The Exchanges

Q Okay. So you switch everyone over and then at some point you become the GM and president in addition to leading product. What was sort of the story there?

A So I was talking about how the kind of COO of the LiveRamp business became the head of product for Axiom. When our founder CEO, Orrin Hoffman, left, which was about a year after, a year and a half after the acquisition, Travis, who was the CEO, became the, the CEO of LiveRamp within Axiom. And then he did that for about, I guess it was 2015, two years, and then decided to go found another company. And at that point in time, me and our current head of sales Became like co-general managers for the LiveRamp business, and that was the point in time as well where Axiom was starting this process of figuring out how to divest the legacy business.

AI assessment note: “me and our current head of sales Became like co-general managers for the LiveRamp business”

Q If you think about quality of product in one dimension and quality of go to market in the other dimension, are there certain setups where one is more important?

A I think it's very different depending on who are the people that you're selling to. So LiveRamp was selling to a marketing persona. Rubric, which is where I'm at today, sells to IT and security. The buying process for IT and security is radically different from marketing. So marketing is not going to go and do like a POC on the technology and see if it actually works. Honestly, most marketers are like, hey, like maybe they'll do a very light POC. It's a very different sale. In the IT and security world, the checklist of capabilities you have do matter, and people will actually issue an RFP for like Like the hundred things that you need to do, and you need to be able to answer that well enough, but then you also need to be able to run a proof of concept and show up well with respect to your competition. And I just didn't see so much of that on the marketing side where people were making buying decisions much more, I guess, much less rigorously than they do on the IT and security side. So I think in some ways, like on the marketing side, A lot more rests on the go-to-market and having a good go-to-market story to tell and is less, a little less about the quality of the product. The quality of product obviously always matters, especially in retention and other things like that. On the security and IT side, quality of product matters a lot.

AI assessment note: “I think it's very different depending on who are the people that you're selling”

Q When you think about other hiring decisions you make, are there some where you are not willing to have someone learn the domain?

A Yes. So for the security products, it was the first direct report hire that I made when I came to Rubric. We had no one on my team who had ever built or sold a security product before. I was like, this is including me. So I was like, this is pretty bad. If we want to be a security company and we sell a lot to IT, but we wanted to do more in security. It was like, we have to have a heavy hitter that has security domain experience and can really help us figure out our vision and strategy for how do we sell into security. Zero compromise on having the domain experience. I needed that 100%, but I also needed someone who could really act as like an entrepreneur in a bigger company because we had ideas about the strategy we were going to take, but we didn't have clarity on what were the salient problems that we could solve coming from the space that we were already in and the assets that we already had.

AI assessment note: “Zero compromise on having the domain experience. I needed that 100%”

Q What about sort of continuing to build on this? Anything else for other people who are thinking about their second big product? Their first thing is a hit. They're at 50, a 105 hundred million, and they're starting to think about their next product that is sold to someone else that you've kind of debugged or figured out that would be useful for them to keep in mind.

A I think when you think about building your second big product as early as possible, identify sales, S E marketing resources that are going to be dedicated to figuring out how to get traction with this new product together. And don't make it 20% of their job, make it a hundred percent of their job. Because I think often what happens is like going and pitching this to 200 customers or 200 prospects is the easiest way to validate whether the idea, the concept of what your second product is going to be and what you're going to include in that Resonates or not. So the earlier you can do that in tangent with starting to build some thought around what the MVP is, the faster you're going to get to a solution that really can sell in the market. And I think a lot of what companies do is they're like, well, let me go do the product engineering work to build the second product and product is going to come up with some viewpoint on this. Yes, product should come up with a viewpoint, but the actual going and having those 200 conversation and having people that are really good sellers go do that, that's going to help refine The product very, very quickly in terms of what is actually table stakes.

AI assessment note: “as early as possible, identify sales, S E marketing resources that are going to be dedicated”

Q What did the experience of working at a company that didn't have product market fit and then figured it out? What's sort of like the residual value for you as a product person? There's a lot of product people you probably hired that have never never worked at Something that wasn't working and saw them figure it out.

A I got to be part of the stage where we were experimenting and iterating very quickly, and we were building stuff, and then six months later, or even sometimes two weeks later, we would throw it out and have to start over, and I found joy in that, and I found a way to feel like I was learning all the time and not get too attached to the things that I had built and were getting thrown out the window, and I, I think that is really valuable. Is figuring out how do you detach yourself from the work that you've done and from what has already happened and say, well, we're learning something new. We're going to pivot our focus to this totally new thing and do that over and over and over again. You had to build the practice and reps and how to pivot at very, and that has carried through as I've been at larger and larger stage companies.

AI assessment note: “figuring out how do you detach yourself from the work that you've done”

Q What have you learned about commercial sensibility in product people?

A Such a great question. I think about this a lot because I think it's one of the big areas that most product leaders do not have good commercial sensibility. And I think it is absolutely important to have that. And I do think it's something that can be learned, but you have to actually understand why does someone not have the commercial sensibility? Is it because they don't understand the role of selling in making the product successful? Is it that foundational or they understand it? But they don't understand how sales operates within this business, within the company that you're in, because things, sales operates very, very differently from one company to another. There are a variety of different problems when you say commercial sensibility and being able to understand what is the foundational building blocks that are missing from this person, why, why they don't have that commercial sensibility is super important to be able to coach it. Now, sometimes you can coach it and sometimes you can't as with anything, but it is a coachable skill. It is a learnable skill. A lot of it comes down to, like, getting the right, giving them the right exposure and helping fill in those, like, foundational building blocks that are missing.

AI assessment note: “most product leaders do not have good commercial sensibility... it is a coachable skill”