Operators Ep 24 Transcript
Delian:
Hi everyone. My name is Delian, and I'm a principal at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. This is Operators, where I interview non-VC, non-CEO, non-founder operators that make the startup world go around. Today, I'm interviewing Jen Ong Vaughan, head of sales and customer success at Assembled, where she joined as the first business hire in 2019, when the company was less than one year old. Prior to Assembled, Jen worked at Stripe for four years, in business operations and was a senior associate consultant at Bain & Co before that. I hope you enjoy the show.
Cool. Well, Jen, thanks so much for taking the time to hop on the podcast. Really excited to have you.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
Delian:
I'm excited to be working with some of my actually old friends from IT, one of my fraternity brothers, but before we dive into that, I always like starting off these conversations by just really starting off from everybody, ground zero of their career. And for you, you actually went to, I think, law school in Singapore, and ended up having a pretty cool scholarship while you were there. Would love to hear about how you ended up ending up there, why law? And what was it like jumping off your career, starting off in Singapore?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. So, the funny story there is I actually wanted to go to college in the US, but my parents were somewhat protective. I grew up in the Philippines, and the farthest that they wanted me to go to was Singapore. So, that was a compromise we got. With regards to the scholarship, it was really cool. I think the Singapore government does this thing where they sponsor students basically from Southeast Asia, and give them scholarships to attend university there, as a way of recruiting talent from the region. And then in terms of why I ended up in law school, the story there is I actually started off college in the business school, but then I was just bored with the program. I always thought business was one of those things that you learned on the job, as opposed to studying the concepts.
And at the time my boyfriend was actually in law school and I just thought whatever he was studying was far more interesting, and so I applied to join the law school. And what I really realized was I liked studying law because it was so much more rigorous, it was very intellectually stimulating. It helped that I was a debater in high school, so it played to some of my strengths there. I just wanted to surround myself with some really smart people, and be challenged, academically, and that was the environment that law school in Singapore gave me. I thought I would end up being a lawyer, but in the end I actually, in my junior year, ended up getting an internship at Bain. That was when I was deciding "Oh, do I actually go back down the business path, and be a management consultant or go back to following my peers and being a lawyer?" And decided to stick with consulting because I felt that it would just give me a lot more opportunities. I'm so glad looking back, that that was a move that I made.
Delian:
Yeah. I was going to say, I actually have always had this thesis that two to three years of consulting at the beginning of your career, especially if you don't know too much about where you want to go, can actually just be great because it's just such a broad exposure across a wide variety of companies, problems you have to end up solving. So, I guess it sounds like you joined Bain & Co, were there for about three and a half years, primarily focused on Southeast Asia. What were the sectors you focused on, but then maybe even more importantly, how did that end up affecting some of your later career decisions or what did you end up learning there that you took with you later on?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. So, I primarily focus in what we called our TMT practice. So, that's Teleco, Media, and Technology. I ended up in a lot of cases in the Teleco practice, and to be honest, why did I choose that? Some of it you don't really get to choose when you are at the bottom of the food chain there, but that was just the first case that I was assigned to, and ended up building a good relationship with my partner there and he ended up asking me to join his subsequent cases. I'd say it was there that I got more exposure into tech, and to be honest, actually, what fueled the desire to join a startup was when in my second year at Bain, they allow you to do this thing where you can do an externship where you can work six months at a different company, but still be employed by Bain.
The six months that you get outside counts as experience towards consulting. So, I chose to do it in Myanmar, or as people would know it, Burma, and it was there that I joined a Teleco operations that was starting up, which sounds hard to believe, but at that point in time in Myanmar, there was only one Teleco operator, they had just gotten licenses and they were starting their Teleco operations from scratch. It was there that I actually met some people in the startup scene. My boss there was very influential, and that was when I started learning more about startups, venture capital, and then I was reading a lot more about it and realized, "Oh, if this is the revolution that I want to be a part of, I want to be where it all started." That was when I decided I was ready to leave consulting, and I wanted to look for my way essentially, to go to the Bay area.
