Product Growth: From Idea to Impact (aka Haresh Convinces Us that His Job is a Real Job!)

Speaker A: Practical Product Management, the podcast where we like to talk about um, how things are great in theory, but product management is really done practically in context of where you're at. So today Marilyn and I are talking to Haresh, who I know from a previous job, previous lifetime it feels like. And uh, he's going to tell us about himself and he's going to tell us about what um, product growth is. So Haresh, why don't you introduce yourself and then we'll dive in with some questions.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it. Um, I think before I start I should mention that Leah used to be my ex boss and I think in all her capacity she's still my boss. So I am a little intimidated coming onto the podcast. Um, because I'm so scary. No, I think you're nice. But it's, it's like that boss and employee relationship which even though you have like, we haven't worked together for like more than four years now and we have been friends since then, but I think there's a little bit of that. Um, um, so my name is Harish. Uh, I'm the VP of Product Road. The fancy title which may mean um, anything and nothing. Uh, to be honest, I think in a B2B context I think it has to do a little bit with someone being responsible for driving user growth, revenue growth, stuff like that. And B2C, I think it could mean something very different as well. Um, it also means in some ways that I have product teams reporting to me, but I also have revenue teams reporting to me. So growth marketing, um, uh, sales, customer success, so on and so forth. I think also in like with such a title, um, it doesn't really like clearly signify what you do on a day to day basis. I think my role is more like I'm the head of the SMB customer segment, uh, at pleo. Uh, I'll tell a little bit about CLIO as well. But like SMBs are small, uh, medium, uh, businesses. Any customer which we see is ah, um, less than 50 or 100 employees. So I'm the business head of that. Uh, so my responsibility is to actually own the entire revenue uh, for our SMP customers. I think maybe a little bit for context, 90, um, percent of our customers are SMBs. 70% of our revenue comes from SMB customers. Um, so I'm responsible for all of growth marketing, SMB sales, customer success and everything we do from a product led growth perspective, which I'm sure we're going to go a bit deeper into. Uh, maybe I think 30 seconds about pleo. Ah, so maybe it starts to make a little bit of sense. Pleo is um, a Danish company we've been around for I um, think eight years now. We are present in 15, uh, markets, 100 million in recurring revenue. I think what we do is we solve for two different Personas. Uh, we help CFOs stay in control with their spend, so pay invoices, manage budgets, track approval, ah, flows, credit, those kind of things. And then we uh, help employees manage their company expenses through a very simple card and app. So that's very simply put, um, what Pleo is. It's very similar to Maryland if you're in the us. Very similar to Ramp or Bricks or previously how American Express used to be.

Speaker A: So yeah, Cool. So I mean I think our overarching question as we were talking about um, kind of different roles in product management, this came out of a conversation Marilyn and I've been having about kind of different types of roles that grow out of product management. And I said, hey, I know someone who's the VP of product growth. And we're like, what's that mean? So you just explained it. I guess the question, one of the questions I have is how do you see it as different from sort of traditional product management and maybe what you've done before.

Speaker B: Got it. Okay. So I think it's actually not very different from being a VP of product at like any other, uh, scale up, uh, basically except as the head of the business or head of SMB business, I have revenue responsibilities. So I manage our overall sales target, I have churn targets, uh, while ensuring we keep our uh, total burn and cost to acquire customers in control, uh, by also ensuring that we are deploying our marketing and overall human budget in a very efficient way. Um, also I think at Pleo we organize in a way where I have cross functional teams in my business unit. We also famously call them domains. Leah, you would remember that from Klarna, Spotify, something similar. So what that does is that makes cross functional collaboration a lot, lot easier. Right. Then I think maybe a little bit in terms of focus, a traditional product manager will be responsible for, I don't know, uh, time to feature, uh, to market, uh, how deeply you understand the customer needs, so on and so forth. Whereas my teams are responsible for user growth, engagement, revenue, uh, we also tend to have a lot of focus on experimentation which may or may not happen in a traditional product role. Um, rapid experimentation, nitration to find the most effective growth strategies. Um, because quite often you don't know what's going to click. When you are a traditional product manager you can spend a lot of time with the customers as you should. And my teams also try to spend a lot of time but then sometimes you don't know why a customer would pay. Right. So you also tend to spend a lot of time with your sales colleagues, with your customer success colleagues, uh, to see what's going to click and what's not going to click. Um, I think there's a huge emphasis also on data. Um, basically I think how do you leverage customers behaviors or actions as well as firmographics? Uh, those things tend to be very crucial to drive both um, uh, engagement, adoption, growth. Uh, as well as also I think my teams then make internal teams efficient so like my product teams and try to make our sales and marketing and customer success teams efficient as well. So I think that's where there's like some lines of differentiation. But my product teams also work very similar to like a traditional product team.

