Reinventing yourself while still being successful
How to reinvent your product in a time record and keep being the leader.
Introduction
After three “long” months without publishing anything, I’ve been grasping taking the context of my new gig at Erudit, an AI pre-PMF company. Yes, sadly I left Nexthink after 3 and 1/2 years of a gratifying, fulfilling, learning, and inspirational journey, I wanted to reflect on the things I’ve seen that made a company the leader in the space.
As I’ve written in Lessons learned of my experience working for a hyper growth SaaS company - Part I (almost a year ago!!!, time flies when you work for a scale-up in hyper-growth), working for company on a period of hyper-growth is rewarding and very challenging at the same time.
The journey is different for every company. Founders don’t have the same background, people come and go, culture changes a long the way, and companies reinvent themselves multiple times to adapt to the strategy and market conditions. That said, I do believe that there are some first principles that, given a similar situation, could be used as a frame and still be useful for other companies, regardless of the industry, country, ethnicity, you name it.
My goal with the upcoming series of nuggets, it’s to distill the principles that have been deployed throughout the years and allowed a company that, in 2019/2020 had almost 100% of its revenue coming from an on-premise solution with a solid product and customer-based, to transform itself, into a cloud multi-tenant, fully web-browser solution in a matter of 3 years; and still being the leader in the DEX category.
Disclaimer: I’ve written this article in February 2023 before leaving Nexthink. Therefore I don’t discard any changes as I’m publishing the series of nuggets.
Following the idea of thinking with the end in mind, this is the (non comprehensive) list of principles:
The story behind the Why
Before jumping into the juicy part, I would like to give a bit of context on what I believe was the main reason to embark on this journey.
Although I wasn’t a Nexthinker when the decision was made, we can simply think in some of the main drivers behind this change.
It would be easy to say that migrating from an on-premise architecture into a cloud computing one, was the main goal (despite the clear advantages of cloud computing vs on-premise). But that would be missing the forest for the tree. Changing the way the product was built, delivered, maintained, and managed, it is just a mean to an end.
I assume that any company in the world, unless you are an NGO, would always want to grow and set ambitious revenue targets, and being at the leader of the category you are part of.
Customers is another big force playing into this decision. At some point, we wouldn’t be able to deliver more innovation to our customers, addressing a larger number of use cases, and provide a higher product quality to solve meaningful customer problems.
As a consequence, the best path forward, was to plan this transition, because the way the existing product at that time was managed, would potentially become from an asset into a liability, given the vision and goals the business had.
Big (Bold) Bets
If you listen to the Nexthink podcast, the DEX show, our CPO was interviewed, and he mentioned a very interesting framework Nexthink leadership team uses to lay out the future work. They think about:
Big (Bold) Bets: what are the bets that will shape the company in the upcoming years
BAU work: things you need to do to improve existing products
Innovation work: what are the areas where we must / can innovate to disrupt ourselves.
I believe that one of the Big Bets of 2019 was the idea of having a product with a fully web browser experience and was hosted on the cloud, and not on the customer premises.
I love this quote from Jeff Bezos that illustrates this way of thinking.
Of course that the result of this type of Bets is not immediately visible. That’s the reason why it’s important to define certain indicators (metrics) that could tell you whether your bet is paying off or not.
Show results
The above would have made any sense, hadn’t had the right outcomes from customer and for the business.
It would have been easy to show the final results, but what about the indicators that could predict whether we are going to reach the growth and revenue targets (leading indicators).
These are the indictors that are telling your company that you’re on the right path. Specially the ones that are coming from your customers themselves.
Of course that we track leading indicators that are one and even two levels below, to predict whether our customers are executing the action of value from our product. That’s what most of the product teams are maniacally focused on.
I’m pretty sure that if I ask you, based on the previous numbers, to answer how Nexthink is doing? you might be able to guess right.
What’s next?
Let’s dive into the principle of Disrupt Yourself. A clear and consistent articulation of how this journey started.