Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In the latest Hidden Chasm episode, Chris Avenick and David Perini dive into the tech debt challenges companies face as they grow from startup to enterprise. It’s easy to get stuck catering to early customers, but that focus can create long-term obstacles. Decoupling solutions from specific needs and thinking multi-tenant is key to avoiding future roadblocks.
Creators & Guests
What is The Hidden Chasm?
An ongoing discussion of how tech debt and legacy solutions become barriers to growth and innovation for established SaaS companies.
You're listening to The Hidden Chasm where we explore unforeseen growth challenges that surprise SaaS Enterprise. The Hidden Chasm is brought to you by United Effects Inc in partnership with Bluenilla LLC. For more information on either visit unitedeffects.com or bluenilla.com, respectively.
David Perini:Yours is a is is it real? It is real. Right?
Josh Smith:Yes. It's real.
David Perini:Or is it green screen?
Josh Smith:Does it look like
David Perini:I'm gonna spend It looks so well positioned that I would have believed it if it was if it was fake.
Josh Smith:Yeah. My cat will probably jump up over. Actually, it's really bright outside, so I'm gonna close these.
Bo Motlagh:Well, we are recording.
Josh Smith:Oh.
Bo Motlagh:So that's a fantastic introduction. I love it. While Josh is closing the curtains there. Welcome. Welcome to our friends, Chris Avnick and David Braney.
Bo Motlagh:And to the viewers here or listeners. Super excited to have you guys here. As you know, we've been chatting about this concept of the hidden chasm for a long time now. We've chatted with different perspectives, some product perspectives and M and A and sales and people and culture. We haven't really had the full package of design and technology together.
Bo Motlagh:So I'm super excited to have you guys here to chat about that with us and really thinking through exactly how these things kind of work together and some of the experiences that we've had together as we've built these. For listeners, all 4 of us actually worked together at one point at a company called Frontline Education, and it was a really fun experience. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit as well. So on the call here, we've got, and I always read these, but to make sure I get it right, it's important. We've got Chris Avnick.
Bo Motlagh:Chris is currently the vice president and head of technology at InfiniteBlue, which was just acquired by Everbridge. So super congrats on that. With over 2 decades of experience, Chris's career spans from successful founder to influential enterprise leader. He has a proven track record of driving innovation and orchestrating large scale development initiatives that generate significant growth and market impact. And David Perini.
Bo Motlagh:David is currently head of product at the rapidly growing startup Red Rover. Across his 2 plus decades of experience in product design and engineering, David has driven innovation and strategy for both startups and large enterprises. He has led teams to create impactful web and mobile experiences across ecommerce, edtech, and fintech sectors continuously, advancing the field with his expertise and leadership. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Chris Avenick:Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Bo Motlagh:That was a a mouthful of an intro. Sorry. We don't usually have 2 at a time. What I think would be a cool place to start is maybe to get to know you guys. Obviously, we know you well, but helping our listeners get to know a little bit about each of you.
Bo Motlagh:So maybe let's start with you, Chris. I mean, tell us, you know, how you got in got to where you are today, hobbies, passions, and and sort of, the career that sort of brought you to maybe us. And then and then since since then, right now
Josh Smith:your favorite Chappell Roan song.
Bo Motlagh:There you go.
Chris Avenick:I do not know. I feel like I just blindly just stumbled to where no. That's I've been on a so I've been on a unique journey within my career, going back and forth between larger corporations to more, I would say, entrepreneur ventures. Both giving me the the experience. It's kind of just helped me to thrive right now where I'm at.
Chris Avenick:So I've been at larger places like Frontline, Infinite Blue now, and Everbridge. Had my own boutique development shop for some time. Spent some time with a startup gaming developer, which was very interesting. Just to date myself, we were building apps on Facebook at the time when that was a thing. So, yeah, I've been kind of all over in terms of technology.
Chris Avenick:I started out as a dot net developer, made my way into more front end technologies, landed in more architect roles where I was more just agnostic. There was a common theme throughout all, which was the way technology was trending and the way, you know, in in in all my stops we were at, there was this large monolithic code base. And so it was just screaming to this this needs to get broken up. And each one of the ventures, I feel like I've I've come into a place where we're figuring out how do we break up this monolithic application, and I think that kind of, puts us in a good position as we start to talk about SaaS and what that means and whatnot. But that that's kind of been my my background, and it's more, you know, ending up in more of a platform space where we're looking at SaaS solutions.
Bo Motlagh:The p word. We're we're gonna get into that too because it
Chris Avenick:means I know I know you don't like that word, by the way. That's why
Bo Motlagh:I said I love the word. I just think it means something different to everybody. And, you know, so it's it's fun to dig into that. David, same question, man. You know, tell us about your background and, you know, the journey that you've been on, passions, hobbies, career, that kind of thing.
David Perini:Sure. Well, so my journey in this industry really began back when I was a teenager in the nineties. I have an older brother who got into, designing websites and while he was busy designing his Mariah Carey fan page, I would sneak onto his computer when he was out of the house and learn and start building my own fan websites and things along those lines, and turn that into a career right out of high school without, like, even anticipating it. It was just a hobby And people were looking for web designers, late nineties. And so they were like, sure.