Speaker C: I love that. Um, thank you for that explanation. Um, now is it because the business positions you differently because uh, everything you said is like, yep, that's what product management do? Yes, of course, of course we care about like the, the um, the success of the product and the revenue it contributes to the, to the company. And you know, depending on where you are from a growth perspective as a company, you know you want your product managers to do different things. Um, but it sounds to me like you have all of the traditional roles and skills of a product management team but your charter is different. You're given a broader charter. You personally are given a broader charter by the business. So do you think it's orientation or do you think there's a skills different?

Speaker B: I think it's the orientation skills are not very different to be very blunt about it. I think there's a bit of I think history here. Uh, I think a lot of B2B companies are ah, set up like that. Definitely is set up in a way where I think when we started we were very uh, sales and customer success heavy. Um, and customers almost had to interact with a human for every little thing, even every small thing. Even when they wanted to get a demo for Pleo, they could not get a demo on the website. It's like the simplest thing you could do. Right. But I think that's how it was built and I think that's how a lot of B2B uh SaaS companies tend to be with my role. I think what we are trying to do is provide that choice back to the customer and leverage Our customer facing teams, in this case sales and customer success, where they can add more value than what we can build directly in the product. Right. So I think you're 100% sporam. There are actually more similarities than people also think. Actually you still have to understand customers behaviors and need. You still have to build, measure, learn. You still need to have like a solid vision and a strategy for how you're going to get there. You need to have incredible focus on execution, tangible impact, stakeholder management. Where I think it differs. Exactly. I think it's a little bit of orientation. KPIs I think are a bit different because there's like a good balance of revenue, cost and experience. Um, and some of the activities are more around optimizing the overall experience, the user journeys. How do you calibrate with let's say marketing to drive the right kind of customers? How do you collaborate with sales on how to make them more efficient? How do you design a lot of AB tests to improve conversion? Um, and I think I've seen that in different organization as well. I think some product teams tend to be allergic, uh, to the word revenue. And I think when I came into pleo that was a bit of a case as well. So I think when my teams were set up, I had a clear revenue target. I still report into our chief Revenue Officer. So it's not something that I can hide around or skirt around. And then it became more like, okay, this is something that we have to do. Yes, you have to care about the customer problem and the needs and the behaviors. Uh, but revenue is also something that you are responsible for. Um, so I would say those are maybe some of the differences.

Speaker A: Marilyn, do you think it's different?

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, I mean I worry a little bit that in the industry we've diluted the definition of product management to the point where you can draw a boundary around someone and say you don't care about revenue. Like it actually feels insanely crazy to me. And the job you just described is the job I think I have. My job is to like help a company achieve their revenue goals or like their growth, you know, improve the gross to net or I do that by having teams that build software. Um, but I should care about the end to end journey. And I just. Do you think that it's, do you think that's an artifact of industries or people applying product management in a very narrow way where we've kind of almost defined this product management role as someone that just sits with engineering and doesn't care about revenue and User experiences. Have we done this to ourselves?

