TESTIMONIALS FROM TOP BRANDS AND STARTUPS

SUCCESS STORIES BEHIND OUR ENGAGEMENTS

Establishing Product at a Growing Start-Up

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

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

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

Driving Innovation With Focus and Validation

The Situation

In 2017, First was fresh off of a sizable VC seed funding round and looking to continue their early momentum in the burgeoning Real-Estate Marketing Technology space. First provided a novel, data driven platform that enabled real-estate agents to predict when homeowners would sell their homes, thus providing a leg up to agents looking to represent potential home sellers. They had created an MVP that proved out the value, but were struggling to take the concept to the next level in a form that would drive the necessary product and customer growth required for additional investment. Without a formal Product team yet established, they needed guidance on how to effectively focus, innovate and execute on their vision.

How SurgePath Helped

Partnering with First’s executive team, and with the belief that smart, customer-value driving innovation starts with a maniacal focus, we started off by formalizing First's target market, target user, and target problems. Out of this definition, we created a qualitative and quantitative target customer profile that could be used by not only Product and Engineering for focused innovation, but also by Sales and Customer Success to optimize acquisition and retention.

With a tangible focus in place, we partnered to create a strategic roadmap that was based on the mission of the company, target market profile, corresponding target problems and key mission areas of the product. The roadmap was organized around these mission areas to foster focus and performance across the team. Along with the strategy, we introduced the concept of a product scorecard that consisted of a handful of key metrics aligned to the strategy that we would use to continually measure innovation impact. These metrics were rooted in the target customer problems we were solving and were a proxy for measuring whether customers were deriving more value from the product.

In order to effectively operationalize the focus and strategy, we implemented a product lifecycle process that served as a playbook for how innovation would be developed, from ideation all the way through GTM. There were a few components of this process that stood out in terms of resulting impact.

We introduced the Product Brief; the foundational document for all product innovation initiatives. This document served to ground all innovation efforts around 1) who the innovation was for, 2) what problem(s) it was solving and 3) the presumed impact to the customer. The Product Brief was instrumental in keeping the teams focused and disciplined when defining scope, designing solutions and maximizing the ROI of engineering efforts.

We also implemented a formalized design validation process that aimed to create a rapid design iteration cycle for achieving optimal solution design prior to development. We did this by getting new product / feature designs in front of actual end-users, paired with a script of interview questions that tested key hypotheses embedded within the designs. The goal was to iterate on design validation until we had a design that we felt confident would be high impact and low risk with end users if we built it.

The Results

With the help of the product strategy and innovation fundamentals that SurgePath helped implement for First, the company was able to better focus their efforts and drive a series of high value product innovations that led to a Series A funding in early 2018. First was subsequently acquired by ReMax (a global real-estate agency franchisee) in 2019 and First's technology became a strategic part of the company's proprietary product platform for real-estate agents.

The Feedback

"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, CEO at First