David Perini:You don't have a high school degree. You don't have a college degree. That just means you're a cheaper labor. So happy to, bring you on board. And, from there, I was able to turn one job into another into another.
David Perini:A lot of work at agencies, design agencies, until I kinda landed a big break at GSI Commerce, which was acquired by eBay, and built the ecommerce websites for companies like Toys R Us and Ace Hardware and, the major, like, NFL, MLS, that kind of thing. And then that was my really first experience with large web application development at a huge scale and the challenges that come with that. And then, from there, I was able to work at multiple entities where they were trying to make that transition into that space from the first space, so to speak. Like, from the, hey. We've been working with an agency or we've worked in a startup environment to we wanna get to where GSI was.
David Perini:We wanna get to where eBay was. So it's been really interesting to start super duper small where you're wearing multiple hats to being 1 of 2,000 people on an engineering organization or within an engineering organization, and try to figure out, you know, how to connect those two dots.
Bo Motlagh:So where were you before you came to Frontline?
David Perini:Before Frontline was GSI. Yep.
Bo Motlagh:GSI. Okay. Cool. That had to be an interesting transition.
David Perini:Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a step it it was a much smaller company at the time that I joined and then grew rapidly over the next 6 years.
Josh Smith:So you 2 likely have experience then tell me if, if I'm wrong. Perspective around what are the decisions that are often made to get from the to get from the point of start up to mid market or enterprise, the challenges there. But what are the decisions that are made there that end up biting you or having repercussions Once you get to the point of enterprise and you need to you need to either you need to scale further, suddenly you look back and say, those were great decisions back then, but now they're causing us significant significant problems.
Chris Avenick:Yeah. I mean, I I guess I can start just because the the what comes top of mind as you say that is as a start up smaller company in the, you know, and and more into the b to b space of ecommerce, solutions. It's all about satisfying that first customer or the first two customers and getting the revenue generation. And when when you're wearing that hat, you know, all bets are off about, you know, how are we how are we gonna scale? How are we gonna grow this?
Chris Avenick:It's what we have to do right now for this customer. And, you know, and and a lot of people who go through this and they get into their second one, they'll say, hey. Listen. We can't make decisions specifically for this customer. We gotta we gotta make sure we're not boxing ourselves in.
Chris Avenick:And and, you know, in one way or another, it ends up happening in some capacity. So one of the biggest challenges from a tech perspective as you grow is, decoupling your solution from being so specific to what that those early customers wanted so that you can you can scale it and grow it into a more a more of a multi tenant type of fashion, which isn't always as nice as you would want it to be. It doesn't always happen. I worked at places where if you look in the code base, you'll definitely see code that has a logical code that says, if this customer do this, if else do this. And those are things, you know, the that's the baggage that you have to determine from a technical debt.
Chris Avenick:Do you carry it? Do you change it? You know, how do we actually grow this and scale it?
Bo Motlagh:I think you're you're tapping sort of from a from a very technical perspective. You're tapping into some of the indicators that, you know, when we talk about the hidden chasm, you're gonna hear me say the word chasm a lot in this conversation. You know, we we listen for it. So tech debt and scalability, and those those types of things. Real world impact on the business.
Bo Motlagh:And I think you're hitting on those. I'm curious. Maybe, David, from your perspective, how do you interpret I mean, unless you think about it the same way. I'm I'm guessing that that you may have a slightly different perspective on the same issues.
David Perini:Yeah. I I've experienced a lot of what, Chris described. I think, when you look at it from the design perspective, whether that be company brand and identity design or whether that is the user interface of the software that you're interacting with, I think I think a lot of the root causes or a lot of the a lot of the initial decisions in when you're in startup mode are similar to what Chris described, that you are moving fast. You are getting your brand developed, at low cost because you don't have a lot of money to invest. Your brand really is you.
David Perini:It's the very first few people who are part of the company and the culture that they bring to the table and their perspective on the problems that they're solving. But as you scale and as you grow, you tend to get to a point where now your culture is representing 50 people, a 100 people, 200 people, and they all have different backgrounds, different perspectives on the problems that you're solving at the same time that you're solving more and more problems for more and more customers. And so the assumptions that you didn't even have to question day 1, the brand identity that you had day 1, that just came naturally because it was who you were and what you individually viewed your company as. All of that now has to scale and represent what your entire organization is doing and the new direction that you are going on. And to double tap on on on what Chris was saying too, there's the there's the survival mechanism that you have at the beginning of your startup journey where you're just trying to survive.
David Perini:You're just trying to pay the bills. You need to keep those customers as happy as possible, the first few that pay your bills. And it's very easy if you become successful. If you do survive, it's easy to get stuck on those first few days, those first few weeks, those first few months. How you define the company, how you frame the company, these these are the problems that we're solving.
David Perini:You're like, we've already solved those. Like, now to acquire new business, you need to solve new problems. You need to have a new message. You need to have a new narrative. But that narrative needs to connect with where you started from, if that makes sense.
David Perini:So from I I think I lean more on the brand and identity side than on, like, the, like, the software design side. Yeah. But, yeah, that that would kinda be how I first approach that that problem.
