Jared Yarn

A common misconception I’ve heard over the past few weeks is that engineering teams should build native integrations to "keep the IP in-house”. A sizable integration library is a competitive advantage. If there’s a well defined product strategy backing the integrations you build, they can be a force multiplier for your GTM teams. There are a few reasons to build native integrations, but treating them as part of your product's secret sauce by default isn’t one of them. Offloading cumbersome integration tasks via unified APIs, iPaaS products, or even contractors specializing in integrations is often the optimal choice that fast-growing product companies could make. I recently listened to Lenny Rachitsky's podcast with Shreyas Doshi and learned about his framework for optimizing work for opportunity cost vs. ROI. The gist of his thesis is that several teams fall into the trap of committing to tasks that are a good use of their time vs. the best use. This is especially true of those in high-leverage roles (founders, product, engineering, and design). Working on individual integrations for your customers is almost always going to yield a positive ROI, but they are unlikely to be high leverage features that result in an impact that’s an order of magnitude higher than the required effort. Features that are difficult to replicate, and that double down your product's core value proposition are higher leverage tasks worth having your product and engineering teams focus on. The few scenarios in which it is worth building native integrations are: ✅ Your product requires a handful of shallow integrations ✅ 1-2 strategic partners drive a significant amount of your revenue and deep integrations with their platforms make your product stickier & increase co-selling opportunities ✅ Integration platforms don't support your specific integration requirements and contractors lack the expertise to build them What are other considerations for building integrations in-house vs. leveraging products or service providers to build them?

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I’ve noticed a lot of the same handful of big SaaS companies on podcast after podcast, article after article. And people gobble it up! As if ‘how we built roadmaps at Apple in 2003’ is ever going to matter for your role at the auto mechanic records app. As if ‘user conference learnings at Salesforce’ apply to your grocery store inventory platform. Even if you work for a unicorn – are the ‘habits of employee number 6’ relevant for you as employee 148,993? A story. When I was young I was interested, as many young men are, in getting yoked. I would pore over Muscle & Strength and Men’s Fitness magazines, noting the diet and lifting habits of the latest Mr Olympia with great fascination. I even made lists! But I didn’t like lifting heavy or even going to a gym. The content I consumed didn’t match the situation I was in. And that’s ok! The world needs middle distance running dads who enjoy an occasional power yoga class. And the world needs your lesson planning app for elementary school music teachers. So I would recommend recognizing much of this content as entertainment for you. And look for education elsewhere. Suggestions: 1) Learn lessons from those companies that are more similar to you, and in your situation more recently. This may require talking to people from other companies one on one. 2) Learn from your own company. Get out of the feature factory and support tickets for bit. Dive deep into your customers. Spend time understanding results of different customer types. Look at trends and develop strategies for causing inflection. Talk to representative customers. 3) Hypothesize and act. Since your product is unique, the best learning comes from doing and making adjustments along the way.

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Thought experiment... delete your roadmap. Stop everything. Now play things out... For the past year or so I have experimented with an activity. I ask teams to imagine that they stop "shipping". Nothing new. No improving existing features. They keep their jobs, and fix major production issues, but otherwise stay idle. When possible, I ask them to refer to some sort of business dashboard or statement. How do these numbers change? They imagine industry press, coffee machine conversations, customer feedback, and board meetings. What happens with the passing months? Could X possibly go unchanged? Would you be surprised if Y doubled? The responses are very interesting. It feels unnatural to imagine doing nothing (even if doing nothing may be the best decision). We're wired to keep ourselves busy and talk ourselves into our grand plans. In some businesses, the impacts of doing nothing are felt quickly. In others, teams find they can go a year or more without real "damage". A competitor gains ground. Cost of acquisition increases. Team members leave for a competitor (or to start their own businesses). It hits home that successful products are a slow burn, the result of many decisions over time. To tackle the exercise, some teams review the past year. How did that work contribute to where the business is today? For new product launches, add-ons, packages, etc. it is easy to say "if we hadn't done this, then X wouldn't have happened." We gravitate to obvious connections, but that is a trap of sorts. The purpose of this exercise is to surface assumptions, and to focus the team on the Opportunity. Yes, it is "not realistic". It takes some practice, but more than practice it takes freedom and safety. Freedom to explore a possible future without judgement. "Non-business" types (if there is such a thing) need to feel free to explore the problem-space. Give it a try! With a big cross-functional group. Folks with more familiarity with “the numbers” should be prepared to teach and guide. Folks with more familiarity with the long-term, slow-burn issues (market share, inertia, product phases, ecosystems, etc.) should do the same.

