LaunchPod - Maya Keekattil (audio only)
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[00:00:00] Maya, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much, Jeff. I am humbled, and it's a privilege to be here. I appreciate that. I feel like this is something everyone's gone through. You know, joining a new company, going through all the onboarding and new vertical and building a team and all those kinds of things.

But it's rare that we have someone in the midst of it right now. We're gonna be able to talk exactly about how you're looking at that. How do you build a team? How do you think about onboarding into a new vertical, a new company? But before we do that, do you mind just giving us the TLDR on the time of your career leading up to this role, and maybe where are you now?

Yeah. I have been in the software space for about 30 years now, and mostly of that was in SaaS. I am at Syn Seven as the chief product officer. I just joined, ending week three today and week four tomorrow, so just right in the midst of it. Prior to Syn Seven, I was [00:01:00] at a company called Smarsh for about four years and about seven months, almost five years there, and I was the VP of product management for the small to mid-market business.

I am a software engineer by background. I have worked through the software life cycle as a software engineer, as a DBA, as a project manager, and then moved into product back in, uh, 2008, 2009 era. So been in product for a long time, way before even product was really recognized as a field in the industry And that brings us up to now, like you said, Cin7.

There's been a decent executive change there, and you are now working with a executive that you had worked with previously at Smarsh, right? That is correct. We rarely get to talk to someone right in the midst of it. So first, congratulations on the new role. As you're onboarding, this is something I think we've seen a lot of turnover in products teams for a while now.

How have you thought about this as you kinda came in? It's a new vertical, new role. How do you kinda set yourself up for success in 30, 60, 90 days in and maybe even longer? Yeah, I think that's an [00:02:00] amazing question and not something that people talk about a lot, right? I mean, I think the... one of the important things is your first 30, 60, 90.

And especially if you are coming in as a leader in the PE world that I am in right now, right? Mm-hmm. The expectation is really, really high from both the board, your leadership, as well as from your teams as well. One of the good things, or I'm blessed, is coming with a team that I know of. There is a leadership that I really am familiar with, I have worked with, and so there is a familiarity there.

But don't mistake that for agreement. It is familiarity and not agreement. Mm-hmm. So we have some great strong leaders who are good in their own spaces, and we are going to continue challenging each other through this 30, 60, 90. The way I think about my 30, 60, 90 is 30 days is just listen and learn. For me, it is a new vertical, but product is agnostic, which is what I like about product.

Product is agnostic in terms of the experiences that you have [00:03:00] carried, both from an operational execution in my early career to being a strategist and a transformational leader in my recent career. I can bring it all. And even though the vertical is different, the problems kind of stay the same. The opportunity is still kind of stay the same.

So my 30 is going to be purely just listen and learn. One of the things that leaders come in with is they need to bring change fast. Mm-hmm. Of course, that is a reality, but you just need to take that 30 days to listen to people and go across the organization, not just the team who is reporting to you, but across the peers.

I have already done about 51 one-on-ones in three weeks. Mm-hmm. My goal is to get to 75, which means that I'm going to meet 75 people in the org. And I even started my work at Cin7 a few weeks prior to joining because one thing I lined up was people who could talk to me and who wanted to talk to me. I told my team [00:04:00] last week, "If there was an office," we are remote, "if there was an office, mine is an open door policy," which means that anybody can find time on my calendar and set it up.

The good thing is I have cross-functional leaders who have given their people the opportunity to come and meet. I have met sales, I have met marketing, I have met finance, I have met with the engineering leadership, I have met product, I have met operations, I have met enablement. I've literally met every piece of the organization, and I'm still going through a few more.

Mm-hmm. You know, that's my first 30 here. What are you hoping to learn as you talk to these people? A few things. Product in every organization is different. The expectations from product is different. Product is the one organization across, you know, different organizations that has a little bit of a nuance on how product works, and the expectations from.

So couple of things that was important for me is understanding from these folks on what's working and what's not working. And the third question is always what do you expect product to do for you as your organization? Mm-hmm. [00:05:00] And that's why that cross-functional collaboration is so important to understand what are they expecting today of the product?

What are they doing today that is good? Because of course the company has been here, it has been here for a decade and more, so there has been stuff that is successful. So you coming in and thinking that I'm going to change it all is probably a big mistake a lot of leaders do, and I've seen them do that.

Can I come in with an open book, an open mindset, come in and learn and talk to cross-functional organizations to learn what is expected of me as a new product leader? That's what will set me up for success, is how can I deliver to the expectations. I have heard, you know, Notion CPO saying, "Reality minus expectations is their happiness lies," right?