Bo Motlagh:That's kinda the beauty of these conversations and looking at the chasm holistically is that it has a brand and identity side. It's just as much as it has a very technical side that needs to be accounted for as well. Chris, I saw you nodding along, you know, as as, David was kinda talking about that. Anything about that was was jumping out at you?
Chris Avenick:No. It was actually, like, reminiscing because I I feel like David and I kinda, like, feed off of each other. Yeah. Coming from the the the more the design user experience side as he does and, me from the technical side. But we've had a lot of, interesting conversations along the way.
Chris Avenick:So that was just a reminiscent moment.
Josh Smith:On that brand identity side, I'll be interested in that perspective, David. When when an organization hits when an organization gets their way to, you know, to the enterprise stage and they are looking to increase their offerings within the same market or within or for the same ICP. How often have you seen companies prepared for introspecting on the uniqueness of the identity or brand of their single product offering and realizing that that's now getting in the way. The larger the larger identity that needs to be crafted in order to in order to bring the other offerings in the fold for that same ICP?
David Perini:Yeah. Well, I think most, if not all of us, saw this at Frontline. Right? That when you start out with a single product, with a single offering, your brand is synonymous with that product. And when you start to grow that into 2, 3, 4 different products or solutions or functional areas, now you've got a challenge because you need to distinguish between the company and the individual products that you are offering.
David Perini:And I I think you need to really think carefully about what makes you unique and what what do people recognize you as. So if they recognize you as the product, you may need to realize that that is currently your company branding, and you may lean into that and instead define different flavor, different sub brands underneath that rather than, say, for example, trying to create a new company brand and treat the product brand that everybody knows you buy as just that one product. I think we've seen that as potentially a there's a huge risk there because people aren't thinking of, you know, this particular widget as, you know, the company name, as the company reputation. They're thinking of the entire company and everybody that they've interacted with as that name, as that reputation. Yeah.
David Perini:I'm not sure if I addressed that.
Bo Motlagh:You know, thinking back, I mean, you guys were all there before I got there. I I sort of joined the team. And and I remember I mean, you were well on your way toward thinking through what you're talking about at Frontline, David. But Chris, you were, I mean, you were basically running, you know, the helm at, at figuring out that first core divergence from from the brand in terms of a technical new solution that would ultimately be, the center of this next thing. And, you know, we we called it that was the platform.
Bo Motlagh:I think we called it employee center or something. And it was an interesting sort of thing because you had this you had this legacy solution. An amazing solution. I think it's still there, and it's and it's done really well for the company. But it it was already, I think, 20 years old at that point.
Bo Motlagh:Mhmm. And here you were coming along the side of this, trying to keep up with both of you keeping up with these conversations of what are we building? What's the brand? How are we selling this? And by the way, let's start building this new thing alongside of it.
Bo Motlagh:Tell us about that because I think what was accomplished there, even in getting started, is kind of unique. The politics involved in saying we're going to start something new is in and of itself intense. And it happened. And that doesn't usually happen. And it paid off.
Bo Motlagh:I mean, it's a huge gamble when a company does that. Love to kinda hear maybe a little bit more from from your from your perspective, on the technology side of the things, Chris. And then maybe we can kinda dig into that a little bit more more holistically as well with you, David.
Chris Avenick:I feel like one of the biggest challenges from a a tech perspective is trying to convince stakeholders that we need to tear everything down and build it back up in a new tech stack. Yeah. That never goes over well in a conversation. But, you know and and that might be due to limitations like we talked about before with how a product was built to support the initial customers. It wasn't necessarily looked at to scale up or grow, or it could be just a change in direction, which was sort of where we were at with with frontline where we had a product.
Chris Avenick:The product was succeeding. We had a second product, and that was starting to gain traction. We wanted to bring the products together. But because of the tech stack that we use, the architecture was made, it didn't lend itself to do that. So when we started proposing, we need to rewrite this in a different way so that we can integrate.
Chris Avenick:Obviously, that didn't go over well. And, you know, when you're working with product management and they have their own priorities and backlogs and time frames and whatnot, it it's a hard sell. So we had the luxury of just going through an acquisition, which was bringing over this this third product, I'll say, which we knew the concept behind this product was more of our central core of what we wanted to to to do for this solution. So it was an easier sell to say, hey. Listen.
Chris Avenick:We're going to rewrite this core into this newer technology that's going to support growth and scalability from this this platform side, and that will allow us to take our 2 existing products and tie them in. So we we had a it was kind of a sweet spot there where we got to sell what needed to be done in terms of updating the tech on this acquired product, and we leveraged that to build out our platform. And and really when I say platform, I'm talking about our shared data model that equated into an actual product offering. Because that's the other thing, you know, is if you go and you try to sell to the stakeholders, to the business, that, listen. We need x number of resources and dollars because we want to build this really cool, integrated tech data solution that's gonna support everything else we're currently doing.
Chris Avenick:But trust us. It's gonna make it better. That never, really goes that far. So if you can put that behind some type of product value that your users are actually gonna see added value to what they're experiencing, it makes that sell a lot easier. And that's what we do with that third product is, hey.