Delian:
Yeah. I'd love to understand what that process was like, going from Southeast Asia, Bain and Co, and working in Teleco, to making it to San Francisco, and then obviously working at a really awesome company, Stripe. Relatively, nowadays, it feels like 2015 was pretty early on in the life cycle of the company, maybe then it felt a little bit of a more scaled startup, but nowadays 2015, it feels it was the early years for Stripe. So, how did you get in touch, discover the role? What was the interview process like? How did some of those prior experiences, both with Bain, and at Telecos prepare you for that process?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah, I'd say definitely a lot of persistence, and just working really hard in your network to see who can find you a path towards that. I'd say how I got into Stripe, funny enough, the CEO and co-founder of Assembled, Brian Sze, he was the one who actually hired me to Stripe. So, at that point in time, Brian was actually the head of biz ops at Stripe, and he was hiring ex consultants into the biz ops team. So, a lot of the makeup of the early biz ops teams, were folks two to three years out of McKinsey, and Bain, and that was their entry point into the startup world. So I was lucky, I had a friend who knew Brian, and put me in touch with him and yeah, hit it off in the first call, was pretty transparent about, "Hey, I'm in Singapore, I would need a visa. Is that something that you all are okay with?"
And I guess at that point in time, Stripe was so much smaller, it was about a hundred people still at that time. I think they just cared about finding some of the best talent out there. I think, and I don't know if I can confirm all of this, but I suspect it was also Patrick and John were immigrants themselves, they weren't from the US. So, I think there was a lot more of an appetite, and willingness to do whatever it takes to get good talent in there. So, I'd say I was pretty lucky that they were open about it, that I had a friend who knew Brian, and that my profile matched what they were looking for. So, we went through the interviews, there was a series of interviews that we did remotely, and then they flew me to San Francisco to do my onsite, in person, in the pioneer office, in the mission.
Delian:
Nice, and yeah, I guess walk me through a little bit of just what was the first 90, 120 days at Stripe like? What were the initial things that you primarily focused on? What are the things that, again, you felt well set up for, with the prior experience, versus what were the areas that were maybe more struggles, but you managed to learn?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. I think the other fun fact here is I interviewed, I think, in February 2015, and Stripe was still around 150 at that point in time, but I could only legally start my job in October because of the visa process because I got the H1B, and the US system is weird that way. So by the time I joined, the company looked very different, at that point in time, it was about 300 people or so. When I interviewed, the biz ops team was doing a bit of everything. So they did sales, they did account management, they were working closely with the product, they were also handling projects. There wasn't a proper sales team or account management team back then, but when I joined in 2015, I'd say the role of biz ops evolved into a bit more like what you see in biz ops in other companies, where they're handling more of the strategic cross-functional projects.
So when I joined in 2015 in October, the first project that I was thrown into was helping to incubate sales ops. So, I was partnering very closely with the head of sales at that time, helping them just understand the metrics, how do we track that these were the things that AE's had sold? How do we tie it to processing volume? How do we set it up such that all of our data pipelines flowed well, that we could pull off all of these analytics into Redshift?
It was definitely very hard because coming from consulting, they teach you to do a lot of analytical skills, manage projects, but they don't teach you SQL. They also don't teach you how to work with engineers or with data scientists, nor do they teach you how to manage Salesforce. So, there was definitely a lot of things I had to learn and figure out myself, spending weekends just teaching myself SQL, building credibility, such that when I partnered with our data scientists that he could see I was putting in an effort as well. I'd say a lot of the skills I learned in consulting, like stakeholder management, project management, and just honesty persistence in trying to find an answer and come up with good solutions that would help the company scale, all came in handy.