So- I like that ... so true, right? There's a reality in people's mind on what's, you know, a person, an organization, what the outcome should look like, the expectation of the folks on what they should be delivering. And so if the reality and expectation, expectation is higher than reality, it is negative [00:06:00] of happiness.

And if you can deliver, the reality was lower, but you deliver higher, that's your true happiness. Mm-hmm. I thought that was beautifully put by, I think Notion CPO is Madhu. It's a much nicer way of putting it than, um, underpromise and overdeliver, I feel like. Correct. Correct. How do you kinda come in where, like you said, there is a team already, there is people.

It is a company that was fundamentally at some level working. How do you come in and very quickly show results, but at the same time, how do you tell the difference between what is maybe broken and what's load-bearing, and you can quickly switch out? You know, it's very easy to look at things and think, "Oh, we'll swap that.

We'll do something different here. I'm gonna make a quick win." In reality, you're pulling load-bearing beam out of the building or something like that if you're not careful. I think that is a loaded question, and I, you know, I like that- ... because that is something, you know, as leaders, like you said, we are PE-based.

There is a true ask of the hour, right? You need to go fast. But I think as leaders, what I would come in and do is you need to separate [00:07:00] between, hey, the processes that takes long to turn around versus processes that actually can in a, in a shorter amount of time. I like the saying of saying, think it's an African saying or something like that, "If you want to go far, you need to take the team along with you.

If you want to go fast, you can go solo," right? Yeah. But this is not a game of going solo. I need the whole organization, not just my product team, to stand behind me. And so my approach to this is I look at a couple of things. I look at core basics of foundation of the organization, the team, the talent, how it is set up, where we are winning versus not.

But where is the 30, 60-day leverage that you can get is where are you able to scale today or not scale today? And I think there's the piece in my past experience is you come in and look at operational efficiency. Mm-hmm. And generally, you will find at least a few things in operational efficiency that you can go fast [00:08:00] on because it's not that they don't have the operational muscle to go, but it is just kind of identifying those little gaps in operational, and you can smoothen those process out, and then you start filling those.

So it's like you have a boat, you have tiny little holes, you start patching those holes, the water starts to retain a little bit more. The fast part is the scalable part, which you can actually do, and I'm sure a lot of organization appreciate that. In my past experiences and here, I'm already starting to suggest operational efficiency, and I already see people rallying behind me.

Mm-hmm. Because most of the time- Others would have observed it and they probably either lacked the expertise of operationally doing something about it or just were hesitant to do it, or their role did not allow them to do it. Where I stand today, my role allows that I have the authority to do it, and I come with this fresh perspective of, yes, if you do this.

And I think as I go back, my career of being operationally as an [00:09:00] engineer, have worked through project management and deep portfolio management enables me to put some of those together in a way that makes sense to people. I have a PMP certification back from 2005, and I still maintain it, and that kind of a project management mindset does help How do you look at it and know when it's time to flip from the operational thinking to more vision or leading in a different way?

Or is there at some point you have to start looking beyond just the operational gaps, and what does that look like, and how do you kind of discern when to make that switch? Yeah. Again, as human beings, I don't think we have a cutoff to certain things, like how we put it, uh, down on paper. Yeah. It's all fluid.

In my head, the way I operate, I'm always thinking about strategy in the back of my head. Mm-hmm. Even though I'm operating at a listen and learn in the first 30 days, I'm making notes of like, "Hey, here are other things that I could do from an innovation, from a strategy, from things like that," even if I'm going through 30/60, [00:10:00] right?

I don't think it's a switch. I think you start rolling on the innovation and strategy perspective even through the 30/60, but it is not apparent to the cross-functional teams. You start rolling on discussions. You start rolling in a few meetings in there so you can start talking to cross-functional alignment.

I'm already talking to my C-leaders and actually getting alignment on a lot of things on where I am thinking my after 60 would look like and putting that down on paper. And you have a cutoff. You start looking at it. The difference between operational and strategic is strategic takes a little more time for us to align, collaborate, figure out that you have support from the organization, both from your teams and your peers and the organization itself, from, you know, my CEO as well, because strategic probably sometimes needs investment, sometimes needs to move around things drastically.

So some of those things needs a lot more clarity, and sometimes the board is [00:11:00] involved as well because you're presenting a strategy, and it actually leads into your next year. Mm-hmm. Like right now, we are already in 2027 planning, and it leads into next year and how we look at P&Ls and budget and outputs and strategic outcomes.