Chris Avenick:We wanna build out this platform because we know we need to integrate, but let's do it so that we can actually, bring to market this product that we acquired in our in our suite of solutions.
David Perini:Yeah. The return on investment conversation underpins any type of technical debt resolution. As engineers, as designers, we can get so passionate about the products that we are creating. Right? The experiences that we are creating for customers, and that's awesome.
David Perini:That is a good thing. That's what hopefully makes us good at our jobs. But sometimes, we're not so good about translating that into the business concerns. Yep. And every single hour we spend at a company, to some degree, somebody somewhere wants to know what's the return on investment of that.
David Perini:And I think that those who are more successful at transformation, within, whether that's, again, resolving Ted debt, building a platform like Chris is just describing here, expanding your brand, expanding the quality of experience that you're providing customers, You gotta be able to translate that to the executive, team in terms of what's the return on investment here. What am what is the business getting out of the time and effort that we're spending there?
Bo Motlagh:It was interesting because when when I got there, there was already sort of two definitions of the word platform. And that's why I always laugh when I hear that word now. And you just called one out, Chris. It was, employee center. I mean, that from a technology perspective was the platform.
Bo Motlagh:There wasn't like an underlying mesh or anything beyond that yet. And it was this shared data model that we we were still trying to figure out how does that even work. And then there was this commercial definition, which I gather, David, was was probably an attempt to reconcile the ROI of this in a way that made that would make more sense. Can can you tell us about that? Because I suspect the technical well, you tell me and Josh, maybe maybe, you know, you were probably part of this conversations too before my time, but I suspect the technical conversation happened first and then a reconciling product conversation maybe happened afterwards, or or was it the other way around?
David Perini:I would suggest that I think there were 2 parallel conversations happening independently of each other. Because at the time at the time that this was all happening, Frontline had gotten acquired, right, by an investment company and was looking to significantly and rapidly grow the valuation of the company. And on the marketing side, there was a strong push to create a cohesive narrative about not just where we were, but where we were going that was platform focused, that we want to be all things to k twelve school administrators. At the same time that that was happening on the engineering side, we were having conversations about how do we get these products to speak to one another? How do we get them to communicate to one another?
David Perini:And everything that Chris outlined and, Chris, I know you can speak to that in better depth than I can, but that was being driven organically from the engineering team saying, we are gonna get killed in the market if we cannot figure out how to get these things to communicate efficiently with one another, and speak the same language.
Bo Motlagh:Okay. Yeah. And then and then I think after I got there, we we kind of invented a third kind of concept, and it was the sort of the data mesh streaming solution to lay underneath all of this. And so for a very long time while I was there, I remember anytime somebody said platform, I'd be like, which platform are you talking about? And it's all the same, but it's it had different perspectives and different connotations.
Bo Motlagh:And then, you know, I remember one of the most challenging elements that you you 2, David and Josh, really, I enjoyed watching you guys thinking through it and talk and working on was, okay. What the heck does this even mean from an experience perspective? Like, what are we talking about? How does that even become together, and and and how do we even begin to think about it? And there were parts of it where I don't know that we ever fully figured out, but at least we got clever about, you know, in terms of it.
Bo Motlagh:So love to hear more about that.
David Perini:Yeah. I remember some of those whiteboard conversations, Chris, you and I, and another colleague of ours, Matt Hildenbrand's office. I I just remember countless times that we would be at that whiteboard talking about, like, well, hold on. If we if we model, what an employee at a school district is, if we model it this way, these are the implications in all of these systems that now frontline has either built or acquired. How are we gonna reconcile those?
David Perini:And what does that mean to the customers who came only from this portion of the of the ecosystem or have only purchased this product? So, yeah, it was a significant challenge. And I think how we tended to try to break it down, I cared very strongly about the real human being at the end of the line that is interacting with the system, that's interacting with whether it's a mobile app, whether it's a web user interface, whether it's an API. But the in the end user of the system in any given context is the experience that we are creating for them. Does it make sense given their mental model and given the type of job that they are trying to do or set of jobs that they are trying to accomplish.
David Perini:Right? And start there, which is somewhat of a purist mentality. Right? A pure user experience of like, okay. Ideally, if this user if we could design the system around what this user understands, what does that look like?
David Perini:How does that make sense? And then work backwards to, well, our data model doesn't align up with that. You know, the technology stack that we have built off of would need to be significantly extended or refactored. What can we afford? And then let that start to impose some challenges or negotiation points on the user experience to say, okay.
David Perini:Are there ways that we can work work around that? Are there ways that we can compromise? And we don't have to, you know, give the customer a Rolls Royce, but at least we can generally, with 1 or 2 clicks, get them to where they would expect to be within the ecosystem.
Bo Motlagh:We could talk about Frontline all day. It was such an amazing experience in a lot of ways. You know, they did a lot of things right. They were very they were lucky in some ways, and they have an amazing story, of their own as well that went beyond all of us. But coming back, I think so these conversations happen everywhere.
