Title

Co-founder and former VP of product management at Smartsheet, current product advisor for Meetingflow, TerraClear, Truebase, Uplevel, and Zync.

Founders Should Call Me When

You’re overthinking it and aren’t sure whether to trust your gut instinct. Oh, and call me if you want to avoid a bunch of the many mistakes I’ve made.

Background

I spent 20+ years helping two startups go from 0 to $100M+ in revenue and then navigate successful IPOs. The first was a traditional enterprise sales model, and the second, Smartsheet, was a product-led growth SaaS model. At Smartsheet, I wore many hats in the early days as a co-founder, but my main role was building out the product management and UX design teams. In those early days of SaaS, there was a lot of trial and error as we learned in many painful ways how dependent the business was on the product UX and onboarding flows. After building new muscles for online marketing to individuals and teams, self-service try-and-buy product workflows, and templatized solutions, it was time to circle back around and figure out how to meet the many different requirements for selling enterprise deals.

Superpower

Finding product/market fit, building early product teams, and balancing infrastructure, end-user feature, and go-to-market priorities.

Lessons Learned

UX is always important, pricing is difficult, A/B testing is worth the effort, and hiring a person who’s just OK for a hard-to-fill position is bad for morale.