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In this episode, hosts Bo Motlagh and Josh Smith explain the meaning of the hidden chasm for enterprise software organizations, and what to expect in future episodes as they seek to uncover the root causes of the most common technical challenges for companies entering significant growth stages, often via M&A.
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, a podcast where we speak with leaders of software enterprise companies to investigate the impact that legacy technology has on growth and innovation. The hidden chasm is sponsored by UnitedFX, where we help companies break free from legacy tech, improve retention, and empower m and a growth. Learn more at unitedeffects.com.
Bo:Josh. How are you, man?
Josh:How am I? I'm doing okay. It's getting warmer. Seasons get warmer up here in below New England. I don't think you can call Pennsylvania New England.
Josh:So
Bo:I don't think you can either. Yeah. But it is warmer. It's nice. Yeah.
Bo:I thought maybe we should take a minute and tell people what this whole hidden podcast thing we're doing is, especially since we just recorded an episode. Yeah.
Josh:And that's said, like, 50 times in that episode. So, yeah, we should probably explain.
Bo:Hidden chasm.
Josh:Oh my gosh. Do you wanna start, or shall I start? You start. Oh my god. Okay.
Josh:So problems are complicated. So Bo and I realized we worked for a long time when we worked for enterprise organizations, of course, predominantly on the East Coast. And, of course, we are pattern mappers. Me and the design user experience product space and then Bo in the architecture product space, We've noticed that when companies scale to a certain degree,
Josh:to a certain size, and they're entering a
Josh:very specific kind of growth stage. Although I say specific, it's common. They start hitting walls, and these walls come from different places in the organization, and they are seemingly disconnected seemingly disconnect. And you and I have seen this happen over and over. Yeah.
Josh:And then we've identified, though, that they are not as disconnected as we all assume, that there is potentially a central reason, a core symptom, and we are exploring what that core symptom is. The reason we call it hidden chasm is because these symptoms appear so seemingly disconnected. They're hard to identify when they're happening. They're hard to correlate. And, usually, you and I have noticed at least that organizations don't realize what's happening until they've hit these walls, until they have found themselves in this ditch.
Josh:And at that point, it's not crossing a chasm. It's climbing out of it. You and I have been racking our brains about this. How is it that the answer, the solution, the accepted solution today is we're just gonna have to climb out of it when we're in it. So Yeah.
Josh:We're exploring how can we speak with different folks in the industry so that we can make what is hidden less hidden and allow people to identify this issue earlier than when they're in it.
Bo:100%. Yeah. I mean, we've obviously been learning about the chasm for a while, and we've coined this term. But this podcast is really just an opportunity to, like Josh said, talk to people who have been in it, who've come out of it, who've successfully crossed it somehow, get these perspectives across different roles. Our first podcast, which we've already actually put out there, Natasha Walden, check it out.
Bo:That's a really cool conversation. She's a product leader, you know, product executive, giving us her story. We'll be talking to more folks like her, but we'll also be talking to technologists. We'll be talking to sales executives and strategy in general and consultants. Agile transformation comes up a lot, so that'll be something we'll check out as well to understand where that fits.
Bo:And we're really just interested in understanding the nuances. It's easy to talk about this and say, yeah. There's this thing. Companies hit it. You might notice problems like retention to start.
Bo:You know, like Josh said, you're not really connecting the dots about what the issues are. Hint, there's a lot of tech debt and technology issues associated. Yes. And that's great. But there's nuances to this, which are really interesting that pop up as a result of individual experiences.
Bo:We're going to dig into that. We're going to talk to these folks and get a sense of that and sort of round out that story here on this podcast, and then we'll see where it goes from there. Does that make sense?
Josh:Yeah. It's not issues in the start up to SMB space with mid market space. When we talk about these issues, we talk about it in the context of your mid market enterprise and you're looking for you you have a larger scale opportunity ahead of you, and you can't hit that larger scale opportunity. So I wanna be clear that the focus is growth to agree when you're an organization that you're much larger in scale than you are a startup
Josh:in the market.
Bo:Yeah. Absolutely. And a lot of the challenges challenges is maybe the wrong word, the indicators that we'll end up talking about. They're normal in early stages, in the good years when everything is just, how do you get traction? How do you bring you know, revenue in?
Bo:When you're a startup or even in the first, like, 5 years or so longer, especially if you're carving out a market, There's a lot of shortcuts that happen. There's a lot of organic growth, and that's very normal. It's the cumulative effect of that when it's not strategically addressed. And when a company reaches a certain size and they're looking for that next jump, that next enterprise milestone, whether that's 100,000,000 or 200,000,000 or whatever, or an exit, acquisition, PE, IPO, that moment of why is this so hard and beginning to sort of feel the cumulative impact of potentially years of these indicators piling up because, as Josh said, they're not necessarily correlated, so you don't see it always coming, which is why it's hidden. That's the sweet spot.
Bo:That's the really interesting story that I think we'd like to dive into.
Josh:Yeah.
Josh:Yeah. And we'll tackle it from all different perspectives,
Josh:from all different lines of business. And some examples of those are your company starting to build more products, and you're very excited. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, your net revenue retention starts to decline. You're saying, what's going on? Why?
Josh:We have everything planned out. Or why is sales starting to struggle out of nowhere at this stage where now we're growing rapidly? I thought it would be easy from here on out. And we look at those issues with real stories, and we're going to attempt to try and find common reasons and do some cause analysis and help explain why folks hit these walls at these first stages.
Bo:Yep. So we didn't say it already. I am Beau Montlag. That is Josh Smith. And this will be the Hidden Chasm Podcast.
Bo:Yeah.
Josh:Thanks for listening to the Hidden Chasm Podcast with your hosts, Beau Motlawn and Josh Smith, and sponsored by UnitedFX. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive exploring the impact of legacy technology on enterprise agility. Follow along as we explore this further by subscribing to the podcast at thehiddenchasm.com. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.