COVID has taught us a few things that will forever shape the future of commerce, driven by one single truth:

Whether B2B or B2C, the customer’s intended experience is a result of a coordinated effort and visibility across the entire demand and supply chain.

And what is absolutely indisputable is this: 

As we enter 2022, CX needs a reset to put the customer at the center of the design experience.

These are the five key 2022 commerce trends that will drive customer experience and become a source of competitive advantage for those who get it right.  

1. Tech stacks will make or break how you get to market – no matter B2C or B2B.

2. Brands must move beyond one-dimensional data sets for real visibility

3. Customer service has evolved and can tie directly to product issues, logistics, and return management 

4. Trust matters – and part of that trust is about compliance with regard to GDPR and local privacy laws 

5. Returns are the biggest profit destroyer for brands – a strong focus on personalization is necessary 

I expand on this on the Future of Customer Engagement and Experience blog, here.

The post RIP, Back Office. #CX first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

Transformation as a topic is something I’ve been immersed in for a long time and so I’m excited about the role and the timing for three main reasons. 

The market: First, every industry is going through a transformation in some form or another, but the world needs fresh thinking on how to employ technology more than ever at this time; to sustain itself for now but to also thrive for decades to come. On the other side of these challenging times, many industries will have changed how they manufacture, source and deliver products and how they become more meaningful to their stakeholders. And they are looking for the right technology and thought partners to collaborate with, to get there.

The ability to make impact: Second, to embrace this challenge, few technology vendors have the reach or the technology breadth and domain heft as SAP does, to help our customers make an impact at scale. 

The people and sense of purpose: Finally, I’ve been privileged to know the current leadership team from my last tour of duty at Successfactors/SAP, and I left the company with an incredibly strong feeling of gratitude for the relationships I made across the globe. Thomas Saueressig, Executive Board Member, and I got to know each other over the years and began discussing a possible comeback. Through subsequent conversations with leaders such as Jen Morgan and Chief Product Officer Abdul Razack, I felt a genuine sense of renewed purpose, and the sheer energy and drive to make a demonstrable impact on the market and on society was evident. 

For those of you who know me, this role is different in some ways as I’ve been an operator for most of my professional life. Yet this role has phenomenal breadth as it spans SAPs significantly broad portfolio of products. As I looked at a number of opportunities, I got more conviction about what I was looking to accomplish in my next role, and the ability to have an impact at scale emerged as priority #1. Given the task at hand for every business over the coming years, combined with SAP’s reach and bench strength, this innately felt like the most unique and ambitious choice to make a dent.

I couldn’t be more fired up!

(Comments rolling in on LinkedIn here and here)

The post Headed to SAP. And I couldn’t be more fired up. first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

I’ve kinda played the role and enjoyed it. I’ve hired for the role. I’ve hired well and also misfired badly. These are my learnings….

First, do you really need a typical COO? Here is an easy framework to sort it out:

• “I want to prioritize my minutes and hours every day on the 30% that gets us a 10x return” – you need a Chief of Staff who can block and tackle in the daily game of time management whack-a-mole. 
• “I want a clone who can make decisions as I would on the 70% so that I can focus on the 30% that gets us a 10x return” – you need a VP of Operations.
• “I want someone who can execute my decisions on the 70% so that I can focus on the 30%” – you need a Chief Operating Officer. 

Obviously, there are overlaps but these are the guiding principles for what criteria must be at the tip of the spear based on the type of help you seek. All of them give you scale but in different ways. That said, peanut butter this decision and you will regret it.

As CEO or large-co GM, are you really looking for someone who is an operator or a VP of Operations? 

A VP of Operations can be an interim owner of functions especially when you are looking for a functional leader but in general, doesn’t manage functions. What she does do is intimately know how you think and work, what your immediate priorities are, and most importantly how you would make a decision. She can be your proxy on a chunk of the decisions so that you can scale by focusing on stuff that strategically really moves the needle. A great VP of Operations can bring thrust to how fast you move as an organization by removing you as the single chokepoint on every decision. She is your proxy in many cases so the level of trust between you both needs to be over the top. She also helps guide the rest of the management team, (especially new members) on how to add rigor when framing the ask in a way that will help you, the CEO to make a call. 