Speaker B: I would say I think a little bit, yes. Uh, for sure. I think success in my role is to actually make myself and most of my team, uh, redundant. I think I can say that quite openly on a podcast and I think my teams would appreciate when I say something like this, not making any of their roles redundant.

Speaker A: I'm not getting rid of you guys. Let him finish.

Speaker B: Yeah, hopefully no one is taking this out of context. Like, oh, he said we are making ourselves redundant. No, not really.

Speaker C: That won't be the promo clip, that

Speaker A: won't be the prompt.

Speaker B: I think certain teams you absolutely need now, you can call them whatever, right? Like I think in my previous company at Klarna, Leah, you remember, we had a team dedicatedly focused on the entire customer sign up flow and the onboarding flow. Now we at Plio, we keep them under a growth domain. Um, in a lot of B2B companies those teams are kept under a growth domain because that is very different from the teams that are building the features. Right? Because you are, you're thinking about the buyer Persona over here. It's still product management. But I think you're trying to understand, I think what are the jobs to be done they are trying to do and how you can position what you are selling to them. Almost like a salesperson. Right. So those teams I think you'd still need then. I think if you think about vertical, different products and features that teams are building, you almost still need maybe an experienced team that can look after the overall experience end to end. If every team tries to think about the commercial success of their feature and you bombard them with nudges about, I don't know, invoices and a few other features, who is taking care about what is relevant to what kind of customer and how much is the overall load you are putting on the customer. And then I think maybe secondary to that is what combination of features is driving maybe um, overall retention. What combination of features is driving overall? I think maybe upsell. Right. So you would probably still need like one or two teams to do that. You can call them growth, you can call them whatever. Um, but I think you'd still have a need for like a couple of those teams which can sit maybe around the product management teams, uh, to be able to do that.

Speaker A: I, yeah, I think I'm, I guess I'm curious if this is born out of. And uh, maybe I'm, maybe I'm making a leap, but I wonder if it's born out of sort of the startup and Scale up universe that is really about funnel management and driving funnel growth versus where Marilyn and I come from, which is sort of big tech, where you owned that. You had to, you had to participate in that. Yeah, we came out of sort of big tech and then kind of the kinds of, kinds of places we worked, you didn't get to hand that off. You had to participate and sometimes you had to then have other teams that you were engaging with to get there. And so I wonder if some of this isn't born a bit out of um, the shift for scale ups and startups to sort of growth as the driver instead of product as the driver.

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, I think there is some, something to that. I think a lot of the whole growth hacking which maybe came about I think 10 years ago through what was happening at Facebook or any of the B2C apps. Uh, Airbnb. Exactly. I think Andrew Chen is like one of the famous growth hackers. Right. So suddenly there's like an explosion of like growth hacking which I think people then realize that yes, you, you need to have incredible focus on the funnel, on user matrix and all of that. Typically they started off as marketing initiatives or like marketing strategies, but then over time I think people realized that hey, you know what, by actually putting a few engineers over there, you're gonna make it more efficient. And then you're like, oh, maybe can I put a designer to think about your role experience? And then it became like a product team, but just like termed very differently.

Speaker C: So yeah, I love the idea of, of uh, an end to end experience manager because I think that's something that's missing in a lot of companies where they're, you know, people are just narrowly looking at their piece, but they're not looking at every engagement across the company. And that's not just digital. Right. It can be like pick the phone and call. Um, I do wonder, I uh, do wonder if that's not the expectation of the more senior product leader roles.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah.

Speaker C: Just what I'm watching your face.

