Gsd - Getting Services Done

Jeff is joined by John Kirkman, who has years of experience from stints at Deloitte, Nike and now Convoy. We covered ALOT of ground in this one, with the first topic being how to use your consulting chops to the enterprise when large companies are forced to change. John has a ton of experience in Large scale logistics and Executable Strategy in Supply Chain, so it was great to chat with someone who was in the trenches on complex problems Other topics are: Remote Teams and management New tools don't Fix old problems How to quickly navigate from ambiguity to clear details to solve complex problems Fast context switching when you have multiple clients

Jeff is joined by Pat Muirragui, Senior Director of Services at Mitek Systems. Jeff and Pat talk a ton of PS and Implementation shop, and go into the details on Org structures, tools, and best practices. Pat is passionate about making sure that the customers he oversees are set up correctly, and how he uses a diagnostic approach to understand current state and desired future state. Lots of TTV, Project Profitability talk as well as we try to cover a variety of topics, including Pat's COVID hobby. 

Michael Buccellato (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-buccellato-15419737/) is at LawGeex, where he runs manages the highest ARR clients.   Michael starts talking about how he transitioned from Business development roles into post-sales success. Discussion ranges from:  Customer lifecycle Onboarding to renewal, and the differences from large company to startups.  Wearing multiple hats and knowing when to specialize vs generalize.  Molding implementation for lawyers and non-typical users.  Getting involved earlier, in presales,  with customers to ensure successful implementations.  Identifying different user types and understanding their challenges Decreasing Time to value to set up success for renewals Radical Transparency in the sales process to make sure there are no surprises.  Initiatives Michael is working on to change internal behavior changes.  Lots more from someone deep in the trenches working with customers every day. 

Jeff is joined by Bradley Jones, who is the VP of Implementation at Indeavor. Brad is the first person that I have met with this title, and we had a lot of ground to cover.  A list  of the topics discussed are: - Applying the learnings of a Big 4 consulting background to startups -  Implementing a Minimum Viable Process vs the over-processization that happens with large consulting companies - Becoming a vital asset of the B2B and B2B2C presales process and helping to close enterprise deals - Balancing flexibility and standard processes with large customer and customer demands - Building Custom features in a SaaS world - Timing the Onboarding Phase to make sure proper transitions between a prospect’s previous vendor

Jeff is joined by Cait Porte, who is leading Product and Global Services for Zmags, including Product Management, User Experience, Customer Onboarding, and Customer Support. This is a unique blend of responsibilities, and the topics discussed are: - Building Product to enable Customer Success FAST in a SaaS world that is easy to do - Getting consensus and alignment in presales and scoping to make sure that prospects and customers can get fully onboarded in less than 30 days - Working with Customers to get consensus on success metrics during the onboarding phase - Balancing UX and Design with what are the most usable features for customers - Building Custom features in a SaaS world - Timeboxing the Onboarding Phase to make sure the customer's time to value is maximized - When to add Implementation fees, and why it works

Jeff and George have worked on projects for over 10 years. Recently George's company, Intevity, has been leading a discussion about Discovery and best practices. Jeff got a chance to sit down with George and go over all the best practices for not just a discovery session, but a discovery period. Topics covered include: - best length of time for. a discovery period - Trust, empathy and how not to "lead the witness" - Best tools to use - Building trust along the way instead of the BIG REVEAL in the end.  Music choice for the intro is George's- James Brown, Love, Power, Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971 . About Intevity  "Intevity is a digital consultancy specializing in Customer Experience, Digital Product Development, and Modernization solutions for both commercial and public sector clients. We believe that technology should serve not set the vision and strategy of an organization. We see technology’s impact on business to be ineffective without alignment, relevance, and velocity. We use our Di

This is a Getting "Software" Done podcast, but we made sure to touch onboarding as it relates to the creation of products and workflows.  Today Jeff is joined by Shmuel Bollen, a UX practitioner, and teacher. Shmuel has been creating interfaces for over 20 years- from his time at Bose to his current teaching at Bentley and creating enterprise UX for ACI Worldwide, a billion-dollar payment company. Shmuel discusses how he started creating documentation on the new Internet in the mid 90's, and his journey to where he is now. Shmuel and Jeff spend a bit of time talking about how creating a great product can reduce the need for complicated onboarding and large teams to support that. 