 A VP of Operations gives you speed.

A COO, on the other hand, is an operator. He not only can play the role of a VP of Operations, but can manage budgets, own forecasts, and they can run key G&A functions. He has the skill to vacillate from function to function and see stuff across the organizational tapestry to find both opportunities and trouble spots and act. The analytics he uses goes across the demand and supply chain. And he operates functions so that you can scale yourself by doubling down on the functions that need your direct attention right, right now. 

A COO gives you speed and accuracy.

What traits do the best COOs have in common?

Well, ironically, that depends on your personality and leadership style:

If you are the big picture, outbound type of CEO, you need an operator who can keep you grounded and help you keep the team accountable at a much more granular level than you generally can or want to but you know is needed. This COO has a handle on all the big dials as well as the small levers that can be moved up and down to adjust how the company operates to meet your goals in the face of constantly changing market conditions. In this case, many decisions get made without you, but you have faith that your decision-making framework is always used, that your strategic goals are always adhered to. But it requires that you’re disciplined to stay in the know in a timely way so that you have the chance to pull out your veto card when market conditions that you are so on top of need a different lens on the problem. But it falls apart if you need to do it all the time. This is super useful if your market is in a state of intense land grab, transformation or growth.

If you are the operational type of CEO who does get into the details, a COO becomes more of an enforcer, making sure that your every preference for detail is borne out. You own the operational dashboard and they see to it that every metric is met.

 That brings me to the last super important distinction: 

What do great COOs do?

Good COOs can play cop effectively. No one can sneak anything past them, and the rest of the team knows this and are constructively weary of them. But great COOs? Great COOs can play cop but can also give the team wings. They have the business acumen to know a good deal when they see one and the management team knows that they will find them the budget and give them both air cover and immense encouragement to take a big swing. They exude a personal brand as such to the rest of the management team every day and are very approachable.  It’s finding this COO that will deliver exponential growth. I’ve only come across 2 such great COOs in my career.

This last point about great COOs deserves its own post that I might get to at some point.

But this should get you started if you’re wrestling with the topic.

Comments rolling in on LinkedIn.

The post What makes a *great* COO? first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

1. Frederic Lardinois / writer and news editor / TechCrunch
2. Katherine Boyle / Principal / General Catalyst
3. Melissa Pancoast / founder and CEO / The Beans
4. Sameer Patel / former CEO / Kahuna
5. Sid Sijbrandij / co-founder and CEO / GitLab

We talked speed, agility, market expansion opportunities, open-source and of course my bias – how SaaS is pulling along a lot of these core infrastructure elements of the new stack and getting them in the hands of more users, more customers, more suppliers, and more employees.

I was a bit of a misfit on this panel in that it was more about the plumbing vs the application or data layer. But I generally feel that not enough is said about how modern plumbing technology gives you mad speed and agility when it comes to getting new application technology in the hands of B2B and B2B customers.  For instance, at Kahuna, we on-boarded 80 million users in a single day with zero dev-ops support. That was thanks to our server-side genius engineers as well as the elasticity of Google Cloud Platform.

We need to have more of an outcomes-based conversation about the new stack. I think we achieved that in this conversation.

Here is a link to the video interview:

Getting the People and the Tech You Need to Build a Modern Enterprise #TCSessions https://t.co/5cixK6zRMw

— The New Stack (@thenewstack) September 10, 2019

The post “The New Stack” for a modern enterprise: A TechCrunch Enterprise Video Interview first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

Most elements of Product Management are generally clear: understand what an ICP (ideal customer profile) wants, make sure that there is a truckload of said persona, and then inform the road map and priorities to deliver new businesses, new products or new features that will drive top line growth and retention.

Most elements of Product Marketing are also clear: make it crystal clear for said persona and for the sales team to understand what problem you are really good at solving and to draw out THE differentiator and THE benefit of your product and consistently hammer the crap out of it at every touchpoint.

In reality, it never plays out this cleanly between the two camps. And the first signs of trouble that leaders and boards need to look for is when product marketing begins to take over understanding what the customer really wants and conversely when product management takes over-communicating how the product should be talked about. Right when you think you have put all the pieces and resources in place to scale up, the pipeline will begin to fall off a cliff.