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Ryan Westwood has been involved in 100 companies as an operator, investor, board member and advisor. He grew his last company to over $650m in revenue. His current company has quickly become THE RevOps platform. He’s played a big role in putting the Utah tech scene on the map. Ryan dropped so much knowledge in an hour. It’s impossible to summarize it all… but I promise it’s worth the listen. Ryan Westwood, Chairman and CEO at Fullcast, The Go-to-Market Cloud, is my guest for this week’s episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. I was introduced to Ryan by Nick Cromydas. On our first 30 minute call I ended up taking two pages of notes. Ryan’s obviously had amazing success over the course of his career. But what I appreciate the most is how thoughtful and deliberate he is about how to build a business and the ability he has to boil his strategies and tactics down into easy to understand nuggets. My highlights from this episode are: Taking 6 months to get into CEO shape - After selling his last company, Simplus, Ryan spent time investing, serving on boards and advising companies. Basically everything but operating a company. When he and his co-founders bought FullCast and he took over as CEO he had to get back in CEO shape. Everything from the hours he had to work, the number of decisions he had  to make on a daily basis, the dynamics with his family, his own health, really everything. Good reminder… the CEO job is hard. Talking to 60 RevOps leaders in two quarters - To understand his ICP and ideal buyer persona, Ryan met with 60 RevOps leaders in his first two quarters as CEO of FullCast. He learned so much about the persona he was building for, the way they think, what they’re responsible for, the challenges they face. By the end of those two quarters he felt like he was one of them. It’s such a simple thing, talk to your customers, but I don’t think founders/CEOs do this enough, both in the number of customers and the frequency. The power of the dream team - Ryan’s three co-founders are people he’s worked with before… for over a decade. He talked about how he’s been keeping a spreadsheet of every person he’s interacted with over the course of his career that he wanted to work with again and when it came time to recruit his founding team he knew exactly who he was going to approach and he was able to assemble the dream team. There is so much more: the power in a cap table, running a board meeting, product roadmap prioritization, defining an ICP, missing hip hop when he moved from Philly to Provo, why we’re seeing so many success stories coming out of Utah and more. Here are the links to the full episode: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ey3AKu5w Spotify: https://lnkd.in/emKyjsBF Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eyXUJHvn If you enjoy the episode, please like and subscribe on your favorite platforms and share with your networks.

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Ticket velocity isn't the *only* measure of an engineering team's effectiveness. At a high level, the best engineering organizations can predictably deliver against the priorities set forth by the business. That involves proper monitoring (through metrics) and coaching by effective managers. Here's a few non-velocity metrics I use to measure my organization: - Tenure of the team. - Platform uptime. - Number of critical issues in the last 8wks. - Automated code coverage percentages. - *Employee* vs customer detected bugs. - Number of requirements missed during project planning. Read more about my leadership style here: https://lnkd.in/geP2m7DJ #metrics #engineeringeffectiveness #team #leadership #software #tech #startup #management #dora #space #agile #projectmanagement #podcast

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Product is fun, complex, messy, and there are no shortcuts. Once you accept that—and embrace it—amazing things happen to your career. Cat Hicks, PhD puts this better than anyone: "Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems What I mean is, sometimes it's really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it's often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It's one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff. What would it look like if we could ask, "how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving" instead of "how do I take away all these annoying hard problems." The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish."

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Super well articulated today Clara Shih - best of the day. We are all looking to see how this orchestration is realized. A question to be considered is if there will need to be any governance over “agent quality” similar to data quality. Great to see all the innovation shown this week at #DF24.

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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The overlooked reason why you might not be maximizing your Net Retention. Every SaaS exec I speak to wants to know the best way to increase net retention -- and they’re all trying different tactics to do it however perhaps we just need to follow the data… 2 in 10 RevOps leaders believe they have clean and actionable data in their Salesforce org, so… here are some things you can start to dig into: 🎅 What and how are you cleaning your data - manual, tools or other? Check your data foundation, specifically your account data. 🎅 Mastering your account data is where the gold lies, how are your Parent-Child data set up, how are you bringing to life your enrichment data (if you say APEX or SF Flows, I challenge you to dig more). 🎅 How does your team carves territories, how does finance managee billing, how does marketing operations route leads, and ultimately, how you build your GTM strategy. From a CRO point of view, if revenue teams want to expand and retain across your large enterprise customers, you have to bring your account data to life and align it into a process. When your team understands this in a visual way (and no, native account hierarchies or account hierarchy data is NOT the same thing) it will help resolve duplicate accounts, ensure visibility into your largest accounts, and make sure accounts are always owned by active sales reps. It also means that come territory season (which I’m sure your team is still reeling from) you can effectively reassign and mass modify directly in Salesforce. Whether you’re looking to reduce churn or sell more effectively, or even just stay consistent through different market events like mergers and acquisitions, it all starts with having clean account data. Clean, Connected SF Account Data IS the path to Higher Net Retention! Happy Holidays!