Speaker B: I would say so. Yes, I think so. I think to a large degree, yes. And then to a large degree, I think maybe like if not if. I think when you have a lead designer in your, in your leadership team, it is a uh, shared responsibility between you as a product leader and the design leader to be able to do that. Right. I think where it breaks down a little bit, I think this is maybe more situational that I think you get so busy in the day to day and you get so focused on, I think what's in front of you that you forget the customer quite often. I think we try to bring that quite often as well. That how often are we really understanding the customer beyond I think the narrow feature. Right. So you have to then maybe like to do something different. You have to infuse it with higher activation energy uh, because otherwise there's going to be so much more inertia and then you end up creating an end to end experience product manager or product team, uh, to artificially I think supplement that 100%. I think that role in itself is also very difficult because you will try to say yes or no or push through other people's code bases or their strategies and you're like, whoa, you are not allowed to touch what I'm doing. Uh, so then I think it becomes really difficult for this team to actually be effective. And quite often I've seen you create a team like that and they'll do a bit of a revamp or like a tiger team or like a lead project or whatever, like a big infusion. They will do like an uh, overall just on the front end and more on the UI than the ux. Uh, and I think in some ways it's like a bit of a uh, failure, uh, of sort where I think you can't orchestrate as a lead product person amongst all of your teams. So you create this artificial team and then they don't really know how to actually work together.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of. It's interesting because it makes me think like there's a, there's an element of this that is like. I think the old Venn diagram was you had like product management and then you had sort of technical product management. Yeah. And platform or technical people didn't have that kind of responsibility. But we expected the people who did to be interfacing with the platforms or the technical teams. Right. Yeah, but that's. We used to argue that technical product management wasn't product management because they didn't have that role. Now we've sort of taken that role and been like it's a different role. Right. And so now. So I feel like between. I think, I think maybe my discomfort is that when I look at, you know, the role of technical or platform product managers, when I look at kind of what we would think of as traditional product management and now we add in sort of product marketing, product growth, this whole concept of like chief customer officer, chief strategy officer, all of these things. When you start to break them down, I kind of go back to what Marilyn said. Maybe we have failed to explain what the job is.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And so over time, CEOs and boards and founders are like, I'm going to create a thing. And you're like, okay, but that's my job.

Speaker C: Yeah, you have the thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, you have the thing. That's my job. And it's like, m. Well, is it, you know, so. And I'm not. So I'm not. I'm not saying that. What you're, uh. I don't want you to take that. What we're saying is like, that you. That's not a job. We think you have a job. We just think we always had.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: No, I think area of the business. I do love your comment though, about the conflict this creates. So a. I think you have a job, and I think it's a job that I love dearly. Right. Like, I actually, I actually feel like anybody that doesn't feel the same way you do about their role probably isn't thinking about product.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Um, and honestly now I feel like I need to update my job title and put in growth something or other, and that will make me cooler.

Speaker A: You too can be VP of Product Growth.

Speaker B: Yes. You can be, um.