The GSD Podcast RETURNS after a few months off. Jeff is joined by Scott Roth, SVP Global Customer Success at Medallia to talk about building a great customer lifecycle. Topics covered are Hiring for great teams, Customers for life, presales, onboarding, and funneling feature requests back into the Product organization.  A quick note that the first 6 minutes are pretty free form and off-topic. This was left in, as it is nice to hear people talk a little in these times to hear the personalities involved. 

I am so excited to bring this podcast to you. Diane is one of the pioneers in Customer Success, and here we talk about early SaaS strategies, "services" DNA, who should own upsell and renewals, and lots of other great nuggets. 

Today Jeff was joined by Randy Syring. A deep dive into how to scope projects from a technical perspective ensued, but also how to map it back to the business needs. Topics covered: - Randy's transition from seminary to CEO - Agile v Waterfall.  - Randy's 100 hour guarantee.  - using Zenhub and "mockup driven development" - using MOSCOW to get priorities of deliverables - Fixed Fee vs. Team based projects

I met Anita recently and after a few minutes of talking, I knew that I had to record a podcast with her. Anita has taken her experience as a university qualitative researcher and is now obsessed with helping companies reducing their churn. HINT- the problem is not always what you think it is.    More about Anita -->  https://anitatoth.ca/

Jeff is joined by Vik Kudesia, a UX Designer that was a customer, co -worker, and now former coworker. Topics discussed were how to scope projects under pressure, pro services team vs product teams, remote working, and many obscure  Seinfeld references!

GSD is back from summer break with  Luiz Figueira of Gympass. Luiz talks about how he has taken some of the lessons learned while at Boston Consulting Group and have applied them to Gympass. Luiz and team have some very innovative ways of ensuring success and satisfaction on every project that we get into, which has helped them scale fast and help utilize partners. 

Dave Witting joins me on this podcast to discuss why he never calls me back, and also both of our conversions to being sales guys. We discuss networking, content generation, methods that we saw the big salespeople do, and much more. Dave and I have a lot of history, so there are lots of jokes before this goes off the rails. 

Jeff is joined by Andrew Fink. Andrew is an exceptional Professional Services leader that started his career at the premier consulting groups of the day - Andersen,  CTP and then grew his skills at Met Life before we met at Endeca. Andrew discusses the differences in roles and the difficult decisions that we all have to face when growing (and shrinking) companies. We then transitioned into discussing both of our recent career moves and the thought process behind those changes

Jeff is joined by one of his closest mentors, Mark Holland. Mark was Jeff's manager at Endeca and helped shape many formative ideas with his background at Accenture. Since then, Jeff and Mark worked together at Brightcove, and then Mark ran one of the largest communities in the world at Applause. Tons of best practices covered here!

We cover Project Management in depth - when to use what methodology, best metrics to track project health, Agile vs Waterfall, and lots more! https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-cox-ms-pmp-pmi-acp-csm/

Jeff chats with Adriana about scaling Acquia with  experience 100% growth year after year and the type of organization she needed to build to support that. Also covered: -  Discussing the concept of creating product/service packages  -  biggest lessons learnt from working  at Acquia  -  alignment between the sales team and the services team  -  how to hire an account manager that can deal with the complexities of working within a startup company  

Jeff chats with industry veteran Bill Whitebone of http://www.advancevelocity.com/, to discuss how he transitioned from Services to physical product, and now to pure consulting. Bill walks through how he effectively built partner teams and also the best way to use offshore resources.  http://www.advancevelocity.com/

Jeff is joined by Renee Bochman, VP of Customer Engagement at Salsify. Discussion on Customer Support, driving adoption, and her drive to create a better customer experience. We discussed onboarding, implementation, best models for SaaS customers to be successful from the time a customer signs. Success metrics, improving adoption, and testing and learning the best model for success while in hypergrowth mode. We also touched on Renee’s approach to management, and finished up with mentoring and meditation.  Renee- https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneebochman/