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Product Guidance For Growing SaaS Companies

All successful SaaS companies reach a point where they need to level up. Whether you’re an emerging Startup trying to develop your Product discipline, a juggernaut in search of a focused strategy in a sea of opportunity, or a mature company looking to modernize your Product organization…SurgePath can help.

We Offer a Full Stack of Growth Services

STRATEGIC PLANNING

As success happens and your team gets larger, it gets harder and harder to keep everyone focused on a unified company mission and strategy. If this is a pain point, we'll help you operationalize a focused strategic plan that provides the guiding light for next-level product success.

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PRODUCT STRATEGY

Laser focus and a disciplined strategy are the foundational layers of a high functioning Product organization. We'll help you align your product strategy to your company mission & vision and define a strategic roadmap that aims to capture the hearts and minds of your target market.

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Are you struggling to unlock the full potential of your Product teams? As a growing business, it's tough to keep everyone aligned and rowing in the same direction. It's vital to establish scalable frameworks for world class product innovation, execution and delivery. 

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PRODUCT-MARKET OPTIMIZATION

Are you creating real value for your target customers with unique and different product innovation not found anywhere else? Establish (and maintain) product-market fit with mature opportunity identification, market validation and success measurement techniques. 

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PRODUCT PROGRAM ASSESSMENT

Feel like you need help but don’t exactly know where? We’ll spend time with you and your team to assess your current Product program and map out comprehensive improvement recommendations across your strategy, process, execution, optimization and team.

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Learn About How We're Different

The Easy Path to Getting Started

1. (Free) Initial Consultation

We'll start by spending some time to discuss your current Product situation, target pain points, particularly troublesome hot spots and define goals / expectations to ensure we’re aligned on the definition of next-level Product success. We'll likely have an initial 30 minute meeting and then a subsequent meeting to finalize discovery and scoping.

TIMEFRAME: A FEW HOURS

2. Growth Assessment

Time for deep discovery into the target product areas. We’ll make the rounds internally with key employees and executives to understand internal perspectives, current process, strategy and performance data. We’ll also do external customer and market research to get an understanding of your target customer, competitive space, and product-market fit. Along the way we’ll have frequent check-ins and feedback sessions to ensure we’re making great progress together.

* For a comprehensive program assessment, learn more about our full Product Program Evaluation.

TIMEFRAME: 2 - 4 WEEKS

3. Growth Plan

Based on the target pain points, goals and learnings from the growth assessment, we’ll present a prioritized set of recommendations and a plan of attack for achieving the next-level Product success that we defined together. At this point, you’ll have the option to implement the plan with internal resources or partner with SurgePath for continued assistance.

TIMEFRAME: 1 WEEK

4. Let's Grow Your Product

Based on the recommended product growth plan in step 3, we hope to partner together and take the necessary actions to improve and grow your Product to the next level!

TIMEFRAME: TBD
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Eliminate the Soft Spots Holding You Back

FUZZY FOCUS

"Focusing is about saying no"  -Steve Jobs

What are you better at than anyone else? What area of the market are you trying to own? Is your focus rooted in solving the market’s biggest pain points? Without this foundational focus, growing your product to the next level will be extremely difficult.

REACTIVE STRATEGY

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”  -Sun-Tzu

Do you have a plan for pursuing the best product opportunities for your business? Do you have difficulties aligning and committing to strategic product plans? Without a sound strategy and an efficient way to prioritize opportunities, precious team bandwidth goes to waste.

WEAK INNOVATION

"We go mission-first, then focus on what we need."  - Mark Zuckerberg

Innovation isn't just about great ideas, it's about great ideas that align to a focused strategy. Top down innovation won't cut it. An exceptional innovation culture involves the entire company and is rooted in relentless market validation.

CLUNKY EXECUTION

“A vision without execution is a hallucination”  -Jeffrey E. Garten

Are you fully leveraging your teams? Do you have efficient and scalable execution processes? Are your teams engaged and passionate about their missions? As your company grows, it becomes very difficult to maintain efficient execution, innovation and trust across the teams.

INEFFECTIVE DELIVERY

“The last 10% takes as much energy as the first 90%”  -Rob Kalin

Do you have an effective and repeatable way to bring new innovations to market? Are your customers prepared to leverage the new value? As your company grows, you’ll need a solid framework for repeatedly bringing new product value to your customers.

INCONCLUSIVE IMPACT

“What gets measured, gets managed”  -Peter Drucker

How do you know if you’re achieving desired results? Do the teams have a clear scoreboard that guides their decision making? As a growing business with limited resources, it’s vital that everyone has the same definition of success and results are being measured.

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Stories Behind Clients We've Helped

ESTABLISHING PRODUCT
AT A GROWING START-UP

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Establishing Product at a Growing Startup

The Situation

In 2015, Windsor Circle was coming off of a Series B venture funding round and riding the momentum of early market traction in the e-commerce automated marketing space. Windsor Circle offered a SaaS platform for leveraging e-commerce purchase behavior to drive timely and personalized automated email marketing messages that boosted customer lifetime value. Co-founded by a combination of engineering and sales experts, they had built an early product, and a solid initial customer base, but were struggling to maintain a growth rate synonymous with focused product strategy and management disciplines. They had yet to formulate a formal product leadership competency and product decisions were largely being made through a combination of the CEO and CTO.

How SurgePath Helped

Working directly with the CEO and CTO, our first task at hand was developing a market and customer focus for the product. We drove an effort (through analysis of the existing customer base, the company's core competencies and competitive landscape) to identify the market and customer profile that would be the product's bullseye.

Aligning around this focus, we worked with their team to create a product strategy and supporting roadmap that sought to address this market's biggest needs.

With a focus and strategy in place, we led the effort to build up the product team with talented product managers and designers, and established the company's first formal Product organization.

Finally, we led an effort to organize cross-functional product teams around customer value based mission areas. This construct enabled the resulting mission teams to focus and drive success within key areas of the overall product strategy.

After this product foundation was established, SurgePath continued to stay engaged with Windsor Circle to provide ongoing product coaching and leadership.

The Results

Capitalizing on the product strategy and management foundation that SurgePath helped to establish, Windsor Circle successfully raised several more rounds of VC funding and was ultimately acquired in 2018 by Output Services Group (OSG) as part of a strategic merger with one of their other companies, WhatCounts (a leading email service provider).

The Feedback

"Don’s clear command of product management helped us immensely as he kept asking "who’s the perfect customer", "what’s the perfect outcome for the customer", and "let’s move from minimum viable product to minimum loveable product". He has made huge contributions, for which I am very grateful."

- Matt Williamson, CEO of Windsor Circle

"Don is a brilliant technologist and he brought much-needed discipline, innovation, and process to Windsor Circle at a time when product-market fit was of paramount importance. Don led multiple successful efforts to re-define our market segments, value proposition, and product roadmap during times of rapid change, fast growth, and a changing market."

- Andrew Pearson, VP Marketing at Windsor Circle

Recapturing Success With Renewed Focus

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Recapturing Success With Renewed Focus

The Situation

In 2018, iContact found itself at a crossroads. Started in 2006, in the early days of email marketing, iContact had since gone through several different chapters; from being a heavily funded and successful start-up darling to subsequent acquisitions by several public and private equity companies. Through this journey, the strong brand it had built over the years was resilient but the product had lost its edge in an ever changing landscape of email marketing competition. With a customer base spread broadly across different companies and industries, the path to distinction and renewed success was unclear.

How SurgePath Helped

Partnering directly with the CEO and existing product team, the first question we asked was "who is the perfect customer for iContact"? To get an answer, we started to analyze the existing customer base to understand success factors such as NPS, sales and churn rates, as well as the different types of businesses and industries that were most prevalent as customers. We also conducted discovery across the organization to get a better qualitative understanding of the types of customers that were most successful. From this research, we were able to establish a target market and customer profile that made sense for the company.

With a customer focus in place, we worked with their team to formulate a supporting product strategy that leveraged the core competencies of iContact, provided differentiation from the competition and also addressed the most pressing needs of the target customer.

Once we landed on an achievable product strategy, we worked with their product and engineering teams to operationalize the strategy through a fresh set of contemporary product management practices used to drive roadmap updates, market validation, design, execution, GTM delivery and success measurement.

As traction picked up on the new strategy and processes, SurgePath continued to stay engaged with iContact to provide ongoing coaching and product leadership to keep the momentum going. 

The Results

The renewed focus and subsequent product strategy that SurgePath spearheaded for iContact helped pave the way for an acquisition by J2 Global in 2019, where iContact now serves as the anchor brand in their marketing technology portfolio.

The Feedback

"SurgePath brings to bear a set of skills, experience and attitude that are enormously beneficial and have been a welcome addition to our product management and strategy disciplines. I can confidently say that our product is in a far better place with SurgePath than it would have been otherwise."

- Chuck Jaynes, Director of Engineering at iContact

Harnessing Potential With Product Discipline

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Harnessing Potential With Product Discipline

The Situation

In 2018, K4Connect had established itself as an early mover in the emerging Senior Living Community Technology and Management space. Securing a Series A funding in late 2016, the company had built up momentum with an early SaaS product across a solid customer base and also built up an impressive stable of engineering talent.