Speaker C: This notion that, uh, and you sort of called it out really succinctly and I'm going to mess it up is, you know, you've got these, these teams working on capabilities. I'm going to call them capabilities.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Whatever they are. And then you've got this team across what I'll say is the top that's responsible for driving growth and revenue. This happens even when your job title is not growth. Um, is like, how do you, how, how can you, from your lens and your point of view, help another team, uh, adjust their roadmap? Because what they're doing is going to impact the overall goals of the company.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And now hopefully, do not let me go back down into okrs, because I think this is going to get back into OKR territory. But that conflict and that not looking at the same piece of the world, um, and then how do you interact with each other, I think is pretty universal, but it seems like it's uniquely a problem in your role. Want to sort of explain that just a little bit?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think I was just going to say that. I think because we are traditionally so sales and human heavy, pretty much. Right. Uh, everything was built with that as the only go to market motion in mind. So every feature was assumed that we did not have to care about the discoverability of it or the activation or the onboarding of it or the adoption of it or how it's going to cross sell itself. So everything was like oh, but the salesperson will go and explain to them. No one really. I mean now I'm like putting it too extreme to be very honest. Right. Uh, to make a point. But it's like now with like my teams coming in, there's like a very clear focus that like everything you're building, you have to build with discoverability and activation and adoption of the, of the capability directly in the product without a human being having to come and actually have to talk about it. Right. So what that does is this dual focus of like engagement and like the right feature building. What that does is um, it brings the product organization with the commercial organization really, really strongly. Right. So I think every product team then ensures that their reach, uh, and the value proposition resonates much, much strongly with like a much larger audience than I think what they were doing. Right. Uh, and then I think a little bit of like maybe what is m the capabilities I was bringing anyways, which now I think I would say are very much needed as like a growth product person is the culture around experimentation, the culture around being like extremely data driven, the culture around cross functional collaboration. Right Again Madeline, Your point is 100% spot on. That it is the job of every product manager. It is especially the job of a VP of product. Right. Like you own all of that and then you are supposed to then interact very closely with marketing sales. So then these silos don't get formed in the first place. But because they were there, I was brought in almost a bit of a band aid. But then as we started to operate we were like, hey, you know what, there's something very interesting over here. And maybe I think taking a step back a little bit, CLIO wants to be profitable in the next year, year and a half. In fact, I think so many companies are trying to be. In fact that should not have been the case right now. Right. Uh, I think it's a lot of like how the market operates where there's so much focus on growth and growth at all costs. People are burning money and I think it's a consequence of that in some ways. Now with sustainable growth back on the agenda, product led becomes even more important for you to become very efficient and effective in the way you do everything. What that is allowing PLEO in this example is to move most of our human force upmarket because we have been trying to go towards more mid market and enterprise sort of customers and in the lower end where I think most of the things can actually be explained really well directly in the product is happening now. And I think it's allowing I think software efficiency matrix to look much better because of I think the investment that we have done. Right. You could argue a lot of that is just like company building 101. 100%. Yeah.

Speaker A: Do you feel like so when you first started down this path kind of as you joined the team and started really pushing in this direction along with obviously with the chief revenue officer kind of in that, that focus, did you have pushback from the sales organization that they were like hey, hey, hey hey hey, you're taking our jobs, why don't you love us? Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think to some degree but I think we solved that really well. I think uh, this is one thing I'm extremely proud of to be honest at pleo, um, in the way we organize ourselves. So I have direct execution reporting to our chief revenue officer, not the chief product officer. I mean I have a dotted into her. Um, what that means is 70% of his target is my target. So ah, I'm directly. So I'm almost in an acting CRO responsibility for the SMB segment. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What that means is I have direct execution responsibility for sales teams, marketing teams and customer success teams. Right. So then as we are like working out the strategy, how we are going to make changes. Right. The overall accountability is with me and eventually to him on how we are making changes. Right. So simple example could be when we are bringing lot more new customers in without having to speak to a human being. We are still compensating the sales folks for that. Because imagine if you change that immediately, you're like whoa, like you're taking leads away from us, you're hitting our salaries and that becomes a very emotional topic. Same for like ah, any account manager which is owning a book of business. Right? Like if you take 60% of the book of business away from them because you're saying hey, that is growing organically, why should we compensate you? We are saying hey you know what, no, we'll do it together. Your compensation is not affected. But over time as I've been able to build predictability in the product led motion to say X percent is always coming product led on new business and growing existing customers, we're able to increase our targets and increase our efficiency. So then the teams also feel comfortable that a lot of the low value teams are converting automatically in the product led motion. Right. So I think having that single threaded ownership and accountability has helped Um, I think remove those silos, which typically would get created if I was just reporting into the Chief Product Officer.

Speaker A: So what led you? I mean, I know the answer to this question, but why were you drawn to this kind of role versus some of the more traditional roles you had before? What I guess we're, we would say are more traditional roles.