So strategic takes a little longer to show results. Operational is a little easier to show results, but you start rolling at, you know, as you start getting your feet wet and you start understanding the gaps and things. So I'm already thinking about strategic. You know, one of the few things I like about product is, and I've pretty much done it over in every organization I've been, is, is reprice and repackage, and that is something that I love to do.

I'm a number person at heart, and I love to look at numbers, and I love to pull some of those levers because, you know, when you talk about product, people talk about product sense. People talk about product strategy, transformation, but not many folks talk about product pricing and packaging. Mm-hmm. And I think packaging and pricing, just like marketing, is a big lever to pull [00:12:00] for the success of a real product.

I want to just click back on the thing you raised. You start with operational stuff- Because you're gonna do a lot of that very quickly, and it's going to show results fast. But at the same time, the bigger things, the more kind of maybe vision or strategic, they're going to take longer. Yeah. So you can't kind of have this bifurcation of at 30 days or 45 days or anything like that.

You kind of switch because what you're going to run into is just this gap of delivering anything, where if you don't think about strategic until you're done with operational learning and all that, you have this just long time before any of that kicks in. So you really gotta be thinking strategic and, and what is the bigger picture stuff right away- Yeah

so that you can continue to deliver this. Am I putting what you said right? That's absolutely right because strategic has to be the foundation. One of the other things you come into an organization and you figure out, one of the big problems is, like, the clarity of, "Hey, where are we going?" Mm-hmm. Teams do require you to...

And that is one of the expectations when [00:13:00] you join is- What does success look like even? Exactly. What is the outcome that now we are going to change? Because they understand there is a change, they understand they brought in new set of leaders, they are all professionals, and we understand we were brought in for a different outcome than existed today.

So I think that's more common sense. Mm-hmm. And so your job is, day one, start the strategic. But it's not easy, so you start with your operational because you start rolling some of that work, and you start seeing the changes. And along with that, you start looking at strategic clarity and transformation and where you want to actually line up your transformation.

Yeah. Because we all have mandates, and we come in with a mandate, right? We know what our mandate looks like. And you start aligning what you are seeing in the organization, your operational day-to-day execution of it to the mandate that you are lining up for because we all come in with a mandate. Yeah.

Let me ask this because I think this is helpful in that this is a good way for almost anyone coming in at a senior level to think about it. You don't have to be [00:14:00] CPO. You can be coming in as a director across verticals, and this is still something you probably need to look at, albeit your aperture might be a little bit smaller.

But you still want to learn, you want to come on and onboard and understand the new vertical, talk to people, but you have to have that view of not just small operational nits and changes, but what does it mean for success in your maybe smaller slice. You don't have the purview of the entire product, except a piece of it.

But when you're coming on, oftentimes there is a bit of a gap where, right, maybe the board wants to grow faster. Correct. They don't feel like they were growing fast enough or whatever the situation may be. There is some gap, and they want to close that gap. Your job is not just to get them there, although it is, but part of doing that is understanding what's going to get you there.

And they might have some thought, they might have ideas. How do you come in and kind of look at and assess What does success need to mean? How do we actually define why we're going to go in this direction and maybe explain it up? And there might be some discussion about you said you wanted X, Y, Z, and in reality, [00:15:00] maybe we need to adjust one of these, or maybe you're dead on.

But what does that process look like? How have you kind of ascertained even what does winning look like? Yeah. I think that's an amazing question, and I'm glad you touched on this. You know, if you talk about product, a product manager is also called the CEO of their own product. So this applies to at any level that you come in, right?

Like you said, the aperture might be a little small, the domain might be a little different, but the process still applies. The ask between what the board asks you and what you are supposed to deliver, I think, how do you address that gap between what is being asked and what is there today? And that is how you look at it.

Mm-hmm. So what I do is I think it is more of a slicing and dicing, and sometimes you need to turn around and say, "Hey, I know here's your ask, but at the same time, what I want to go for might take us a little bit longer, but the path to where we will end up will be much different and even further than you are asking for."

Mm-hmm. And [00:16:00] here's why I say that. I start with the customer because every product solves a customer problem, and what you need to understand is, yes, we are solving for what the board is asking. Yes, we are solving for what the PE wants us to do. Yes, we are solving for the mandate. But I think that is a short vision than what say, what makes you successful and why does your customer like you?

So I would actually look at why does the customer like me today? And why does the customer not like me today? Mm-hmm. You always have churn as an issue, and you always have bookings as your growth lever. And so when you look at just those two numbers, but not just the numbers as just numbers, but the empathy, you know, the emotions behind it, that's what the product brings very different from other parts of the organization.