Good product marketing maniacally focuses on identifying what capabilities need be at the tip of the messaging spear to pull in the first meeting. The product marketing manager is not the champion of every feature you have. Rather, the product marketing manager is the grand poohbah of evangelizing the problem statement and the most critical capability that solves that problem better than anyone else does. The day to day grind of the product marketing manager is the ruthlessly decide what to exclude from your Maga Carta of interconnected features that no doubt make your product great but will leave the prospect’s brain in a state of mush if it’s all thrown at them at once.

The job of the product marketer is not to make the product fantastic. It is to make the product infectious.

Product Management on the other hand, when done right, requires the commercial and strategic rigor to know what products will expand the market size and drive high velocity and then to subsequently get super tactical to identify the levers what will achieve market message fit to bring in the prospects.

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Why this gets messy, at least at growth stage businesses is often for these three reasons that can be easy to spot in a board meeting or a management meeting if you look for it:

The CEO or GM or the broader leadership team comes from a company or business unit selling into a very mature category where the product manager is mainly building reactionary features to secure 10-20% growth. I’ve seen over and over again that these leaders tend to expect product marketing to help with what goes into the product and PMs are generally sitting in the back office working with engineering all day. All good for a mature category. Fatal if you want real growth.

Product Marketing is tucked under Product Management, literally or politically where marketers are instructed to message and position with an AND mentality and not an OR mentality. That’s when you spend an inordinate about of time marketing the different flavors of your coconut milk-based ice cream when the larger market doesn’t really understand the fundamental value prop of coconut milk being dairy-free or they think it’s an intrusively gross substitute for cream in ice cream. (you can tell how I feel about it). In these situations, your product marketing becomes a clearinghouse. And with due respect, the best product managers can think that they are world-class communicators. They are most often not and when they have hierarchal oversight, they get to flex an unhealthy muscle.

Finally, being in denial about the onset of idea bankruptcy on the part of Product Management. This happens 2-3 quarters before its clear to everyone but at some point, the company can start to look to product marketing to come up with new “stories” off the same code. This is a result of a tired product organization that has may have temporarily lost its ability to outflank the competition. Insist that your product team tells you why you will win. If your product marketer is dominating that conversation in a leadership or a board meeting about this topic, you’re in trouble.

So, is this always applicable in all types of SaaS/ Enterprise? Yes, with one exception. In those rare viral, bottoms up, network effects based products such as Slack and Zoom, the product really does a good chunk of the product marketing (see examples marked in pink). I remember Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, telling me at one of our Sequoia Capital CEO summits that he refused marketing spend early on because every Zoom call literally exposed the product to one or more new leads by design and with zero effort. Code is always going to your cheapest marketing and has the highest velocity. Conversely, marketing is your costliest marketing.

But for every other business that is not based on network effects, you need some dose of real, objective, hands-off product marketing to let the size of the problem and the tip of the spear message breathe in the market.

As CEOs, GMs, leaders, look for these trouble spots to drive accountability for growth and reach.

(Comments rolling in on LinkedIn)

============

More on building a weatherproof Go-to-market operating machinery:

–      What really is Go-To-Market?

–      SaaS product-market fit fools you into thinking that growth will come

–      Looking to do badass SaaS BD deals? Do these five things now

–      Combining functions in a SaaS business is a terrible idea

The post What really is Product Marketing? first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

If you really have a go-to-market problem, it is a systemic issue that spans across multiple functions in the organization, many of which aren’t even directly market-facing.

The definition of GTM is actually super simple. Build a moat with your market narrative and then maniacally focus on constructing and closing a pipeline via direct and indirect channels as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

If you truly have a GTM problem, the answer lies not just in a high falutin PowerPoint deck but rather, deep in the nooks and crannies of your operating machinery. All too often, GTM heroics happen in the design when it should be all about the execution.

And this is without exception, the job of the operator – the CEO, the President/COO, the GM, and the board – to define and orchestrate at a structural level.