Bo Motlagh:You know? And I'm curious as you guys moved on from from frontline, these notions of these things that we're describing now, these were a reaction to I need to integrate a bunch of stuff. And I have legacy technology and I have, you know, tech debt that I wanna avoid. How's that conversation typically for you now? And, you know, I know David you're in a smaller earlier company.
Bo Motlagh:Maybe you guys are thinking about this, though, to avoid some of those challenges. And, Chris, I'm I'm guessing, you know, you just went through an acquisition. I'm guessing some of these things are kinda fresh and popping up, you know, in real time for you as well. Love to understand maybe from both your perspectives, the chasm and how you're experiencing this in your life, you know, since then.
David Perini:I guess on my side, the last two companies that I've been with since Frontline have both been smaller startup stages that have been looking to grow and grow fairly rapidly. At Red Rover, particularly, we've been the company's been in business for just under 5 years, and we just launched our 3rd product. So we are building out our portfolio pretty steadily. And I think because of the experience that many of the product team had with platforms in the past, At Red Rover, we've tried from day 1 to cast a slightly broader vision than you often do when you have a startup environment where you've where you're trying to solve one problem. We said, this is the playground that we wanna play within, this whole k twelve administrative ecosystem.
David Perini:And we know that there are different parts of the playground that we eventually want to get to. So having that knowledge in the back of our minds has allowed us from scratch to start building, core services and functions that cut across the entire suite even as the first product is getting built or the second product is getting built. So in that way, having that knowledge, like anticipating it before you go in, has been really, really helpful. And having a vision that goes beyond one product, not necessarily as grand as, like, 10 or 20, you know, something along those lines. But having a general sense of, like, these are the problems that I'm solving now.
David Perini:These are the problems that I plan on solving next. And if we're successful, if we survive, these are probably some examples of the areas that we're gonna go beyond that has really helped to frame and give us a strategy for how to build out the ecosystem. There's definitely gaps in that. But that's one way that kind of from scratch, we've been able to mitigate some of the challenges that are hidden in that chasm when you kind of just inherit a product or through acquisition. You now have to figure out how to put 2 and 2 together.
Bo Motlagh:Can you, tell everybody what Red Rover does? That might be
David Perini:helpful. Sure. Yeah. So similar to frontline education, Red Rover builds, software for school districts, specifically for district administrators to manage things like educator time off and and leave, time tracking for especially classified staff at, school districts. And now just in the past year, we released a hiring solution that allows school districts to create job postings and hire candidates and, interview them, the whole kit and kaboo.
Josh Smith:So what you're saying, David, is if if you had to give tell me if this is accurate. If you had to give advice to anyone who's, like, operating in a start up who assumes or believes very strongly that their long long term vision, is to to grow and scale, whose vision is isn't whose vision isn't that. If you do start with a very specific problem with a specific market and you say, I am at at my stage as an early start up and I have the capacity and ability to directly sell to this, that those organizations should likely be understanding that problem in the context more broadly of that specific customer and everything they're dealing with within that space. Because more likely than not, a common path to growth and to scale, whether it's organic or inorganic through serial acquisition, is to fill out the problem spaces before and after the one you're trying to solve. And if you're not looking at that and not looking at the larger picture, you might Yeah.
Josh Smith:Not only from a technology perspective, but from an experience and branding perspective, set yourself up to be so constrained that when you suddenly want to expand, you have to completely as you are as you both were saying, reimagine, rethink everything you were doing.
David Perini:Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes when you are in that survival mode, you can fall into 1 of 2 pits and you kinda wanna bridge the 2. You can fall onto one side where because you're just trying to survive, you get too narrow in your focus and your strategy. And then when you actually succeed, there's a little bit of the dog who caught the car of, like, what?
David Perini:Now where are we going? Now I have an idea. The whole chase was like the thing I was focused on for 2 years or 5 years or whatever, and now the chase is over. So you you wanna make sure that you've given yourself runway, that you continue to anticipate or project out where you see yourself going. On the flip side, there's also the same pitfall of over engineering, over stressing.
David Perini:Like, this is where we're gonna be in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. And you're not servicing the customers today, and you're not building the system to handle it today. So I really think that, like, you are walking this fine line of of balance of just enough insight and direction and context for where you're headed, but not getting lost in the future either.
Bo Motlagh:So, Chris, I I think Infinite Blue is is probably 6 or 7 years ahead of a Red Rover in terms of just life cycle. Maybe well, first, maybe tell people what what Infinite Blue does, and then, curious about your perspective about how things have have been moving forward there. Obviously, neither of you need to air any anything weird, but just just your perspective and keeping an eye on these things because I think you probably have been thinking about it.
Chris Avenick:Yeah. So InfiniteBlue, we are in the business continuity and disaster recovery space. And very similar to, frontline and and when I joined InfiniteBlue, there were 2 well, there was there was one product, which was the flagship project, product, which dealt with business continuity, helping organizations create business continuity plans, which would ultimately benefit them in educating the business on how to respond in times of crisis. When I started at InfiniteBlue about years ago, I was brought on to build and run the teams that were gonna develop our next product, which dealt more into the response of critical events that would happen to a company. And we wanted to leverage our domain knowledge and all the data that we had from our business continuity product and leverage that to help corporations respond in those times of crisises.
