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How to scale your business as a technology leader: Leveraging AI and People

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With constantly evolving technologies offering organisations new ways to improve efficiencies and scale, understanding what technology to adopt for your growth strategy can be confusing. Many leaders can be distracted by new technology and stray away from the problem they are trying to solve.

To understand how senior leaders can effectively scale their business and identify which technology can support their growth plan Luke Webber, Senior Director for BIE’s Technology Practice interviewed Roy Robinson, Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Mention Me, which is backed by Octopus Ventures and Eight Roads.

Roy developed a three-horizon product strategy (12, 36 and 60 months) to drive commercial success and establish Mention Me as a MarTech leader. The result was evolving from a refer-a-friend point solution to building the world’s first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform that leverages data and artificial intelligence (AI). He was directly responsible for all aspects of product vision, strategy and development from ideation to product launch and adoption.

Master product execution through strategy, process and people

  1. Strategising for success: The first 12 months

As a Series A organisation, focusing your first 12 months on what drives cash flow is critical. Organisations should put their energy into solving one problem exceptionally well to make the business essential to your target customer’s workflows.

The product strategy must go hand-in-hand with your growth strategy. It can be easy to get excited when more money is raised and want to start scaling through further product development, for example, a complimentary product, exploring a new market or building a new ideal customer profile (ICP). Though this may portray success, building new products diverts more brainpower than you can afford to lose at this stage. Often, the knock-on effect is that the business doesn’t hit its overarching metrics, and the Board and Investors start to question the business. The leadership team needs to understand that the growth strategy is underpinned by the sales and product strategy, taking on too many projects at once will only hurt the business in the long run.

  1. Process is the key to agility

A common mistake in series A organisations is the lack of formalities. Founders often feel that process kills agility, but this is a fallacy. The right amount of process actually helps speed time to market and increase agility, as it aligns the team on the correct processes to follow and allows you to trust the conclusions reached on the way. With a growing customer base, ensuring your team is aligned on processes is critical to maintaining customer satisfaction.

This is particularly important when it comes to receiving customer feedback. Typically, customers around Series A are very friendly, they’ll give you warm feedback and tell you how brilliant your product is. There can be a tendency to push out your product based on false sentiment and it’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking that’s all the validation you’ll need. You can balance this valuable, but often biased feedback, through qualitative and quantitative research methods. Introducing formal feedback collection processes can increase the amount of reliable feedback from your customers and actually allow the business to improve in the long run. The last thing you want is to be misled by unreliable or inaccurate feedback.  

  1. Leadership for early-stage success

With formal processes and clear strategies in place, ensuring you have the right leadership at an early stage who can complement the business is crucial. A close-knit team with a balance of personalities that challenge each other and offer diverse thinking should be central to your early-stage growth strategy. Not only will strong leadership lead to successful strategy development but will also contribute to building a motivated and excited wider team and culture further down the line.

Get your first product hire right

 The ideal candidate for your first product hire will be dependent on the skill set and personality of the Founder, but one consistent skill is the ability to be agile and to cope with continuous change. They almost need to be an entrepreneur in their own right. A critical quality of an excellent Product Manager is exceptional communication skills. They need to be able to communicate the organisation’s “why” and inspire confidence that the right product is being built. Everyone in the organisation needs to be aligned and understand why the problem needs solving to ensure business effectiveness.

A CEO or Founder, with engineering experience, for example must communicate the vision to all internal stakeholders and externally to prospects and customers. With the right product hire having the ability to communicate clearly and inspire teams this partnership will help create faster iterations and validate the product strategy early on. Non-technical founders will require a product hire with technical experience to complement their skill set.

Take a problem-first approach to AI

Companies that were successful 20 years ago had the same attitude as successful modern-day companies. Forget AI as an atomic solution, identify a problem that people will pay you to solve and that improves the world. Then you can solve that problem.

For example, there was a huge buzz around blockchain and its ability to change the world, but few applications have actually been identified.  That is the dangerous part of Gen AI, it’s very much about understanding the problem spaces and how to apply them. Software companies that take the problem-first approach are the ones who will be successful.

Whether you are a Series A or Series D organisation, it is time to experiment with AI to see if it is intelligent enough to solve the problems you have identified. Gen AI will have a huge effect on what software does and how it looks particularly when it is used in the execution phase more widely in coming years. Early-stage organisations should look to hire engineers or product managers with an understanding of AI and its applications. Whereas later-stage companies will start to look at how their existing products can be more user-friendly by applying Gen AI to remove manual processes and shorten the time to adoption

Though organisations should avoid being distracted by Gen AI, there should always be allocated time for experimentation to test the latest capabilities available and how they might help make your customers more successful.

Identify your AI inflection point

The type of software you are building will dictate when it is the right time to start building AI products. Data software should be built as soon as possible because going forward big organisations will be spending 100’s millions of dollars to build new Large Language Models (LLMs). These organisations could end up making their LLMs proprietary and releasing their own infrastructure.

If you have software where there are a lot of manual steps for users to take, map the user journey and introduce AI at the most painful steps. Do this gradually over time to improve the whole user journey. The demand from potential investors or acquirers for Software as a service (SaaS) businesses to leverage AI will increase as the market matures. However, investors will always need to see a clear problem that your organisation solves better than anyone else, with a clear go-to-market strategy.

In summary

Scaling a business hinges on balancing technology adoption, such as AI, with a strong team and clear processes. Senior leaders should prioritise solving core customer problems, establish a focused product strategy, and foster agile leadership. While AI offers significant growth potential businesses, a problem-first approach ensures its application adds real value. Staying focused on both innovation and execution is key to driving sustainable growth.

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