Here is a quick illustration of a subset of root causes of your go-to-market problem:

Not a single one of these chokepoints can be addressed by tweaking or rebuilding any single silo. Successful GTM is a function of how you design and obsessively communicate the market proposition to the whole company and to the market, and subsequently, how you hire and orchestrate collaboration amongst different functions to move really really accurately and really really fast to get many customers on board as possible.

Take something as seemingly straight forward and tactical as securing references – a critical proof point that your GTM is working. A GTM focused reference is NOT just securing a polished customer success story. GTM focused references have teeth. They are a manicured depiction of the veracity of the problem and the sophistication of the solution that directly speaks not just to the awesome sauce in your product but to the market narrative that you are convinced is a story that 200 very qualified target customers already understand and are looking to solve for, today. That takes maniacal collaboration between marketing, product and customer success to influence the types of outcome that speaks to exactly the right subset of capabilities you are trying to highlight. This is GTM.

Or take a fall sense of security that early product-market fit will deliver the Market-Message fit (whole post there) that’s needed to drive up pitch rates. You may have excellent product market fit but that will not drive up pitch rates and lead to a successful GTM. Again, a problem to be first tackled not by marketing or sales, but by product teams to ensure that the product itself drives sales velocity. This is GTM.

Or take development priorities. At least at a growing business unit or at a growth-stage start up, you’re making product roadmap tradeoffs everyday between features that drive growth vs those that drive NPS, especially during wartime. Your GTM is severely impacted in a positive or negative way when you make a choice to have your sales leader sit it out for a quarter to build features that might not immedicably attract new customers but will lower churn, or drive references that will help sales 2 quarters out. This takes mad amounts of discipline, trust and sisterhood between the head of Sales and CS, with the backing of product. This is GTM.

You get my drift.

Yet, as leadership teams or even boards, we naturally go for the sales or marketing jugular when we miss a quarter or two.

At our business within SuccessFactors/ SAP, we drew revenue to $70 million from almost nothing in 4 years by shifting the market narrative on what collaboration means, and then reworking the entire product strategy, sales training, content marketing strategy, the charter for CS and reference strategy, to back the truck into that narrative. At Kahuna, our strategy was to ruthlessly narrow the market scope to just consumer marketplace retention marketing. But our GTM plan was to massively expand the product scope to become the only provider that offered both sell-side and buy-side marketing and analytics, resulting in a pipeline growth of 1900%. This is GTM.

So, the next time you miss a quarter, or the lead volume falls off a cliff, use this framework to truly work out where the leak is. Or if it’s all working well, still use it to really understand why it’s working, so you can double down and move even faster.

This at least gets you on the path to figuring out a fantastic go-to-market, and with brutal honesty.

(Comments rolling in on LinkedIn.)

The post What really is “Go-to-Market”? first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

Think very carefully about whether you want to hire someone who grows into the role or if you should be really hiring leaders that the company grows into. 

It shaped how I sourced and interviewed candidates over time and also gave me the fundamentals to build from.

Even if we do intentionally look for that person that the company can grow into, the most promising candidate at least at a startup, is most likely someone who has the best vocational competency and cultural fit but played a divisional responsibility in his/her prior role.

Meaning, we do well when it comes to “I want to go from $40M to $150M and I need a leader who has operated a $150M+ function and is a cultural fit.” But we don’t dig deep enough to ascertain whether the person has the needed organizational, systems and strategic tone to scale the scaffolding of the company and create the right kind of space under him or her. That’s where the benefits of scale truly come from. And it is these DNA altering traits that will determine if you truly scale the business consistently and grow valuation beyond hitting even 4-5 consecutive quarterly targets.

Typically, this leader comes from a bigger company where they likely owned a cog in a much larger wheel – a region, a unit, a market, etc. and is looking to move up. Being a cog in a much larger wheel means that said rockstar likely did not have to deal with a lot of resiliency issues that one has to, as the person in charge.

When you are the cog, the operating scaffolding is in place, allowing you to come to work and focus on capitalizing on “the system” and on maneuvering around inefficiencies and obstacles. And scaled down for proportionality, the candidate would most likely have a much smaller role if they were inside your company right now, doing that same job. This is a very different mindset from what’s needed when you own the wheel.