Delian:
Makes total sense. And so it sounds like you did a pretty solid job with the first two years. You ended up being the lead on the operations platform at Stripe, I guess. Was it always an interest of yours to start to manage your broader team? Did you naturally grow to that role or was it a sudden jump? It also sounds there was some expansion of scope as well beyond just... It sounds like in the early days it was really around sales operation versus it sounds, the scope suddenly grew over time. How did that scope increase and what were the natural next things that got added in to the biz ops group?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. So I'd say the operations platform team, at the time that I moved over to lead that team, we were actually, I guess, in other companies known as support operations. That was the point in time when I wanted to find just something to gain expertise and specialize in. Funny enough, this is actually where I met the founders of Assembled. So at that point in time, Brian had left, had stopped running biz ops, and he had joined the support tools team, and Ryan was also there. The two of them just started solving some problems that the Stripe support team had, and were building tooling against it. I joined them in the latter half of that project, and helped and took it over and built a program around it. So, the team that I ended up managing started to look after tooling, training, knowledge, and handling strategic projects to really help in scaling out Stripe's support team.
Delian:
So, it was both supporting both the Stripe support team and the actual sales, and customer success and a multifunctional operations platform?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
So, operations platform here only handled support. So, operations was the broader name for the support org because they were handling other things as well, like trust and safety and all that stuff.
Delian:
Right, right, right. I mean, I'd love to, I guess, understand some of the major projects you worked on as a part of the operations platform, and how you prioritized them, but then also maybe some of the more tricky parts about launching them. You listed both the 24/7 phone and chat support thing, and then Lumos as well, would love to hear a bit about that. And I assume that leads into eventually the stuff that you're working on at Assembled.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. I'd say some of my favorite projects were definitely rolling out 24/7 phone and shop support, and also premium support. That was actually a year long project, and part of that was really helping and transforming Stripe support. I don't know if you remember, but back in the earlier days, Stripe only had email support. It was really crazy, and when you're thinking about a mission critical business where people are dealing with their livelihood and their payouts, it just wasn't right, wait 24 hours to get a good response. So, we were working really hard to back in, also how do we ensure that we're giving everyone fast, responsive, high quality support. That was when we started planning, how do we rolled out live channels? And so there was two parts there.
One is we wanted to make it accessible to everyone, and we wanted it to be available 24/7, which sounds like a table stakes, but I'd say it's actually very hard to execute on 24/7 phone and chat support because you need to basically think about staffing globally and always needing to make sure you have enough people there to answer each how the customer has or pick up a phone call to talk to them. And then the second phase of that project was rolling out premium support where we were experimenting with paid support packages, where for some other customers of Stripe, if they wanted to get even more support and dedicated support managers, working closely with them who were very intimate with their account, that they would have that option to do that.
Delian:
Yeah, I'd really like dive into that a little bit more, what was the process for establishing, I assume a more global support organization, at the time, did you guys already have international offices to be able to cover those 24/7 timezones? On the premium side, how did you guys actually think about initial pricing of it and then how that pricing evolved and the packages overtime time you would actually offer to the Stripe customer base?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah, I think in terms of the support operations, Stripe already had offices in different regions. So, we already had a team that was in Dublin handling EMIA hours. We later on spun up 18 in Singapore to handle APAC hours, and then obviously you had the team, in the US. So I'd say that gave you enough coverage, you could do a follow the sun model where every eight hours, there was someone who would come on. We also had a network of partners globally that we could tap into to also provide extra resourcing to help in scaling our support efforts.
Delian:
Is that what you use to basically flex up and flex down during more, I assume, similar to all of e-commerce or online that Q4 is probably a lot heavier than Q1 in terms of support tickets?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Exactly. Yeah, and then the second question that you had asked was regarding the pricing, right, for premium support? That again was trial and error and experimenting. That was where a close partnership with the sales team was really important where we had a partner from sales who was essentially testing it out, right. He's like, "Hey, we're going to get this new offering here. What do you think about it?" They would pressure test different price points. I think the rule of thumb I learned with pricing is, you got to wait until people are saying no. If people are saying, "Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable." Then you probably haven't figured out what the maximum is, and we also ran a survey to use and triangulate, and get extra data points to see what the right prices.