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Data Rant #1 – Numbers without context. "It was a 4-point game, when…" Yes, that tells you nothing without context. The context? There were 8 minutes left in the NRL grand final between the Broncos and the Panthers. The Broncos were still up, but an errant kick had just led to a penalty in favour of the Panthers. My family is still too sore to speak of this loss over a year later.   Numbers without context are one of my pet peeves. For example, 4 points is an enormous lead had it been soccer – but this was Rugby League. And had it been 8 minutes into the game, versus 8 minutes remaining, it would barely be called a lead. Context changes everything. Please don’t ire the data gods by presenting numbers without context.   So how do you provide context? The two most relevant complements to a number are the target and a past value. Sometimes you can omit one of these if the other can be implied, but there is no harm in providing both. For example, if machine utilisation is 79% the context might be that this is up from 75% last month but still short of the 85% target. See how much richer the understanding is with the additional two context numbers?   An alternative is to include a chart with a target line. Charts are great because now you can see a 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘥, however, be careful not to introduce too much visual noise. There is an art to good dashboard design. I'll pick this up another time.   'nough said. Please include context! And feel free to contribute your rants. I've plenty to come.   Note: this was the 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘦 Broncos and the 𝘗𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩 Panthers. Sensibly the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers don't play NRL. For the Australians, wondering why I'm still talking about last season, it's because this season has been wiped from my memory.

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So I've joked about it in the past, and it's not actually that funny anymore. Yet another release and no updates to CPQ. Salesforce your customers are paying a hefty premium for this product and to have no meaningful feature enhancements in over 2 years is absurd. I realize you're pushing everyone to Revenue Cloud, but a lot of us maintain orgs that are going to have CPQ for quite some time. Is the product team going to fill us in on the official demise, or are we going to continue to pull the wool over our eyes? #salesforce #salesforcecpq #cpq

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I like money. A lot. I also like saving money. (So I can spend more of it later 😂). So when looking at what SaaS to integrate into our marketing and sales stack, Total Cost of Ownership is a pretty huge metric for us. https://buff.ly/3SexH1J #salesforce #hubspot #finance #marketing

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Our partnership with Brex now gives us unparalleled insight and breadth in SaaS purchasing reports

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🚨 Hot take: If your Customer Success Operations team is just managing your tech stack, you're doing it wrong. CS Ops has the potential to be your secret weapon—but too many organizations are sidelining it. It’s like having a Ferrari and only driving it in a parking lot. Here’s the hard truth: Customer Success Operations should be the backbone of your CS strategy, not just a support function. But instead, we’re seeing these three common missteps: 1️⃣ Treating CS Ops like IT support. “Can you fix this integration?” “Set up this dashboard?” Sure, those tasks are part of the job, but CS Ops is about strategy, not just troubleshooting. 2️⃣ Over-indexing on tools instead of processes. A shiny tech stack won’t save you if your workflows are clunky and disconnected. CS Ops should streamline how your team delivers value—not get bogged down by managing 50 tools. 3️⃣ Keeping CS Ops in a silo. If your CS Ops team isn’t syncing with Revenue Ops, you’re missing out. These teams should be swapping insights, aligning on metrics, and creating a unified customer journey from lead to renewal. 💡 What CS Ops Can Learn from RevOps Revenue Operations has mastered scalability, predictability, and alignment. Here’s what CS Ops can borrow from that playbook: Be data-driven: Every move should be tied to metrics that matter—ARR, NRR, retention. No fluff. Own the end-to-end process: Just like RevOps optimizes the funnel, CS Ops should optimize the post-sale journey. Collaborate cross-functionally: Partnering with Sales, Marketing, and Product isn’t optional—it’s table stakes. 🚀 The Future of Customer Success Operations Want to unlock the full power of CS Ops? Here’s where we’re headed: 1️⃣ From reactive to proactive. Stop waiting for issues to arise—CS Ops should be the team identifying risks, spotting trends, and driving decisions. AI will play a huge part in this. 2️⃣ From tech stewards to strategic advisors. Let them lead strategic conversations about customer health, renewal forecasts, and churn prevention. Again .. AI. 3️⃣ From siloed to integrated. Embed CS Ops into every layer of your organization. This team should be influencing not just CS, but your entire GTM strategy. CS Ops is so much more than keeping your tools running. It’s a growth engine. It’s your competitive edge. So, are you leveraging your CS Ops team to its fullest? Or are you still stuck in the parking lot?

