Allison Pickens' Podcast

Historically, customer-facing teams treasured every moment they could get with their engineering counterparts — because those moments were rare. Engineers were focused on building the core product, and any other initiative could be considered a distraction. Support teams in particular were often frustrated because they felt that Engineering wasn’t spending enough time fixing bugs, gathering custom...

I remember that around 2013, everyone was talking about “CRM 2.0” — what CRM company would displace Salesforce? SFDC was clunky. Implementation took forever. And it never really ended. It seemed like only a matter of time before SFDC would be forced to pass the torch to a hot new CRM company. As it turns out, SFDC is here to stay. They’ve been an incredibly successful company. When you go to hire...

Many startups are thinking about conserving cash. Some are reducing their R&D spend by cutting headcount. That might be because those product and engineering folks were working on projects that were more aspirational, less proven out; because their companies are now focused more on top-down sales than product-led user growth; because the company’s new trajectory didn’t justify senior leadershi...

Data teams and the modern data stack have attracted large sums of investment over the past few years. Everyone has taken for granted that data teams are valuable, and that they deserve a multi-layered stack of best-of-breed software. I’ve been wondering: with the significant changes in the macro-environment this year, will data teams (and their software vendors) soon be required to justify their R...

Update from Allison: I’ll be taking a break from the newsletter for a couple of weeks, first for PTO and then to think more carefully about the next content series I want to publish. I’d be grateful for your feedback on what to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing. Reply to this email - I’d love to hear from you! Here’s a question I’ve often wondered about: When I publish a podcast like this on...

VCs have been sounding the alarms, and everyone is wondering how to conserve cash. What decisions should you make in your go-to-market? I explored these questions with Alexa Grabell , CEO & Founder of Pocus , who just announced her Series A from Coatue (and me!). We discussed topics such as: * What initiatives should you prioritize across your GTM? * How do you run a category creation / community...

One of my favorite topics is the future of operations, because it's on the rise, as a function and a concept. Founders are obsessed with scale, and the company-wide platform and glue that comes from a strong operations effort is pivotal to that scale. As a result, my hunch is that operations -- both in terms of roles with that title, as well as people more broadly who identify as systems thinkers...

Not everyone is a late-stage, overvalued company laying people off right now. There are many founders out there who are gearing up to announce their company — and they want to make a splash, hire people, and bring in customers! Ryan Narod is an expert on strategizing for your announcement. He leads marketing at Mutiny , which recently announced their Series B from Tiger and Insight (and me!). We d...

NFTs are known as a consumer trend. But with every new consumer need, there are businesses looking to offer a solution, and there are other businesses that want to help those businesses. Which means that there are now B2B companies enabling the NFT ecosystem. I discussed this topic in my latest podcast episode, with Lisha Li , CEO at Rosebud AI . We covered: * What opportunities has the NFT world...

Product releases can be painful for many reasons. Employees may not be fully aware of what’s included in the release. Customers may have been waiting with bated breath for a feature that may or may not become available. Moreover, the product release cadence may not align with your sales cadence (e.g. quarterly targets) or your customer cadence (e.g. monthly check-in’s), which means it’s another rh...

I have a hunch that many go-to-market folks in the SaaS world will transition into Web3 companies at some point in their careers. But what does “go-to-market” mean at a Web3 company? If you’re in marketing, sales, customer success, or business development, it’s likely that your skills will be relevant, but you’ll probably have to learn new ones, too. In this podcast episode, I sat down with Jenn K...

I’m now including lightly edited transcripts in these podcast newsletters. Scroll down if you’d rather read than listen! So you’re a COO or Head of Operations. What does it mean to perform well in the role? In this fireside chat for On Deck’s Strategy and Operations program, with program director Fadi Hindi as my interviewer, I spoke about: * What makes a strong COO? * What should be your self-onb...

I’m now including transcripts in these podcast newsletters. Scroll down if you’d rather read than listen! The delineation between Web2 and Web3 isn’t always clear. Some Web2 companies are serving Web3 use cases. And there are other situations where a Web2 company might incorporate the core Web3 tenet of decentralization into how they build their product or business. In this podcast episode, I expl...

The “modern data stack” has been a gigantic leap forward. It feels cutting-edge. But might there be an even newer frontier? In this podcast episode, I take another trip down the Web3 rabbit hole with Danny Zuckerman , Co-Founder at 3Box Labs . We discussed: * What does the Web3 version of the "modern data stack" look like? * What is the value of decentralized data? * To whom is it valuable? This c...

Finally, podcasts transcripts are here! The one below is lightly edited for readability. I’m working on finding a more efficient way to condense transcripts into key points, in line with past written fireside chats that I’ve published, but I think this will still help folks who prefer to read vs. listen. Enjoy! If you're trying to drive Talent Efficiency at your company, you're probably wondering,...

Alignment can be challenging at a tech company for many reasons, including: * Everyone is moving extremely fast, and arguably faster than ever before because our software is continuously improving. * Instilling a feeling of ownership by assigning metrics may have the unintended side effect of people acting more territorial. * Founders are sometimes managing people for the first time and haven't ye...

If you read my post about my fireside chat with Colin Evran at Protocol Labs , you know that I went down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017. At that time, most innovations were occurring in the infrastructure layer. But over the last year or so, we've seen a burgeoning of the Web3 application layer, primarily for consumer use cases like NFTs. More recently, and more interestingly from my standpoint, w...

Much has changed in the world of customer success in the last two years. I covered some of the most significant changes in my keynote at Invest Ottawa’s annual conference, including: * Is the rise of the CRO, particularly in contrast with the CCO role, a good or bad thing for Customer Success? * What does Customer Success mean in a PLG (product-led growth) company? * What are the latest industry v...

The modern data stack has received a great deal of attention over the past couple of years. We saw Snowflake go public at a massive valuation and saw other data warehousing solutions take off. And the resulting new source of truth of data spawned an abundance of products that made data teams far more productive in uncovering insights about their products and businesses. But the benefits to go-to-m...

Last year I posted the following to LinkedIn: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could easily record customer testimonials on a Zoom call…? I haven’t seen a product like this but it must exist…” There's a reason why I was so excited about this: there is enormous untapped potential in customer advocacy.  Every founder knows that in the early stages of building a company, your early customer champions a...

Good morning! Before we get into the podcast, I’ll share two announcements: (1) You may have noticed that I changed the name of the newsletter. I was tired of the “new normal” term for many reasons. Consider the name “Allison Pickens’ Newsletter” as all-encompassing of “things Allison is thinking about that may be worth sharing” and as perhaps a temporary placeholder for a new thematic title to co...

Have you ever heard of an employee NPS of 90? I hadn't, until I joined the board of dbt Labs , which just announced their Series D today. In this podcast, dbt Labs's founder and CEO Tristan Handy and I think out loud about his leadership style and his organization’s unique culture, which have contributed to extremely high engagement among team members. We talked about: * How modern CEOs differ fro...

In this podcast , hosted by conversational marketing company Drift, I discuss strategies for category creation: * Messaging your company as part of an ecosystem * Elevating early evangelists of a movement * Aligning your product with business metrics * Positioning yourself as the category leader I also discuss the growing importance of Operations functions, which is fueling the creation of many so...

One of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had recently was during the keynote that I gave at Operations Nation ’s conference, along with Hari Raghavan , founder & CEO of AbstractOps , whom I am lucky to support! We discuss: * My career path, and the value of COOs to founders * Why Operations is the core of the “ Composable Enterprise ” * Why “systems thinkers” will be our future leaders This...