Delian:
I believe Stripe was the first time that you built out a larger org, I'm curious what were maybe some of the early pain points of shifting from being, "I see you're a consultant," to starting to manage your broader team, partners across the globe? What were some of the lessons learned and how did you think about expanding out that team based off of the products and projects that were under the new scope?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. I'd say the biggest learning was learning how to delegate. I'm sure every other manager you have on this call probably says that, but I think especially when you're used to being the one rolling up your sleeves, doing the work, you have a high bar for yourself, and you expect people to do it the way that you do. And when you see someone else doing it and not quite doing it the way that you want it to. So, as I need to tell myself, no, you just got to align on the outcomes, and the goals, and people will do whatever their own way is, but at the end of the day, what matters is the outcome. You don't want to be a micromanager. So I'd say that's the thing that I definitely had to learn to do, and to learn to let go.
The other thing is learning how to hire, and how to spot really good talent. I'd say early on in my journey, that was probably where I made the most mistakes, where I think sometimes when you are under resource, you really need a solution to something you might be quick to make a hire, but actually hiring is one of the most backdoor trapdoor positions that you could make, right. That's not something that you can just say, "Okay, oops wrong position. Let's pivot." So I'd say that is a learning I have taken away and try to hold a high bar and really be thoughtful about bringing in the right people for the roles that you're looking to fill.
Delian:
What do you think it was, it sounds you at least got to watch it or you didn't, you got to watch it over the course of six months from afar go from a 100 to 300, and then obviously since then Stripe has scaled up massively and I'm sure you got to over the course of the years that you're there got to watch a lot of that. What do you think made Stripes culture and execution startup so unique and special in such a sometimes let's say difficult and an industry that requires quite the grind to really compete and deliver for your customers, right. You're moving massive amounts of dollars, and your margin on that is relatively low, is requires just extreme execution to really stay ahead of competitors. I'd love to understand sort of what do you think made Stripe special and allowed to become the company today? Or how did that maybe impact you and how you make decisions and thinking about company formation and building?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
I mean, I think it would go back down to Patrick and John cause at the end of the day, Stripe is their baby and has their DNA. They're definitely some of the most incredible people I've ever worked with very smart, very visionary, but also just very kind and very humble. So, I think that's a pretty rare combination. And then I'd say how they are cascades down to the company in terms of the operating principles. So I'd say the one that comes to mind is we have one of our operating principles is Stripe is for optimists.
So, just really having that positive demeanor and really thinking big, and then there's another one that comes to mind is we haven't won yet. So, as much as we've accomplished XYZ, we never just sit back and rest on our laurels. We are only beginning the work, and I'd say it's the combination of those two things of whatever you've done is not quite there yet, and you can always do more and push harder, and having the optimistic view. I'd say that those two combined is very powerful and creating some of the magic, and obviously the people that you just hire in terms of... I'd say one thing that was really crazy back then is just how much we were able to do with so little.
Delian:
Yeah, no, you guys, it's been quite the impressive path with now obviously a lot of resources, but along the way, there weren't always necessarily a lot of resources. So yeah, I guess I'd love to understand. So you spent almost four years at Stripe and decided to leave to go take, it looks the same sets of problems that you were working on at Stripe, and turned that into a company of its own. I'd love to hear how that came together? What gave you the confidence to go out and strike it out on your own? Were you always planning on co-founding something one day and obviously the experience has tried to give you a set of problems you wanted to go after? Or was it more, oh, you just saw a gap in the market, and said, "I've got to do this." It wasn't necessarily in the plan all along to go and build something yourself one day.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. I was alluding to this earlier where I had worked with two of the co-founders of Assembled. So Brian and Ryan, that was a project called Lumos, where we were basically building internal tooling for Stripe support team. When they had left to start assembled, I was very excited that they were doing something to really improve the state of schooling in this space, because having worked in the support team, you basically, you see, there's tons of problems there, big challenges. Yet, this is a function that is heavily underappreciated, under resourced, and to me that just means that there's so much opportunities in terms of what you could be doing in transforming the space. So I'd say what drew me to leave Stripe for Assembled is one, just conviction in this space that there's a lot of opportunities there. Two is just the trust that I had in the founders. I think it's pretty rare and unique to have had an opportunity to work with someone and build that trust and credibility and to join them on another ride.