Chris Avenick:So the stuff that they were planning for, whether it be, you know, some type of weather event like a tornado or a hurricane or even, something like a cyber attack, They have a plan for that. If one of those things would unfortunately impact your business, how do you respond, and how can you manage that that response in real time? So the majority of my time has been building this new product and then integrating it with our existing flagship product. Going, I guess, back to one of the initial questions you had about, you know, what have we taken from our experience from, you know, in our case, frontline and moving forward. It's interesting because I I've had a few different conversations with people and and especially now with with Everbridge and what we're looking to do as we as we move forward, from a product standpoint.
Chris Avenick:And, a lot of companies I won't say everyone, but a lot of companies that are in this space of trying to integrate products together are faced with the same type of challenges, especially when they are disparate, products and trying to bring them all together. And I really do feel like the value that I bring to the table is not that I have the golden solution that's gonna solve the problem that's ahead of us. But I have the 1,000 times that we failed, and I can bring that to the table. Because that's that's the the consistency between different companies, different solutions that you're trying to build is the the roadblocks that you hit along the way. And, you know, having someone that's going through that in any type in any scenario is always valuable because you could bring what those failures are so that you can get ahead of them.
Chris Avenick:And, you know, maybe the solution that you came up with at another product or a previous company will be the solution you use for this situation or it may not. Because at the end of the day, it's software. There's, you know, a million ways to solve one problem. Yeah. But I think what is invaluable is understanding what did you try in the past that actually failed.
Chris Avenick:No slight on any of us, but I feel like we were all going through this whole integration play maybe for the first time. I know for myself it was for the first time, and so there was a lot of failures along the way. I'm thankful that, you know, we had at least the foresight to build this in a microservice way, which made us able to tear down and rebuild as we got to that next hurdle that we realized that this isn't gonna work type of thing. But getting ahead of that definitely has been beneficial, especially at InfiniteBlue.
David Perini:I was just thinking. So one key takeaway there, Chris, is when you find yourself faced with this hidden chasm challenge, recruit team members who have probably gone through this once or twice before because the problems will probably be very, very similar, and you may be able to leverage some of those same solutions.
Chris Avenick:Exactly. Yeah. And it empowers everyone. You know, this isn't just about, you know, whether it's an ivory tower approach to come up with solutions or, you know, just on one person. The more we advance in technology and go down this path, there's more people that have been a part of these type of situations.
Chris Avenick:So, I I truly believe it's very powerful to leverage everyone on the team of helping solve, solutions because everyone brings their own unique experiences and, you know, in my case, failures to to help solve these issues.
Bo Motlagh:I'm a firm believer that failing is important as well. I want to shift gears a little bit here because I think there's a perspective that I'd be super curious what you guys think, especially because at your companies, I'm guessing it has been an an extremely important one and it's the, and again, connecting to what you're saying here. It's probably super important to have people in this position that have gone through it from this perspective as well, but it's the sales perspective. Right? We had a great sales conversation with an advisor of UnitedFX, actually, Jenna Watson Braun, a little while back.
Bo Motlagh:That episode will be coming out soon, so keep keep an eye out. But the dynamic, especially in the early days of what are you trying to sell and really the competing incentives because sales is compensated differently than engineers and product. And that dynamic of them pushing forward and product and engineering either trying to keep up or even maybe pulling them back, It's a healthy tension or it can be, or it can really devolve into a, you know,
David Perini:well,
Bo Motlagh:really debt. So super curious about, that experience from both of your perspectives. I'll pick somebody to go first. Chris.
Chris Avenick:If you look at your corporation through the lens of a specific department or or focus area, like sales or support or even tech, you're missing the bigger picture of how your your business really can succeed. And I I'm a firm believer in, product led organizations where the the product team organization drives all the other areas. And it's it's not just about what that solution is. It's about the user, the customer. What is the problem that we're solving?
Chris Avenick:And I think that is key to be the central focus. Specifically, when we were looking at product led technology companies is that that one question of what is the problem we are solving needs to be understood by all the different departments. Because if you know what the problem is and what the problem is solving, then, yeah, it's easy for them tech to go off and build the solution that's meeting that need of solving that problem. But, likewise, it's easy for sales then to go and start selling that solution to that problem. You know, and I've been in different circumstances where sales maybe isn't on the same page as as product.
Chris Avenick:And there's always that tension that starts to build between, you know, why why aren't you further along with the product? Or how come, how come it doesn't have this? Or we need this in the product. And, you know, and maybe text on the side of saying, well, wait a minute. That's not even what we're looking to build type of thing.
Chris Avenick:And it gets more focused on a deliverable and less focused on the problem that needs to be solved. Because I think even the solution that product and tech come up with on what that solution to that problem is first needs to be rooted on what has to be solved. And that all gets, in my opinion, rooted back to who is the user, what is the problem we're solving for these users. And I really think that's how you keep sales. You keep support.
