There’s always someone a few years ahead of you on the scaling journey who can share their lessons learned. Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations.
Each of these companies had very different stories and helped shape the advice you’re about to read on scaling teams. Unlike product-led or sales-led growth, Notion is focused on community-led growth.
While there is no golden formula to reach the next level of growth, a common thread exists across each company with three foundational layers.
- Product
- Go to market
- Talent
Product is at the Core of Everything
Before thinking about sales or GTM motions, you have to start with product market fit. The most important thing to consider when building a product is the problem it will solve. Next, you must determine if that product is big enough to build a business around. Some problems are niche and may have the most elegant solution, but it might not go far if you can’t scale a business around it.
Timing is also essential. At Dropbox, the rise of the iPhone and smartphones meant an explosion of user-generated content. People were creating more and more content, but where does all of that data live? Companies struggled with databases and mainframes, and Dropbox created an elegant, simple, cloud-based solution.
Asana came during the rise of tools in the workplace, where companies were seeing information silos. Asana brought product management to the masses with a simple, elegant tool.
So, when you’re designing and building a product, think about the problems you’re solving for and the business models to support those products.
Customer Centricity and Feedback Loops
Customer-centric feedback loops and fast iterations are incredibly important. If you’re lucky enough to find a problem to build a business around and put your first iteration of the product in place, there’s a way to put users on your team.
Notion has done a good job of this. It’s a tool designed by a designer and engineer, built for themselves originally. They spotted a gap in how they were collaborating and wanted to centralize their work.
Very quickly, they had their first users – designer and engineering friends who shared a similar problem. This created an initial feedback loop and allowed the community to become part of the team. They could quickly suggest new features, and the founders could add them on the fly.
You want to keep this culture of feedback loops and fast iterations a part of your culture as you scale. Today, Notion is still oriented around community-led growth, with a vibrant worldwide community of advocates. Building a great product and bringing it to market is only the beginning.
Lessons Learned from a Product Perspective:
- You must stay on your toes and make customer-centricity an integral part of your business.
- Be able to learn on the fly.
- Don’t be afraid to rip up your roadmap if you get feedback in the wrong direction.
- Create a strong feedback loop both informally and within the product.
- Listen to your customers.
Align GTM Strategy with Product
Another key learning from the product side, which might seem obvious, is to tightly align product vision with marketing positioning. If you can align your GTM strategy and product, you can unlock frictionless growth more easily.
First, you need to determine if you’re building for end users or CTOs and Heads of IT. Do you put a product team on making cool new features that delight end users or on critical security and admin features to please the CISO at the end of the day? Do you drive revenue through self-service or generate leads for the sales team?
These are critical tensions to understand and leverage, and will help you put together a product roadmap to know what you’re building, who it’s for, and what to prioritize. You can get this wrong.
If your sales team is out of whack with the product vision or is in full outbound execution mode, but your product team is trying to ascertain end users for the product, companies can make mistakes.
The Lesson: Ensure your product vision is well-matched to where you’re focusing your efforts.
Set a Strong Foundational Plan to Ensure GTM Clarity
The next foundational layer is GTM. At Asana, the founder, CRO, and COO were very purposeful around what they called the pyramid of clarity. The biggest learning here for founders is building a robust strategic plan. It’s not easy to do, and you need to be an effective leader to make it happen.
One of Robbie’s mentors advised: Be brief, be brilliant, and be gone. You want to quickly create and communicate a compelling vision and mission that everyone buys into and underline that mission with a clear and concise strategy.
You’ll tie your company-wide and department-level objectives to that strategy and regularly communicate key results to assess how the strategy is performing. Things can be muddled in the early stages of a team or organization.
Key results can be hard to measure, and people might get overly focused on one key result, so strong leadership skills within GTM are imperative to building and executing a robust and clear strategic plan.
Understanding the Customer Journey and Sales Motions
Once you’ve built a product, you have to create a GTM motion. To do that, you need to be clear about the customer journey. You want to map that journey to every function within your company. At Notion, they want to ensure they’re a likable brand.
Notion invests heavily in its community, brand, and influencers, but how do you measure those efforts successfully? Can you measure if people have a strong sentiment around the product? It’s debatable. Marketers know that conundrum.
You can keep an eye on how many people sign up for different programs, who collaborates with VCs, where new businesses are popping up, etc. Naturally, if you do a good job at the top of the funnel, that should pull people towards the website and where they land in the product.
From there, digital marketing should be in a good position to track behavior, and eventually, you’ll want to optimize for international customers as you scale. That’s all part of the discovery process.
Next is the seeding motion. How do you ensure early users stay in your product? They need to see value immediately. Once you provide that value, you start to land new business sales. At Notion, they want to attract customers spending over a certain amount, and here, they can measure ARR from sales-assisted larger customers vs. self-serve.
How your product is discovered, seeds and lands ultimately determines how you retain and expand your customer base.
You Need to Get Talent Right
This is the foundation you most need to get right. Robbie likes to use the metaphor of Jedis and stormtroopers to drive this idea home. In the early days, you may need Jedis, the builders, people who can flex to cover many functions and set the DNA for your team or company.
Jedis are capable and curious, often making something from nothing, and they like that. With that said, Jedis can’t stay in the same place forever. They’ll want to build the next thing soon.
As soon as there’s structure and order that they often build themselves, it’s time to bring in the stormtroopers, the people who are high achievers but don’t necessarily want to do as much innovation.
You want to balance these two personalities. If you keep Jedis in a row too long, they get bored. If you bring stormtroopers to an unstructured environment too early, they’ll struggle.
Hire For Balance
It’s cliche, but it is important that you hire for balance. Diversity comes in many forms; you don’t want just a tick-the-box metric. As a hiring manager or leader, look at your people and find the strengths and gaps.
You want to hire the optimists and the realists, the pessimists and the dreamers, the book-smart people and the street-smart hustlers.
Look at your teams and ask your leaders to hire people who are different from one another. When you bring in multiple perspectives, you often find the best solutions because everyone approaches the problem differently. It’s not easy to do because hiring is tough, but you can instill these hiring practices from the beginning and set your teams up for success.
Set a Growth Mindset
You want to thread a growth mindset into your teams, especially early SaaS teams. It fosters adaptability, continuous improvement, innovation, and resilience. There are plenty of challenges in early-stage organizations.
- It can be stressful
- There might not be a plan
- People are burdened with operational and strategic debt
It’s also a great time because you’re earning a street MBA. You learn so much about product, marketing, and more because of proximity to those functions. You might be stuck in your own swim lane and goals at a bigger company.
The 10% Rule
You should implement the 10% rule with all your leaders – ensuring they spend 10% of their time each month learning and developing skills for themselves and their teams. If it’s a big company, you might have the budget to participate in expensive development programs. If you’re bootstrapped, you could buy a book each month, and everyone reads it and then shares what they learned from it.
Why does the 10% rule matter? If you do it from the outset, it compounds over time, and becomes a part of your company culture.
To Sum it All Up
To Scale Product:
- Build a solution to a problem
- Maintain customer centricity and feedback loops
- Align your GTM strategy with the product
To Scale GTM:
- Build and communicate a strategic plan
- Understand the customer journey and sales motions
To Scale Talent:
- Remember that the early team sets the DNA
- Hire for balance
- Set a growth mindset