And then three, I'd say, I always just wanted to scratch the itch of being an early stage startup employee. I'd say by the time I joined Stripe, I mentioned, I interviewed and we were about 150. I joined and we were 300. I really felt I missed out on this window when the company doubled. And every time you meet some of the earlier employees, you hear about the stories and you're, "Oh, I wish I was a part of it." And so I just wanted to see it from the beginning and figure it... At the end of the day, what would they regret more? I think I would regret not having gotten this type of experience.
Delian:
Yeah, and to be curious here maybe this is an incorrect assessment, but it seems you should have, Assembled given that it builds tools for customer support teams and you're having customer success there. I assume you're the most avid user of the product since I imagine you guys use it in-house yourself. And so I'm curious, what is it being in that position where you're at a company where you are the primary potential customer for the product and how does that end up influencing how the company prioritizes what to work on? What's on the roadmap? Et cetera.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. I'd say one of the things that it has helped is when I joined Assembled, I was pretty much doing both the sales, and also the customer success. That's what my team is looking after right now. I'd say it helped, right? Because there's empathy with the buyer, because hey, I understand the challenges that you face in the support team. And I'd say a big part of the job is also some education about the space support operations. Here's the rigor that you would put into it to help you in really scaling your team. And then I think in terms of how we think about using this to prioritize what we build for our customers, I'd say that's another thing we took a lot from Stripe where Stripe's, one of our operating principles was being users first, I'd say at Assembled, definitely being customer obsessed. And one of our operating principles that we're leading on. I think the exact phrasing we haven't finalized, but it's think like a support agent, really be in the trenches, really have empathy there.
So I'd say for us, one of the things that we've done is the way we do support with our customers through shared Slack channels. This is something that was pretty incredible and helps us really feel we are an extension of our customer's teams. So we want to be there, not just as their vendor, we want to be the best partner they have. We want to be their go-to if they ever have any questions about growing or scaling their support team. So that's one of the things that we had done. I'd say the other thing as well is we are very proactive about asking for feedback as we're thinking about developing our product, especially since we're still in the early days. So I'd say that's something that we are very intentional about, and our customers often call that out. Even in sales conversations we're asking for feedback, even if it's something that we don't have yet, we want to dig into their use cases because at the end of the day, those are the customers that we want to build for. They should have a say in terms of how the roadmap comes out.
Delian:
I think one of the tricky moments for a lot of startups is when they bring in their first external to the founding team, head of sales or sales hire, since a lot of times that can be where a company dies, where the founder hasn't yet either brought the company to a level of product market fit where it really is ready for a sales person or just sometimes translating how the founder describes the value proposition now, because it's not a founder doesn't necessarily always translate well until that person isn't able to succeed. And so I'd be curious, where would you describe the level of product market fit with Assembled when you joined? And what gave you confidence that you would be able to sell it? But then also, how has that transition been from founder led sales to obviously now I imagine most of the founders, or most of the sales are not necessarily led by the founder? And in relation to Assembled it'd would be great to hear those answers, but then also I'd be curious how you recommend for others about when to think about when they're ready for someone like yourself to join.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah, I'd say when I first joined, we definitely were close to finding product markets. I read this book that talked about how there's this point where there's product market fit and finding go-to market fit and actually for a B2B SAS company to figure out those two pieces. So, I'd say at that point in time, we definitely had a handful of customers and I'd see the founders who do a really great job of bringing in [inaudible 00:25:17]. First few customers were all heavy hitting logos. So all very referenceable customers, and to me that gave me conviction, which is if these companies could have these problems and would have a lot of faith in Assembled and building a product there, I think there's a lot for the market. So I'd say a lot of my job in the earlier days was really helping figure out what their go-to market motions are. So, what are the things that we could be doing to drive more inbound? How do we experiment with different outbound efforts?