However, with a Series B funding effort on the horizon, the company was struggling to fully leverage their deep pool of engineers and recent product efforts had suffered from a lack of holistic direction, competing priorities and slow, disappointing results. The company needed to harness the collective potential of their product and engineering teams to drive sustained growth and optimize its chances for securing a Series B funding.

How SurgePath Helped

Partnering directly with K4Connect's VP of Product, we started by taking an assessment of how product was being done at the company, from strategy to delivery, as well as diving in on the underpinnings of the company's overall mission and strategy within the senior living community space.

Through this assessment and learnings, we identified distinct mission areas embedded within the overall strategy, and empowered cross-functional mission teams around these areas. Each mission team would own the  mission's product strategy, execution and delivery that contributed to the overall product strategy's success. This, in turn, created more focused, motivated and efficient teams which drove improved velocity and ongoing delivery of product value.

SurgePath also drove the introduction and adoption of contemporary product strategy, development and delivery processes that the mission teams used to drive corresponding roadmaps, product requirements, Sprint priorities and success measurements.

We continued to provide ongoing coaching and leadership to ensure successful adoption and optimizations of these new processes to maximize long term success.

The Results

Capitalizing on SurgePath's efforts to effectively operationalize K4Connect's strategy across the organization, the company successfully raised a $12M Series B funding round in Q4 2018.

The Feedback

"SurgePath was critical in helping us implement the necessary strategic frameworks, processes and disciplines to help our team focus and scale as we transitioned to a cross-functional mission team organization and true Agile SCRUM. We were able to make a huge positive impact in a very short amount of time."

- Ben Armstrong, VP Product at K4Connect

TESTIMONIALS FROM TOP BRANDS AND STARTUPS

"Simply put, Don was a game changer for us. He was instrumental in driving the greater product strategy, as well as guiding teams and individuals in the day to day execution and delivery. His critical thinking, relentless work ethic, and obsessive commitment to delivering amazing products were critical to our company’s growth. Don has a rare passion and gift for helping teams deliver amazing products – we were lucky to have him on our side!"

COOPER BANE, CO-FOUNDER

BOOMTOWN

"SurgePath was critical in helping us implement the necessary strategic frameworks, processes and disciplines to help our team focus and scale as we transitioned to a cross-functional mission team organization and true Agile SCRUM. We were able to make a huge positive impact in a very short amount of time."

BEN ARMSTRONG, VP PRODUCT

K4CONNECT

"Don is one of those rare product visionaries and strategists that every company needs...He is simply the best product leader I’ve had the privilege to work with in my 20+ years in technology and I strongly recommend him to any company who is looking to get their Product or Product team to the next level."

CHRIS HUMPHRES, CO-FOUNDER & CTO

WINDSOR CIRCLE (ACQUIRED BY WHATCOUNTS IN 2018)

"SurgePath brings to bear a set of skills, experience and attitude that are enormously beneficial and have been a welcome addition to our product management and strategy disciplines. I can confidently say that our product is in a far better place with SurgePath than it would have been otherwise."

CHUCK JAYNES, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING

iCONTACT (ACQUIRED BY J2 GLOBAL IN 2019)

"Don has the rare ability to lead at the level of strategic prioritization and also drive effective processes to ensure each iteration is better than the last. In one instance he helped us cut ⅔’s of our scope and still deliver the core value to our users - it’s hard to think of a better investment than his ruthless prioritization that helped us ship a great product 3x faster."

MIKE SCHNEIDER, CO-FOUNDER & CEO

FIRST (ACQUIRED BY REMAX IN 2019)

"Don had a huge impact in a short period of time both strategically and at the roadmap-level by spearheading our 2020 strategic planning process and integrating valuable processes and frameworks into our product management discipline. I would heartily recommend Don to anyone looking for a fresh outside perspective on their product strategy."

RICHARD WHITE, CO-FOUNDER & CEO

USERVOICE

"Don’s clear command of product management helped us immensely as he kept asking "who’s the perfect customer", "what’s the perfect outcome for the customer", and "let’s move from minimum viable product to minimum loveable product". He has made huge contributions, for which I am very grateful."

MATT WILLIAMSON, CO-FOUNDER & CEO

WINDSOR CIRCLE (ACQUIRED BY WHATCOUNTS IN 2018)

"Don's team's research was comprehensive and thorough, and their recommendations were excellent. We adopted nearly all of them."

STEVE HARBULA, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

DENVER BRONCOS

"SurgePath’s process orientation really helped us to make sense of complex tasks like shepherding our product roadmap and continually iterating with feedback from our key customers. Their guidance forced us to ask ourselves the tough questions that we really needed to answer."

JESS MARTIN, CTO

FIRST (ACQUIRED BY REMAX IN 2019)

Let's Start Growing Your Product

 

We've had success with some great SaaS companies. We have a passion for helping more.

Let's chat - we'd love to help you!

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