We are not looking at just numbers. We are looking at why is the customer buying us today- Mm-hmm ... and why is the customer leaving us today? At just those two things, if you look [00:17:00] at, you will actually get to the gist of where are you succeeding versus where you are not, and then you start laying out the path on, can I get another 10% success?

Can I get a 20% success? And you start laying that out. And you know, in my past experiences, when you look at the customer and the customer's viewpoint, you actually beat every mandate that's given to you. I cannot possibly disagree with that. There's no excuse to ever not go talk to customers and find out what's gonna make them happy, 'cause at, at the heart of it, and I think at times we lose this, we're actually not here to build software.

We're here to solve the problems first and foremost. If you can solve problems better than anyone else and it's a problem worth solving, you're going to hit all the mandates someone puts in front of you- Exactly ... because that's how you win. Yeah, because at the heart of it, you are not selling a product, you are selling a solution for a problem.

And if you remember that, and if you actually makes your customer the center of why you are doing what you're doing, and actually reminding everybody in the [00:18:00] organization of that deep customer obsession, I'm confident I've done it so many times, and I'm confident that if you do that, you don't even have to look at what you are supposed to deliver.

Right. I think you just bring that back to the center. It's like gravity. It's like the center, you know, of the universe. You come back to your customer, and you start talking to them, and you will find every answer on why- Certain areas are not working as they should be. Mm-hmm. And I think that is the key to all.

I-in my past, again, I think customers are happy to talk to you if you actually reach out to them. Even the customer who has left is very happy to talk to you, and they spend the time because they are invested. They have used your product. They have invested in it. They're happy to give you feedback. Yeah.

So you look at your time that the customer got on and the time that your customer got off, and I know Meta, Facebook, when it was, they saw that every user was coming in, and they're leaving at day five or something. So they introduced a program internally to say, "Keep your customer past the [00:19:00] seven-day mark."

And that is how they introduced the add friend suggestion because they figured out that if a person by, is by themselves, then that Facebook doesn't matter. Mm-hmm. Why does it matter is when they have friends there. So what they do is they would ask for your contacts, and they would have friend suggestion.

So they understood that by day seven, if at least three of their friends signed on or got added, that person would stay on past the thirty-day mark. Yeah. And if they've got them past the thirty-day mark, they could have a long-term customer right there. So just understanding the behavior of a customer is just so valuable.

So joined, you've been there, I think you said you're coming right up on the fourth week, pretty much. Yep. I think there's been giant discussion going on, not just in product teams, but across our entire world of tech, centered on two letters, right? And it's A and I. But specifically product, I hear a ton of people debating what is the future [00:20:00] of product?

What does this look like as AI gets faster? Do we need it? Do we not? I personally believe, from everything I've seen, you're gonna be in a very bad spot if you don't have a strong product function. Just 'cause you can go fast does not mean that you can move in the right... Velocity is a vector. You need speed and direction.

Maybe you can move quickly, but if you don't have the right direction, you can go really fast the wrong way. But as you're kind of building a product team and rethinking what a product team looks like coming into this new role, and I know you have a team already, and there's people there, but how are you looking at structuring this team and building and maybe making changes to set yourself up to succeed as you're coming in and kind of trying to reach that mandate set up by the board and everything else?

Yeah. Again, I'll date myself here. I've seen from the Y2K, you know, boom to the cloud. Yeah. And I think this is the fastest technology has moved. We have seen the world really literally, like, changing in the last one and a half, two years. From two years ago, I have remembered discussions in 2024 that AI adoption and people were [00:21:00] scared, hesitant, to now where literally everybody, including our kids in school, are using it.

And so, yes, I think the world has changed, and like you said, I totally believe that product has the most responsibility with this change. And definitely with every change, there is a little bit of restructuring, a little bit of a change on how we actually think. It's not literally about the roles itself, it's how actually we align to the change that we are seeing.

Mm. So the difference between past and now is earlier we used to go by, like, the organization would be by product. You know, we would say the organization would be led by, hey, we are a product function or product output, versus now it is more about outcomes. Mm-hmm. So what is the customer outcome that you're looking for?

And AI actually makes us think by outcomes. So even the pricing model, I come back to pricing, but even the pricing model, we used to go by users and seats and licenses. I see pricing changing to more outcome-based model, [00:22:00] right? Mm-hmm. And you will start seeing people are going to look for what is the outcome I want and is this going to give me the outcome?

So when I look at the product structure and I... as I came in, the way I look at it is analyzing your talent. Where are they good at and where are they not good at? And this is my favorite thing I tell my teams always is if you look at a skill of a monkey versus a skill of a fish, if you analyze the monkey to see how great they swim versus a fish on how great they climb trees, they both will fail, right?