Speaker B: I mean, you could call this is, uh, like a traditional role as well. But just like it sounds a bit fancy, it has a fancy title, and the way I describe it, it comes across as a bit fancy. Um, I don't know. I think a lot of what has happened in my career has been, uh, being extremely lucky and being at the right place at the right time so many times. And I think Leah, you obviously know it because I think you know me quite well. But I think, like, simple things, like when I moved to the uk, uh, to work for a bank, uh, the MD of the team was from my same university, um, obviously 25 years apart. But I think that helped, right? When, then I moved to Klarna, I think Leah, you and I, we had spoken a lot, and then obviously, um, we got along well. I came in, Madeline, to join as a platform product manager, and I got lucky because Leah was leaving and she was leaving, and she positioned me to say, hey, you know what, maybe this guy could run like a few more product teams and the single product team that he had. Right? So I became like a product partner to our engineering, uh, director, and then we started to run it together. And then I think, so, um, luck, or life would have it, we were given commercial teams, we were given customer, uh, support teams.

Speaker C: And.

Speaker B: And then suddenly the awareness and the learning exploded with having to manage so many product teams, but also, I think getting exposure to the commercial and, uh, the customer facing roles as well. So then when I joined Clio, again, right place, right time, the connection was made by Leah with my ex boss. Now, uh, they are good friends. And I came in to do something very undefined. They were like, hey, why don't you just come in? We'll figure something out. And, uh, growing Clio and growing more from an international expansion perspective was important. They were like, hey, why don't you jump into this? I'm like, okay, let's jump into this. We ended up opening 10 new markets in 10 months, uh, which was a lot of fun, but gave me a lot of, I think, commercial exposure, exposure to our Chief Revenue Officer. And then I think as we were restructuring, they were like, hey, you know what? We need to, uh, become profitable in the lower segment. And also as a company now, you have had exposure to commercial teams. You have actually directly run them. Why don't we redefine the role around you? Right? So I think it's in some ways, I think right place, right time, things just happen. I think you noticed, Leah. I think I was very commercially driven. Just like how things were done even when I was a platform product manager, um, I have been data driven. I've been analytical. So, Madeline, to your definition, I've been a very traditional product manager. It's just that then I think the right opportunities presented itself and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna do this.

Speaker C: Uh, I love it, I love it. And I will tell you that, uh, um, the role you described speaks to my heart because I think it is what we all strive to do. Right. We're not building things for building things. No one cares. Right. We. We actually want to drive the company forward. We want to be part of the success of the company, and that includes being fiscally responsible. I love. You know, one of my jams is like, helping the business understand how much they're spending on different areas.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: I'm talking about ROI of the investment. Because engineering teams are expensive. Why would you apply them against a problem that doesn't matter?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, right.

Speaker A: No, totally, totally. I will say Hresh was one of the people, two people that I basically, from the time he started, said, come and get my job. You want it?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Like, let's go. You want this job? Come and get this job. Right. And he would be like, can I do this? Can I do that? Yep, yep, yep, yep. You know, it was like, you want. You want to take it, take it. Right. So that my goal was always, when I walked out, they didn't try to replace me because there was already replacement. Right.

Speaker B: But that is very rare. Right. Because m. There's a huge difference between where you were operating, Leah, um, and the experience that obviously you had versus where I was operating, I was a senior product manager, had one team. But then I think, obviously it took a huge leap of faith, obviously, from your side and the rest of the cloud management to say, you know what? We're going to try it, see how it goes. And I think it just, like, worked really well.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally, totally.

Speaker B: Which has been very similar at my current company as well. Right. Like, I think I've learned a lot of the revenue work by directly working with our, uh, CRO. Uh, whereas he knew I haven't really ran sales teams or customer success team and being responsible for Such a big share of the company revenue was a gamble that they were taking as well. Uh, and I think so far it's going well. And I'm, I'm extremely grateful, I think, for a lot of those things that have happened.

Speaker A: Well, I think this speaks to, I mean, Marilyn and I've talked about this. It's come up almost, uh, I would say most of our podcasts at some point we talk about that there is this like, I don't know, myth out there that there's like product management and the business. And I'm like, I'm sorry, what do you think this is? Do you think it goes back to that mentality of your it, Right. Kind of old banking segment or old, you know, hardware companies and things like that, where it's like the IT guys set up your computer and make sure you have the software you need and it's like, that's not what we do.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, we are the business because we have to care about the customer and we have to care about doing the right thing so that we can actually have a customer and a business.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: I think that's where this is a really interesting. Like that, you know, whatever you call it, I think it makes sense, but it is ultimately what I consider the job because we are the business. Right.