I'd say you can make that transition from founder led sales is to when... I see the profile you'd want to look for at that point in time, as someone who can help in connecting the dots. And that's why I'd say in the early days, I like how we structured our team. If I had to do it again, that's how I would do it, where all we have are people building the product or people talking to customers because the people talking to customers are the ones who can get insights in terms of here's the use cases, here's the problem statements, help in connecting the dots, which is here is exactly what our target customer profile is. Here's the sweet spot, here are different shades of it. And here's who we should be going after.
And I'd say that is the piece where at the early days when you're building the playbook, you want someone who can spot these trends and patterns, and actually use that to then influence what you build in the product and what the go-to-market motions are, and be able to adapt and change those things along the way when you learn something new.
Delian:
Classic tension that I'd love to hear your perspective on is the tension between sales and customer success. How do you determine how much of the team and company's resources you spend, and obviously you getting new logos on versus making sure that those logos succeed and the idea of we expand and as a part of it is also dependent on just how much room there is for expansion within those companies. I'd love to understand how you guys think about balancing that trade off and especially given that you're leading both of those efforts, how you personally think about that, that trade off and how to assess when to lean in on one side versus the other.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. No, that's a good question. To be honest, I don't think we've completely solved that. I think it's a very hard balancing act to juggle. I'd say at the earlier stages, one of the things that we had done back in the earlier days is be able to convince people to go with us, even though we don't have all of the bells and whistles, but we will build alongside with you. I think that's definitely helped us a lot in our journey. So in some ways we sold on sales to, "Hey, here's the vision and we'd love for you to be a part of it." And then when they're a customer, obviously there are things that we need to build in our roadmap to address those things.
I think at the end of the day, ideally, you shouldn't be forced to make that trade-off right, because if you've got your target customer profile, right, and your product roadmap is aligned there, then those two things should go hand in hand where your existing customers' needs are met. Those are the things that you're building is what will help you get new business because I'd say in the earlier stages, really nailing the ICP and figuring out the product that works best, I'd say is the most important to avoid distracting the engineering team from building other things one-off or custom for other folks. I remember someone telling me the highest ROI thing you could be doing at this stage is improving the software because then it could be used by so many more people. I guess my best answer is you shouldn't be forced to make that trade off between sales and customer success if you actually really understand your target profile and build your roadmap against it.
Delian:
I love that. I also understand it seems like at Assembled, this is probably easier given that it's a smaller scale, but I'm sure you faced this same trade off at Stripe. How do you make sure to properly translate and get the right amount of feedback from the customer support team to product engineering so that, that roadmap is aligned? I'd love to understand how you did that at Stripe, but then also how has that translated to Assembled or how are you thinking about maintaining that culture of translating the customer's needs and putting those at the forefront for the product engineering team so that they're prioritizing that over other potential obligations?
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. So I'll share a bit more about how we did it at Stripe, and then I'll share more how we do it at Assembled, because as you can imagine, different sizes of the company, different processes. So I'd say at Stripe, that was actually the product that we built, Lumos, but it was a tool that made it easy for agents or support reps to answer customer's questions. The way it worked is it would be a widget on the right-hand side of Zendesk. When a customer writes in, an agent would look for what we call a resolution path, where it would list out here are all the steps to answer this customer's questions, and when they would solve that ticket, that resolution paths would be added as a tag. So later on, because you're dealing with tens of thousands of cases each week, you could then quantify, and categorize like hey, here's the support volume that we had. And here's how many people were asking about XYZ types of questions.
