Post 4 of 4 in the series of Scaling CMO’s- the other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief Customer Officer, What does Great Look like in a Chief Customer Officer and Signs your Chief Customer Officer isn’t Scaling. You can engage with each person on the executive team one-on-one to understand what their issues and challenges are, but I’ve found that engaging with the CCO offsite with customers is far more productive and leads to a better understanding of the service organization than any other meeting time. I have typically spent the most time with or gotten the most value out of CCOs over the years doing the following. In person at “Canary in the Coal Mine” customers….
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return path
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In My friend and former colleague Angela Baldonero (used to run our People Team at Return Path, now is COO of super cool startup Procurify), used to say about her job as head of HR, “Everything is Data.” She guest blogged about that principle on OnlyOnce years ago here , and she particularly cited this theory when talking about the recruiting and hiring process. I’ve thought about this principle a lot over the years, and I’ve occasionally come up with other examples where I think peripheral data can inform whether or not an employee will succeed, at least in my world. I don’t know how many of these can be caught in…
Book Short: Scrum ptious
Book Short: Scrum ptious I just finished reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This reading was in anticipation of an Agile Facilitation training my executive team and I are going through next week, as part of Return Path’s Agile Everywhere initiative. But it’s a book I should’ve read along time ago, and a book that I enjoyed. Sutherland gets credit for creating the agile framework and bringing the concept scrum to software development over 20 years ago. The book very clearly lays out not just the color behind the creation of the framework, and the central tenets of practice again, but also clear and simple illustrations of…
Everything Is Data
Everything Is Data As our former head of People, Angela used to say during the recruiting process, “Everything is Data.” What she meant is that you can learn a lot about a candidate from things that happen along the way during an interview cycle, not just during the interviews themselves. Does the candidate for the Communications role write a thank you note, and is it coherent? Does the candidate for an outside sales role dribble food all over himself at a restaurant? Here are two great examples of this that have happened here at Return Path over time: Once we had a candidate in the office, waiting in our café/reception area before his first interview. Our office manager came in…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for…
How to Wow Your Manager
How to Wow Your Manager Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees. Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager. Why Wow your manager? Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important. What impact does a Wow have? It sends the signal that you are on top of things. Symbolism is important. It also advances the cause further and faster. Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team? High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on. If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better. Here are my…
Not Just About Us
Not Just About Us When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy. This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post. We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path. And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means. I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure…
Email Intelligence and the new Return Path
Welcome to the new Return Path. For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business. Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our…
How Do You Eat an Elephant?
How Do You Eat an Elephant? Credit to my colleague Chuck Drake for this one…but How Do You Eat an Elephant? One Bite at a Time. The David Allen school of time management (post, book) talks about breaking your projects down into “Next Actions” so they don’t become overwhelming and can easily move forward one step at a time. I think the same is true of organizational projects – perhaps even more so. Any time we find ourselves swirling around a big initiative at Return Path, we are at our best when we ask ourselves some questions along these lines: How can we be scrappier about this? It it ok to be messy here…or at least not perfect? What is…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for myself that I started to get some clarity around the…