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How do you keep engineering teams aligned with business goals while embracing innovation? Ada, the world’s leading customer service automation company, found the answer with Jellyfish. When pivoting to a generative-first strategy, Ada faced a key challenge: balancing innovation with supporting existing customers. They needed clarity on how their teams worked and invested their time. With Jellyfish, they achieved: 🚀 A 14% improvement in cycle times 🎯 Ranked in the top 97th percentile for “days with commits” 📈 Over 10% growth in technical investments “Jellyfish has become our go-to dashboard to understand how we’re operating as a team at a glance,” says William Mora, Head of Engineering at Ada. Now, Ada’s team is striking the perfect balance—focusing on reliability, experimentation, and investments that drive their business forward. Read the full story. Link in comments👇

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RevOps vs Chief of Staff work "I think RevOps is like a right hand to CRO of an organization. So a Chief of Staff is essentially like an extension of an executive member on any team. I think if you're smaller, than you have your hands in a lot of different pots." - Ravi Neppalli from our new Chief of Staff Podcast episode 🎧 Key takeaway: the size of company and who you report to impacts the work you do!

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How do you tackle technical debt? Every software company has technical debt, and the majority struggle to pay it back. After reading Shape Up, we've been trialing 8-week cycles of a 6-week build phase followed by a 2-week cool down. The cool down phase allows us to catch our breath and prepare for the next cycle. More importantly, it also allows us to focus on technical debt. The 2-week window gives us plenty of dedicated time to focus on large issues that will have significant benefits for future cycles.

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The question of how to choose between Ops vs Product as a career path came up recently in a discussion thread I am in. I wanted to share my thoughts here in case others are struggling with this decision. The first thing I try to consider is what tradeoffs you're making in either role, i.e. what are the problems you're solving in each respective role? What does that mean about the problems you don’t get to solve? Product: 1️⃣ My biggest gripe with product is that you are in control of a lot more and simultaneously a lot less. 2️⃣ You have to worry about the entirety of the product from top to bottom, not just the features/problems that are fun to solve. 3️⃣ You're at the behest of customers/end-users and the business and are torn at the seams in that way. Ops: 1️⃣ It’s really easy to feel like you don’t have any outcomes or impact because all you do is help other people do their jobs better or more efficiently and may often not get credit or public recognition for that. 2️⃣ If your solution is remotely dependent on buy-in and consistent effort from other teams just doing things the right way it will almost certainly fade/fail. 3️⃣ You are your own BDR and kind of have to be on the hunt for new problems to solve all the time. That is fun for someone like me but could be draining and ambiguous for others. Ops is more like solving specific problems from start to finish vs product is like solving pieces of a big problem a little at a time, in my experience. Curious what other PMs and Ops folks in my network think! S/O to Out-Of-Pocket for the discussion thread — super looking forward to Knowledgefest next weekend! ❤️

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X: "We need consistent sprint lengths across the company. And a consistent definition of a point and an epic!" Me: "Why? Some teams don't use sprints and points? Or even epics?" X: "Reporting. It makes it easier to compare apples to apples." Me: "Are teams working in the same context? Would apples to apples comparisons even be possible?" X: "We need a standard. Two weeks is the standard, right? What is the extra effort involved in points, anyway?" Me: "I'm less concerned about the standard -- because teams will just work around it if they need to -- and more about the assumption of apples to apples comparisons. Also, this is still overhead." X: "This is so pedantic and theoretical. Do people care as much as you?" Me: "No. That's kind of the point. If they don't care, what does that tell us?" X: "How is a leader like me supposed to get a birds eye view?" Me: "Is a super lossy birds eye view ok? Like if you know the view you're getting isn't tell us much?" X: "It is really about standards! Something needs to be consistent!" Me: "Standards when used effectively create beneficial consistency. If teams are just working around this to humor you, does that have the desired effect? If someone was asking you to jump through a hoop that didn't really reflect reality 'just because', how would you feel?" X: "Hah. Welcome to leadership. You don't have people banging down your doors wondering about how efficient we are, and asking why some teams aren't shipping..." Me: "Interesting. This feels like we're getting to the deeper problem to solve." X: "Yes. Do you know how little information we have as executives to answer this question. I'll take anything! It's like NPS. Everyone knows it is a sham, but it is something." Me: "OK. I appreciate you sharing this. I think we can make progress on that problem." X: "2 weeks sprints, points, and a definition of an epic. That's all I need." Me: "...."

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