So that was how we handled product feedback from the support perspective. Obviously, each team at Stripe did their own version of product feedback. So, the account management team would represent here's what the customers are asking for. The sales team had their own types of feedback, and there would be a round table between the product teams and the customer facing teams, because each of the teams would ask for slightly different things, right. And then they would give that input to product, and product would use that to decide what to build in their roadmap.
Now on the Assembled side of things, I'd say obviously ours is not going to be as structured as regimented, but what we have are a few different channels. So, we have a Slack channel called a feedback channel where every time we hear feedback from our customers, we'll put it in there. The idea is everyone in the team, both engineers and the business team members can see all those things. We also track that in [Canny 00:31:21], which we use to then zoom out a little bit more and see where the most common feature requests that people are asking.
And then every month we have this meeting called customer monthly where I walk through everyone, okay, here's how we did across marketing, sales, customer success, and we have a section around product feedback where we could actually share some of the themes that we're hearing to our product team. One of the things that we are going to be doing is we just signed with Chorus, which is a sales recording tool, and actually thinking about ways that we could be using that for product feedback as well. So setting up certain trackers, and actually being able to take snippets from it and put it into a playlist for product, because I think you can read the feedback, but I think it's very different when you hear it directly from customers, because you're not, you're reading my interpretation of what the customer said. So, I'd say that's another way that we were thinking about how we could really improve the product feedback in our side.
Delian:
And then I'd love to understand a little bit more in depth. Maybe if you can explain it a little bit of the, let's say value proposition for Assembled, but then also more interestingly let's say the onboarding process and how you take somebody from sale to actually being successful. Let's say, "self-serve" with the product and scaling up their team on it. I'd love to understand both of those.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah. So is it the what's the value Prop for Assembled? And then also what does the motion look like for Assembled after a customer says, "Okay, I want to get started with assembled?"
Delian:
Yeah. I'd love to hear how you describe that since obviously you get to see both sides of that coin. I'd be super, wish I could hear you talk through that.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
I'd say in terms of just the value proposition, we want to be the operating system for modern support teams. We want to be the glass panes through all of the different tools and platforms that they're using. Today the way that we address that right now is through solving workforce management, which helps them answer the question, how many people do we need? What is the best place and the right time for me to be putting my people against where my customers best need them? And the value there is really how do you help and managing your costs, right? I'd say for a support team, the people that you have are your biggest cost. And so how do you make sure that you're being efficient and keeping your customers happy while also not burning out your team and also ensuring that you are efficient with the staff that you currently have.
And then in terms of what our onboarding process looks like, so after the sale, once they signed the contract, we pass them, we introduce them to our customer success manager and the customer success manager would set up a series of calls where we walk them through how to set up the platform. So we make sure that we transfer the context from the sales person to the customer success manager, recapping, here's the goals that this customer has, here are things that are unique about them, here are the things that we should do to help them get to value. The success manager would then have a kickoff call, help them do the setup, make sure that they're advancing along the way and getting the product set up correctly. And then we would do a training session to the managers or to the other users of Assembled, and help them in rolling this out to their team.
I'd say at the moment, our product is primarily one where you do need to talk to someone from sales. There is no self-serve motion yet, and we invest a lot in making sure our customers are onboarded correctly, because if you are not set up correctly, it should just be to downstream problems down the road, and we want to get ahead of it. Again, this is related to the whole idea of, we want to be an extension of their team, and we really just want to make sure they have a smooth and the best personalized onboarding experience.
Delian:
Yeah. Great to hear you talk through it. It's always super interesting to see how it's sales motion and value proposition is different between companies. Well, yeah, Jen really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. It was a super fascinating conversation and appreciate you taking the time.
Jen Ong Vaughan:
Yeah, no, I'm glad to be here. It was really fun.
Delian:
Thanks for listening everyone. If you'd to support the podcast, please sign up for a paid Substack subscription, which we use to pay for transcripts mikes and other improvements. If you have any comments or feedback on what kinds of questions I should ask, who should come on the show or anything else, please do let me know, have a great rest of your day.