Speaker C: And I think that the, the opinion, um, from my experience, from. From my limited experience, um, it. It tends to be more, um, profound in, in segments where, um, the business was a really thriving business before being digitally native. So a lot of the, like, you know, I would say digitally native types of industries and companies, um, they don't have that like product management and business dichotomy. But any company, that's what I would say. You know, grown up through paper processes, 100% has this. And I actually think it's probably one of the things that reduces efficiency and reduces everybody's ability to have an impact, um, and drive whatever you want. Revenue, profitability, like whatever.

Speaker B: Yeah. 100%.

Speaker C: Hm.

Speaker A: Um, one last question for me. Like, I'm curious, do you think that what is. What you measure and what, like from a KPI OKR perspective, do you think it's different? The same. Is there a different focus?

Speaker B: I would call it a little bit different. But then I think if this is a business, then I think it's not that different, to be honest. I think it comes down to very simple things. It's three things. It's revenue, cost and the overall customer experience. Right. I think everything could be boiled up to those three things. How, um, much Revenue you're making, what is the overall experience you're giving and then how much money you're burning to get there. Right now obviously underneath that, if I visualize the entire lead to customer life cycle, uh, we look at, in my business area, we look at things like how much pipeline, uh, we generate, how well we convert that into new business revenue, how well we drive adoption of that and retention, which is also a proxy for churn, how well we grow these customers. Right now again this is very linear, this is very revenue focused. Then I think this is where then PLG comes in, Product LED growth comes in, uh, in that product LED demonstrates how efficiently we are doing that. Right? So now we also have things like CAC payback which then tells us how effective are our marketing spend is. Uh, and then we also look at share of revenue in a product LED way. Right. Um, so those are the things we look at. Then obviously we try to break it down by different aspects of the customer lifecycle. So if I think about acquisition, I touched on pipeline. We also now focus on how much of that pipeline is generated from low cost channels. Uh, and then we look at the effectiveness of any channel based on LTV to CAC. So LTV to CAC of like greater than 3 or 5 tends to be quite high. Uh, tends to suggest that it's working really well. Conversion in these channels. Uh, so that's what we look at from an acquisition for activation. We look at any milestone of intent, uh, which could be like, I don't know, filling out certain information. If you're in a regulated environment, doing KYC or loading your account or wallet to get to whatever you define as your aha moment at pleo. I think you get the value once you do the export of expenses into your accounting software or when you can make your accounting software. Right. So we look at what is the conversion for those two points. We look at how long it takes, um, we also look at I think conversion from lead to paid plans, which is in a very traditional sales environment. It's called the win rate. Then we look at I think existing customers. So we look at adding cohort of customers, uh, how well they're growing, which I think in a traditional sense is net, uh, revenue retention, uh, which obviously became I think quite popular in the last few years. Um, churn rate, adoption of certain key features. We do a bit of correlation by the way. So which features drive uh, spend or usage or revenue, uh, events. And then how well are we actually driving the adoption of that? Um, I would say those are the main things around revenue and cost. And then I think from a customer perspective, we have stuff like your classic satisfaction score. Uh, we have something called as customer effort score as well. So after, like, key moments or key experiences, we asked him, how well do you think we did? And those kind of things, which then gives us a proxy for how easy was it for the customer to get somewhere. So I would say, again, those are the things. Nothing fancy. I would say, uh, it all boils down to the three things. Like, I started with, uh, revenue, cost, and experience. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. So, Marilyn, what's your verdict? Does he have a real job?

Speaker C: I think he's got a real job. I think, I think. I mean, I think it's a job I want.