Chris Avenick:I mean, support's a huge part of this, not just from a a standpoint of of supporting the current customers and helping them with their issues that come up, but also just the upsell capabilities and what we can do from managing these relationships. If they understand that problem, the central problem that we're solving, it makes it easier for them to go and build these relationships and let them know where we're going, and sales going out to potential customers or new customers. So that's I I think that's the, in my opinion, the root of just solving the problem of keeping the whole organization connected and on the same mission.
David Perini:Yeah. Yeah. Chris and I see the world through very similar eyes. I think that to keep your organization aligned, having a really compelling problem that you are solving that reflects your market, that reflects your heart and character as an organization really helps everybody to stay on the same page. And and I might frame that as customer empathy.
David Perini:If the product organization depending on how how you're organized as a company. But if as your as a company, you are building products that meet a very clear need to your market, that makes it so much easier to sell. That makes it easier to support. It makes it easier for everybody to be on the same page. And I think that what can often happen you know, you were you were asking Bo initially about sales organizations and and the impact there.
David Perini:I think what can often happen on the sales side is as a company is growing, what they're selling is changing. And the narrative that they're trying to craft, the narrative that the marketing and sales organization is trying to craft to be able to find leads and generate leads, and then be able to close deals, that narrative is changing. And they need clear guidance and communication internally to say, here's how this connects to what we've always been as a company. You know, if you if you make a certain type of widget for farmers, for example, if you suddenly start making medical utensils or something along those lines, you're gonna need to explain to your sales organization how those two things connect Because it doesn't feel immediately like those are those are part of the same market. They might be, but somebody somewhere internal to the organization needs to be able to craft that narrative and say, this is why, you know, farmers have animals.
David Perini:And I'm gonna real really spitball terribly here. But, you know, farmers have animals that they need to take care of and there are medical concerns for those animals. And so therefore, yes, these things connect together. If you can't find a compelling narrative for why you're building both product a and product b or why you're acquiring another company or something like that other than, oh, it just makes us more money, you're gonna be in a world of hurt, the sales organization, the support organization, the technology organization. But if you are making strategic decisions, to Chris's point, product led of, like, this is the change we want to be in this market.
David Perini:These are the customers that we have empathy and we care about and we're listening to. And these are the problems that we opportunistically are identifying and saying, we can make money solving that problem, but we also can win the support of our market, our customers, then it makes the job of evolving the narrative on the sales side, or evolving our practices on the support side, or evolving our technical architecture on the engineering side. It makes that job so much easier because people have a clear sense of, like, why are we doing what we're doing, and how does it connect to what made us successful when we were in startup mode?
Bo Motlagh:I had to learn, in my in my sort of journey is as as important as the problem you're solving and that that market story, that market narrative is. The other side of that, which is surprisingly important, is also what problem you're not solving and what market you're not in. And and having that be a conscious choice and an actual conversation to make sure that things stay. And honestly, having that conversation, I think obviously, you know, sales is an important group to have that conversation with. But tech is a really important group to have that conversation with in product because, I know my for me personally, I'm I'm a, you know, systems minded growth sort of minded person.
Bo Motlagh:And so I'm always like, oh, if we take this, we could do that. You know, and it becomes important to know. But we actively don't want to do that and help guide an organization. And I think that that's missing a lot of the time. Right?
Bo Motlagh:I think there's a lot of focus on the positive. Like, we want to do x and we're going to be the market leader in this. And, it's often not said that we're actively not doing that, at least not right now. So please don't do that. Yeah.
Bo Motlagh:And I think that would be helpful. I don't know what you guys think.
David Perini:1 100% completely agree. I and maybe it's a difference between kind of like an entrepreneurial mindset versus or even a growth oriented mindset versus, like, a a scaling mindset. Your eyes get too big for your stomach. You opportunistically you don't wanna you don't wanna leave anything on the table. If customers are saying, hey, I've got this problem and this problem and this problem, it's your inclination.
David Perini:Even when you are having strong customer empathy, your inclination is to say, well, maybe eventually we can do all of that for you. We can solve all of that for you. And yet that's extremely scary to architect for. And you're gonna get into analysis paralysis real, real fast because you are trying to go too broad and you're not going deep enough on one key problem or one set of problems. So, yeah, I think saying no is is just as important as saying this is this is where we're saying yes.
David Perini:This is where we want to focus our strategy. By saying we are focusing our strategy here, we need to sometimes explicitly tell everybody on the team and even sometimes externally, that means we're not doing all these other things because we need to make sure that we solve this problem well. Right.
Chris Avenick:One of my favorite questions that comes down to the tech side is, is this possible?
Bo Motlagh:Sure.
Chris Avenick:Which in a, you know, in a a smirky type of way, I usually answer, of course, it's software. Everything's possible.
David Perini:Everything anything's possible. How much do you wanna spend?
Chris Avenick:But it comes back to, you know, Dave, what you're saying. You know, what what is our focus? What is our problem that we're solving? Not just what can we build type of thing.
Bo Motlagh:My other favorite tech question is, can't we just insert something there?
