working and require additional investment to scale. It’s about placing bets. In the absence of any customer data, market research and market data are a good place to get started.
An anti-pattern we want to avoid is going “all in” on this new thing. When you have a founder with a big vision, if you don’t have the checks and balances against that big vision, that can be an anti-pattern that sometimes teams fall into. They say, “Well, the boss said we’re going to do it. We’ll just do it.” But if you’re placing smaller bets and you’re checking the status of the ROI of those bets throughout a regular planning period, it gets a lot easier for the new sectors to reveal themselves based on data.
With EVC, we had the opportunity to partner with a sister company that could give us an MVP of an EV charging storefront. We put that on the site. It took our collective engineering team a couple of weeks over the December period to put that up. By January, we were learning, so it was a small investment, and we used that learning to guide our future endeavors on EVC.
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