The good news is that once you actively look for these traits, it literally takes the first 10 min or less to suss out if the leader has the presence, the compassion, the compass and the gravitas to immediately assume a position that truly sets the marker for what the company will grow into. The things they want to discuss quickly expose where their current center of gravity currently lies and what they will focus on as soon as the immediate fires are put out.

So, don’t get seduced by vocational competency exhibited in their last role. Be 120% sure that this leader can move from being a cog to designing and championing the whole wheel.

The post When scaling for high growth, make sure you hire cogs that can design wheels first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

Whilst getting to product market fit is job #1 for a CEO at the early stages, product market fit alone leaves gaps that you need to fill to drive sales velocity.
There are some fabulous perspectives about these gaps already.  Brian Balfour offers a tremendous blog series on why product-market fit isn’t enough, offering additional vectors such as Model/Market fit, Product/Channel fit, Channel/Model fit (Hat tip to pal Andrey Kushid, CEO of Miro, for the pointer). And Bruce Cleveland astutely describes his stated missing gap as Market Engineering in his awesome book, Traversing the Traction Gap (hat tip to the fantastic Follow your Different podcast by Christopher Lochhead).

Over my last few tours of duty as GM and as CEO, I’ve learned that to achieve sales velocity quickly, there is an additional vector. And I’m calling it Market-Message fit.

Market-Message fit comes from a set of floating product capabilities that brings the customer to the table to learn more about your product, at high velocity. Not clever derivatives of your product marketing messaging, or the rate at which prospects move through the funnel, or indications that they are willing to pay or buy, or even features they use. Brian and Bruce cover these. What I’m talking about is just the features that add immense speed to the rate at which they come to learn more, because of *something* you offer in your product.

John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is working. I just don’t know which half.” This is true for the business of building product as well. Though it’s closer to “80% of our product features that we pitch are actually used. I just can’t predict which 80%.” Unlike marketing, that 20% of product is not wastage. That 20% defines, whilst a floating set of capabilities, what brings different segments of prospects to the table at high velocity.

So, let’s dig into that 20% with some examples ….

Conversational intelligence (in my case, Gong.ai) products do many things: they record emails and calls, they transcribe, they surface important topics using AI, and on and on. But as CEO, the single biggest benefit I was looking for at Kahuna was ways to shrink the distance between the demand and supply by moving the whole company to the front lines to learn what the prospect was saying verbatim during Zoom calls. So, in our case, Gong’s 20% for me as a decision maker was the simple act of capturing calls and easy offline listening. Once the product was in the building, we used all its functionality over time. But Gong had me at what is really an elementary feature in their great product set: Recording and parsing who said what.

At SuccessFactors, we shifted the goal post on plain vanilla collaboration software by maniacally focusing on the right-brain buyer. An add-on to the usual grab bag of features, we offered work patterns – a set of predefined integrated experiences that solved for discrete problems in sales, marketing, HR, etc. Even though a big chunk of customers still used the product for simple collaboration, work pattern product capabilities drove massive inbound interest and created a unique brand perception that large swaths of ROI focused buyers and users (36 million in total) gravitated towards in just 12 quarters.

15 years ago, my wife and I were down to making a decision between an Acura and a Lexus SUV. The cars had exactly the same features that we cared about most. The tipping point that appealed to the geek in me was voice activated GPS on the Lexus. All you had to say was “find Chinese restaurant” and boom! Chinese flags would light up on the map. Over 10 years, we took maybe 4 road trips. And used the feature once. But voice-activated GPS was Lexus’ 20% for a buyer like me.

Other quick hits: For Slack it was never the impressive library of integration for me. Or even persistent group chat. It was being able to come together to create a live conversation to solve a discrete problem, and then disband. For Drift, whilst it was scaling an automated SDR process for our marketing team, for me as CEO, the clincher was learning why someone came to our website for the very first interaction so that we could refine our messaging at external touch points. And Salesforce’s market message fit was never about warm-hearted customer relationships. The cold killer app that drove sales velocity was the ability for a sales manager to be able to snoop on monitor individual reps progress.

Is this really a product management problem or one for product marketers to tackle?

It feels like this is a product marketing /messaging problem to solve but that’s only 1/3rd true. The best product managers are acutely aware of this split and realize that 20% of the product is really a marketing cost to bring massive amounts of interested buyers to the table so that they get to hear about all your awesomesauce. However, what the best of ‘em often tend to do is fret about why 20% is not being used by everyone.