Josh Smith:I'm I'm hearing I'm hearing they're not contradictory, but I'm hearing several things. You're saying there's a level of focus that's required in terms of value found in the market. There's a level of flexibility needed by the folks you hire having experience of all of the ways in which you can support that value to scale. I say that because I think we've all hit scenarios where we hire in the wrong we hire in folks who are really good at one thing, who've been very successful at one thing, and they try and take those operations in that playbook and implement it without any consideration for where the organization's at. But to be flexible and curious enough to understand that that the specific ways in which that organization can scale that value, but to make sure that that focus on that value is not only myopic, but it it is then the knowledge of that and that why because we've been having conversations about this.
Josh Smith:Do the knowledge of that and that why is consistently understood from the top of the organization all the way to the bottom because we've also had conversations where when when organization scales, what happens is the bottom the bot the bottom of the organization. The the boots on the ground are the there's a lot of ignoring them, at least, forgetting that they need to understand what that value is, in every every piece of work that they're doing.
David Perini:Yeah. There's a couple of things there. I absolutely think it's a balance between multiple concerns. It's there's a couple of analogies that pop into my head, and all of them are terrible. But I'm gonna use the worst one just for fun.
David Perini:Why not? Nice. When you're dating when when you're dating, you need a certain amount of self confidence. Right? Like, you you need to be able to project confidence, and it needs to be sincere.
David Perini:You you need to know who you are. You also kinda need to have a sense of what your goals are from a dating perspective. You know, if where you live geographically, what your interests are, what you bring to the table relationship wise, All of these things are factors that matter. In the same sense, within an organization, at any given moment, whether you're small or large, you need to be self aware about what your strengths and weaknesses are. And you need to be confident about your strengths, but you also need to be defining strategies that don't require you to be really, really strong in an area that you know you are weak in.
David Perini:If you just did a little bit of introspective introspection, you know that you don't have the team. You don't have the experience to solve a given type of problem. So you need to have confidence about the problems that you can solve in this day or, you know, in the next year to 2 years. These are the problems that reasonably you can solve with the team that you have or are capable of acquiring with the budget that you have and the return on investment that your investors are looking for. You know, all of those factors balance it.
David Perini:You have to have that introspective self awareness. But then you also have to be able to project confidence and believe in yourself that you will be able to achieve those goals that you're setting out. If you if you're overconfident and you're overly opportunistic, you're gonna be a hot mess. If you are insecure and you are too conservative, and you focus only on solving the problems that you've already been solving for the past couple of years over and over again, you're gonna have myopic growth. You know what I mean?
David Perini:It's gonna stagnate. And and you're gonna be just resting on your laurels until somebody else comes in and takes your customers. So it is this fine line of making sure you are being thoughtful and being introspective. And within an organization, you can't send the entire organization to therapy to figure out what your challenges or weaknesses are. You have to be proactive in listening to your boots on the ground, listening to the team underneath you if you're in a leadership position, because they are the ones that are going to capture and identify and communicate the indicators that are telling you we're weak in this area or we're strong in this area.
David Perini:They may not have the whole context to put the entire picture together, but they can at least tell you guys our our tech stack is woefully lacking from a performance standpoint. If we suddenly throw a 1000 customers on this, it's just going to crap out. Or, hey, guys. I'm telling you the market doesn't understand and is not responding to the messaging that we're putting out to how we solve this problem.
Chris Avenick:Love
Bo Motlagh:it. I think well, I think that this has been an amazing conversation. And you guys have laid out some really good advice actually for anybody facing these types of issues. We are at a full hour here, so it's probably a good time to wrap it up. But I wanna put the spotlight on you guys.
Bo Motlagh:Let the people know what, you know, anything that you think is worth chatting about and how to get in touch with you in terms of these concepts, the projects you're working on, dating advice. And, yeah, go for it. Why don't we start with you, David?
David Perini:Sure. So the company that I work for is, Red Rover, red rover k12 dot com. If you're in the school of software business, come check us out. Most likely you are not though. So more broadly, I would just say we are a rapidly growing team.
David Perini:Every year we are hiring and looking for new talented team members across the board, but from my perspective, especially the engineering team. So if what we're talking about here sounds interesting to you, these types of challenges, you know, check us out.
Bo Motlagh:Thanks. Chris?
Chris Avenick:Yeah. So from the the Everbridge side, InfiniteBlue side, we deal, like I said, with business continuity, disaster recovery, critical event management as a whole suite of solutions. So we deal with some of the the larger Fortune 50 companies in the world right now. If that is something that you are, a part of at your organization in terms of business continuity or part of a GSOC, definitely reach out to us either at everbridge.comorinfinitblue.com as we're in the the transition period right now. For myself, you know, from a from a tech standpoint, I'm always open to networking and chatting about tech.
Chris Avenick:Probably not dating advice. That's probably more Burini's skill set. But anything dealing with tech, you know, platforms, SaaS, always open for talking and connecting with anyone. I'm just kidding, Dave.
Bo Motlagh:Awesome. Well, thank you both of you. This was really cool. You've been listening to The Hidden Chasm, where we explore these topics around the chasm, around things that hold enterprises back. Stay tuned.
Bo Motlagh:We'll have more perspectives coming soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Hidden Chasm. If you'd like to share your story or if you have any questions, you can reach us via email at podcast@unitedeffects.com or by visiting thehiddenchasm.com.