And I think the most important part is to analyze their skills that they have and do they have the right attitude? Do they have the right mental model to learn, to grow, to evolve, and are they on board on the journey that you're going to take? Because this is a time of transformation, both at Cin7 and as a world in general.

And then the way I look at teams is organizing by outcomes. Like, hey, can we look at, can I deliver an AI feature? Like, we need to transform completely the way on, and the head over heels [00:23:00] basically, instead of like legacy platforms and the way things is looking at who can operationalize AI in the organization, who can build a platform for AI, who can actually drive growth from that AI perspective, who can create an AI strategy.

So you now start instead of saying product A versus product B versus product C, or like somebody doing integrations versus somebody managing customers, you are actually looking at the layers of building those products and how each of those role. Because somebody might be great at technical product management as we used to call it, or a business analyst in the past years, now it's technical product management.

Mm-hmm. The people who can actually build platforms, so that is your, you know, platform engineer. Then you have people who understand AI and operationally allow everybody and bring the team along from an operational perspective and get velocity to be better. So they could be your AI product manager. You look at a growth product manager and we'll say, be growth product managers has existed, but I think this now becomes even more with the, [00:24:00] you know, the model that we are going to change is the outcome based product managers.

Mm-hmm. You layer the product managers a little different. I think the mindset still kind of stays on the output. Like, "Hey, what am I trying to deliver that will take us multi-fold?" And I always talk about 10X. I say reach for the moon and you'll get to the stars. So basically you try really hard to 10X from where you are.

How much are you looking for your product team to actually build and be in there versus understanding the problem and what needs to be built? Does this shift how technically you look at people? Because I mean, you get one group here talking about product people need to be shipping and pushing to production and deploying and all this kind of stuff, Debar, how do you think about that more?

Yeah. Again, I am an engineer, so I have a bias for engineering and technology, but at the same time, I think compared to the recent hiring I have felt is we have been around in technology for Past 25 years where all the kids who were born in this generation who are now entering the [00:25:00] workforce, they're already heavy into technology.

So I don't think that gap of, you know, if you go out and hire today, you have the best technology kids that are out there, even though they could be in any field, they could be in sales, and they still know technology quite a bit, right? So I don't think there's a dearth of that. So you could actually layer those when you hire the Gen Z or in the last 10 years if you have been hiring, you know that they are leaning more towards technology, and then you have the people with the experience.

So if you can actually do it right where you layer the experience with that kind of generation, you actually can layer the experience with the technology really, really well. The way I look at is, is there a true gap in the organization from a talent perspective? Mm-hmm. If there's a true talent gap and you want to go fast, you do need to hire.

But if there is not a true talent gap, and we have people who, who want to learn and grow along with the technology, they do have domain expertise. Remember that. Because even if you hire for a [00:26:00] talent gap, you need to bring on someone up to speed on domain, so somebody has to learn it. Mm-hmm. And so I would rather trust the teams that you have on the domain expertise and build that up.

That actually builds your trust with them. You are actually influencing and not using, you know, your authority here, and that goes a long way. But of course, again, analyzing for true talent gaps. If there is true talent gaps, you know, you add to that gap in there because that'll help us move forward faster.

Speaking of onboarding and speeding up your first 30, 60, 90 and putting that team together, you're still in the middle of that, and I assume that since Seven probably wants you doing more of that and less of here with us, so I unfortunately do have to let you get back to that. It's been a pleasure, though.

Thank you so much for coming on, Mai. This has been really, really helpful to see both how you're onboarding into that role in a new vertical, how you're looking at building a team in this new kind of AI-enabled world. It's something a lot of people are going through, I don't think a lot of people talk about.

So thank you for kind of taking this specific moment in your career and in your [00:27:00] trajectory to talk to us about how you're looking at both of them. Yeah, and thank you so much. Again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I love giving back to the community, and like you, I could talk about product for days and days and days.

And so hoping we will have more of these, but again, I think the, we are at a juncture of change, and I am in the middle of actually wading through new waters. Mm-hmm. And this is a perfect time to have done this, because I'm already rethinking something I did about four and a half years ago. But right now, in the middle of it, as I go through it, a lot of things come back, a lot of things have changed since my last time doing this.

With AI and things, I mean, definitely it has got a lot easier in how I, you know, onboard and how I go through the 30, 60, 90. Again, product is close to heart and again, thank you for the opportunity. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's great to talk to you, and yeah, have a good rest of your day, and hope the onboarding continues to go exceedingly well.

Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate that. Take [00:28:00] care.