Embrace this 20%. Study it intensely and understand how it differs by segments. Then keep investing in it and make sure that your product marketers pimp the crap out of it segment by segment, to bring a mad number of prospects to the table.

(Comments rolling in on LinkedIn)

The post SaaS Product-Market fit fools you into thinking that growth will come first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

This comes up with a lot of early-stage startups that I’ve been advising so I thought I’d opensource it.

Here goes….

Obsess about the “Why now?”: If retail is all about location, then SaaS BD is all about timing. The reality is that your timelines and that of largeco almost never lines up.

For largeco, timing can be driven by two factors: First is strategic thrust: what’s the one big message or proof point your partner wants to communicate to the market right now? Is it an expansion opportunity or market share growth in a new category? Or is it the need to simply look hip at their annual conference. The second is the more tactical: what is the one big hole that comes in the way of closing multi-solution deals right now?

Timing is important to you as well. Your runway is limited so every bet matters. Largeco can absorb 4 quarters of dilly-dallying. It can be devastating to you to be empty handed after putting all those resources to work and taking your eye off the ball on direct sales. The confirmation bias that is born out of potentially cheaper and faster indirect selling will blind you into downplaying the very low probability nature of reseller deals getting done.

As startups, we naturally prepare for Why. But it’s not being brutally honest about ‘Why now’ that can make your BD deal be dead on arrival.

Understand how your unit economics will change: Large companies can take as much as 30-50% off the top line. You likely know this, but I’ve personally been part of the process or seen early start-ups I’ve worked with be in the final throes of a deal, only for the CEO to get cold feet about giving up that kind of margin. This egregious move of backing out midstream is fatal. Someone at largeco went way up to get approvals and kept the blockers (more on that below) at bay. And now she has to eat crow. In largeco land, that’s career suicide. So, model out the unit economics before you pick up the phone.

Understand the overall sales compensation structure or the broader product roadmap: When I vetoed a deal of a peer, it’s because said potential startup partner had features not applicable to the deal at hand, that were on my team’s road map. And I was afraid that it would cause confusion in the field with respect to which product a rep positions. And so, I squashed it. So, don’t think of just the right person who can close it. Think of everyone who can block it. The bullets can come from anywhere.

Don’t think too hard about how you make them more strategic when they want block and tackle help: Man, I saw the most long-winded stories sitting on the other side of the table. Your startup likely has some bleeding edge solution that solves for an edge case or wins a new customer category when my mature customer in the heartland is trying to grow corn more cheaply or mine coal more safely. So, understand how largeco plays offense and defense. Intimately. You need to explain how you help largeco play offense or defense inside their boxing arena. Do not romanticize about creating a new sport together.

Help them visualize the morning after: Here is how largeco does deals – there is a named sales rep, a named technical sales lead, a named solution architect and a named account manager. You have an inside sales team with an engineer moonlighting as a technical sales rep. Can you keep up when the flood gates open? You most likely can’t. So, think really heard about how you make them feel confident that you can drink out of the firehose and still knock out some serious NPS.

A lot of this is SaaS 101 and the solutions are very nuanced. But these are the overarching pitfalls I see time and time again at early stage startups.

So, take care of these details. Or your BD deal will redline to nowhere.

——————

P.S If operating SaaS is your thing, here’s more of where this came from: SaaS Org, SaaS CS, and SaaS Culture.

The post Do these five things to get badass SaaS partnerships done first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.

Watching the G Suite news coming out of Google Cloud Next 2019, I had my Michael Corleone moment that took me back to my old stomping ground: employee engagement and workplace performance.

I was hoping that we wouldn’t see Google trying to out Microsoft at Microsoft’s own game but that’s what we got. “More collaboration insights in the Activity dashboard, New security assessment program for apps on G Suite Marketplace, Gmail making email more secure with MTA-STS standard, Get more done in less time with G Suite Add-ons beta, Google Voice for G Suite: Cloud telephony with the intelligence and security of Google Cloud”

Not shockingly, the incremental updates to G Suite were awesome engineering feats. But Google had the chance to entirely shift the goal post by re-imagining a better “what” this time. Instead, what we got another attempt at a better “how” by pitting product features against Office 365.