Speaker B: Please don't take my job.

Speaker C: I'm not sure I could. Horash, you're safe. But it is, uh, it is. I mean that, like, yes, I think it's product management differently applied.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: I just think this is, uh, you know, where the business is choosing to focus the, the expertise and area. So this has been super enlightening for me. Haresh. I will no longer tease people about job title.

Speaker B: Oh.

Speaker A: Uh, and we've made a breakthrough.

Speaker B: Maybe you can start adding it to our CVs.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. No, and I think, I think what I like about this conversation, and I would. I mean, I think it's good for us to have it. I would also like to have a conversation with somebody coming from marketing who also thinks that's sort of a growth product kind of role and talk about that as well, because I do think that some of this is now incumbent on us as leaders in product to say, these are still product management. And it is okay if you call it by something slightly different, but understand that product people are going to be like, that's. That's my job. That's my job. That's my, you know, and so having some of those conversations and then saying, like, are we evolving in different directions or is this still the same thing by another name? Right. It's kind of like I said this whole chief customer officer, chief, you know, whatever. You know, chief strategy officer, when really I'm like, I do the strategy. I'm a charge customer. Right. And so I think some of that is just, um, there is something happening where people aren't getting what they need.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and then the question is, are we just creating spaces instead of saying, hey, let's, let's redefine this, or is it evolving? And I think either of those are fine.

Speaker C: Or, or like, it's the person that you have just not doing their whole job.

Speaker A: Right. Also possible, I think.

Speaker C: Definitely. And if you think about this in terms of doing the right thing for the company, if you already have someone that should be playing that role, why would you spend the money to bring in someone to do part of it? Now you're creating this matrix environment that sets teams up for frustration. Um, so I think this goes back to this, the premise of our whole podcast, Leah, which is like context really matters and people should not be just looking at, um, job titles, but be looking at what you're intending to do with groups of people.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker C: Um, and then applying them in the right way instead of stacking people up to like over I. You know, it's the equivalent of a 5 year olds playing soccer.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Everybody can't play the ball at the same time. And how do you make sure that people are effectively playing the right role in the company to try the right outcome? Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. And I think that's what's. I think that's having this conversation has been really important because if Haraj had come in and said, I'm the VP of product growth and it described a job that we were like, well, who's doing all of this? We'd have been like, you don't have a real job. You're in sales.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. But because you're running the gamut, it's actually the job that we think is the job.

Speaker B: Right, yeah.

Speaker A: Um, it just has a different title.

Speaker B: No, but I think what you were saying and Madeline, you, you said it as well. I think quite often we, there's like an external expectation for what someone's job should be. Like this is the business. You own the customer and you own everything. Quite often it's like it's either lack of capacity, which is maybe like an easy excuse, it's otherwise a lack of capability which I think you probably did not find the right person. And then third times it could be that you don't have the right expectation as like, I don't know, whoever hired you, they did not set the right expectation and you did not knew that that was what the job was. And suddenly you created an organization that did not care about xyz and suddenly you're like, oh shit, two years in we have this huge deficit. Can we now supplement there's this new role going on in the market. Can we bring those people in to do what you should have done maybe two years ago?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Uh, Haresh, thanks. For coming to us.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: A lot of fun.

Speaker B: This was a lot of fun.

Speaker A: I'm sure we'll think of something else we need to talk to you about.

Speaker B: I would love to come back. This has been so much fun.

Speaker A: Good. And I was glad you and Marilyn got to meet, so.

Speaker B: Because, yes, I just talk about you

Speaker A: to each other, but never. You never get to meet. Then this is much more fun.

Speaker B: So we are real human beings and we have real jobs.

Speaker A: Yay. I think I'm the only one without a real job. That's true. I just coach the people.

Speaker B: That's what I do.

Speaker A: Just. I just coach to people. All right, well, then, everyone, we'll see you in the next podcast. Thanks again, Haresh.

Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.