Ditto for the go to market messaging gleaned from session titles:

“Learn about G Suite’s newest app: Currents! Large organizations are increasingly dispersed, and as they grow communication and knowledge sharing often become more difficult to navigate. Adapting existing productivity tools to maintain a sense of community can be challenging—employees struggle to connect with each other, leaders are unable to get feedback and drive alignment, and content and knowledge remain trapped in silos.“

Knowledge sharing, connecting employees, breaking silos.

2001 called. She wants her value prop back.

So, what does more “what” look like? 

• Frontline Work: Upskill America estimates that over 24 million workers just in the US are front line workers. Many of these workers have one job in huge industries such as retail, logistics and healthcare. Sitting at the very last mile of the customer experience, they are the face of a company’s brand. Yet these workers today do backflips to make desktop worker optimized HRIS and employee engagement systems work for them. The mobile-only front-line worker needs a very different design paradigm to be the best that she can be.
• Shift Work: Approximately two in five workers in the US work during nonstandard times. Shift workers work in jobs that go 12-24 hours. Each job requires 2 to 3 people to cycle in. And shift workers often have multiple employers. There is a significant gap and inefficiency in how they get found, how they get scheduled, how they perform and in turn, how their performance is measured, and how they get marketed to potential employers. The Population Reference Bureau estimated that the occupations of these workers will have the largest projected growth rate over the next decade. That’s a hunk of TAM.
• Unstructured work modalities are hugely underserved. The design metaphor for tools such as GSuite, Office 365, Asana and others serve a structured work modality: task management, spreadsheet creation, workflow, etc. The reality is that these tools are great after the collaboration to generate and firm up ideas has already taken place. They work great when its time to break up tasks and get them done, to model out costs, or document decisions, or present plans made. What’s missing is the ability to support the integral steps that form the basis of the task – whiteboarding, ideation, planning, organizing thoughts. Massive industries such as Professional Services, Industrial and other Design, CAD/CAM all rely on these crucial precursor phases before “work” is remotely ready to go into a spreadsheet for costing, or a presentation for funding.

The tragedy in all of this is that Google does have the best capabilities, the best real-time interplay and the absolute best NLP in the market. All sitting atop GCP which remains the best-kept secret on Planet Enterprise. Thanks in part to GCP and in part to the genius of Kahuna co-founder and CTO Jacob Taylor and his team, at Kahuna we on-boarded 80 million consumers in a single day, with zero dev ops support.

And yet, Google misses the forest for the trees by deploying these maddingly sophisticated resources only towards improving the “how”, vs re-imagining the “what”.

This playbook of shifting the goalpost works. At SuccessFactors / SAP, we shifted the goal post by offering functionalized collaboration to solve very discrete problems in Sales, Marketing, IT and HR. And as a result, we drove revenues up well over 20-fold and subscription 5-fold in just 12 quarters. And we changed the narrative for collaboration which added significant sales and marketing velocity.

So, question the prevailing premise.

Look, this doesn’t need to be an either / or game. Given the astonishingly good numbers we’ve seen from Google’s historical focus on education, the horizontal long game can work. But Google has all the pieces to re-cast the narrative and see returns now. And with Thomas Kurian at the helm, they have the street cred to build real enterprise SaaS software that solves real business problems, for huge markets.

I’m rooting for you, Goog.

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As I was doing some research for this post, these were some of my favorite posts on the event.

• Mike Melanson of The New Stack brings a very compelling developer angle
• Holger Mueller of Constellation Research covers the infrastructure and security elements but ventures into apps and SaaS.
• Ron Miller at TechCrunch and Kurt Marko at Diginomica go for the jugular and take on the AWS vs GCP analysis, head on.
• Finally, Frederic LardInois at TechCrunch has an in-depth interview with David Thacker, VP of Product for G Suite on Currents – Google’s newest shot at horizontal enterprise collaboration.

The post Why does G Suite keep kicking into Microsoft’s goal post? #GoogleCloudNext19 first appeared on Pretzel Logic - @sameerpatel.