Generally speaking | Matt Bennett

[Matt] (0:00 - 0:23)

Biggest challenge I think is a lack of nomenclature and taxonomy around like what we can do between product and revenue orgs. There's very like well-defined roles in product that are pretty narrow and pretty competitive. And then there's very like revenue-driven roles.

And sometimes, especially in an early stage company, you have to wear all the hats, but a lot of times that's the quantity of tasks is a detriment to the quality of the delivery.

[Dillon] (0:32 - 0:43)

What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you the fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:44 - 0:44)

What's up?

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:49)

What's up? And we have Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:49 - 0:50)

What's up?

[Dillon] (0:51 - 0:54)

And we have Matt with us. Matt, can you say hi?

[Matt] (0:55 - 0:55)

What's up?

[Dillon] (0:56 - 1:05)

Two-timer, Matt Bennett. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Matt, thank you so much for being here again. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Matt] (1:05 - 2:04)

Thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is Matt Bennett. I'm based in San Diego, California.

I work at Ritten.io. We're a behavioral health EMR startup. We're now kind of like an early stage series A company. I started originally as a founding member of the CS customer success team, built out a small team there, decided I wanted to move into more of like a product-adjacent role as an individual contributor.

So we brought in a new director of CS last summer and I've been kind of working with her to do the transition, which has now kind of successfully happened. And she's now managing them as a revenue team. And I'm in this kind of unique hybrid role where I sit between product and CS and I do a lot of different things.

It's a mix of strategic projects to try to improve our ability to get customers on board. I can talk a bit about more about it, but it's a unique role. And that's one of the things I wanted to talk about today is different career paths for CS and what kind of things we can do in CS-adjacent roles.

So that'll be an interesting thing to dig into, I think. I love it.

[Dillon] (2:04 - 2:31)

I love it. I love it. I've been thinking a lot about this myself.

So Matt, you know what we do here. We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind, usually about CS, but I want to blow this out. Let's do it.

Tell me about this particular topic and these different career paths out of CS, next to CS. We're just working at a SaaS company, early stage generalist stuff. I want to hear all about it.

So keep going.

[Matt] (2:31 - 5:13)

Yeah. I don't know if you guys can see, but I've got range on my bookshelf, which is a great read that I would recommend to generalists who are looking to build some confidence around not being a specialist. I had a lot of imposter syndrome issues early in my career.

I was a self-trained software engineer coming out of a consulting job. So I just was like, oh, you know, software's cool. I can make money being a software engineer.

Didn't have an engineering background. So it was a pretty uphill challenge that I went through to do that. And I felt a lot of imposter syndrome, which I'm sure a lot of CSMs and other non-technical folks are trying to cut their teeth in software feel.

And I think finding some confidence in the generalist skillset is really important. And so as I've matured as a professional, I've noticed that. And so I've tried to take that into what I'm doing at Ritten.

And it's been challenging at times to carve out a role. The biggest challenge, I think, is a lack of nomenclature and taxonomy around what we can do between product and revenue orgs. There's very well-defined roles in product that are pretty narrow and pretty competitive.

And then there's very revenue-driven roles. And sometimes, especially in an early stage company, you have to wear all the hats, but a lot of times that's the quantity of tasks is a detriment to quality of the delivery. And so, at least in our case, and for me, what we're finding is that, and what I'm finding in working with our CEO is that it makes sense to have someone in between who can handle, who has some more technical experience, either just from tenure or education background to handle escalations and work on strategic projects that help with margins around bringing customers on board, especially with us, we have a very complicated product that requires a lot of onboarding. So, having technical expertise, I mean, you could liken this to a solution engineer or a solution architect.

We don't have that path at our company right now, but I think that's probably the best comparison. But it's not really that, because I'm not building integrations or anything. I'm just extremely knowledgeable on the domain information, also on the architecture of our system, so I can handle those issues, but it's kind of an interesting mix.

But it's stuff that I don't think you need necessarily to have a specialized background to be able to do. So, to a CSM who's like, oh man, I want to find my place, and I'm not necessarily the kind of smooth talking salesperson that some of my colleagues are. I like working on the product.

I like building things. I think it's important to acknowledge that you can carve a path to yourself, whether it's through the support organization or the product organization. But I mean, I would love to see more naming of roles, like product operation type roles, support ops, whether it's solution engineer or whatever, but I think we lack that, or at least I lack the knowledge of what that is.

So, I'm kind of living in this no man's land right now. Yeah.

[Dillon] (5:13 - 6:05)

Matt, you built me up just to break me down. I felt like I was understanding it, and then you paused and you were like, but that's not really what I do. So, I feel like I'm lost.

And then at the end, you were like product ops, support ops, and that makes more sense to me in my head. My question before I unleash the guys here is, you made this transition, and granted, you guys are pretty small. And so, it's probably easy to say like, hey, I see a gap.

I'm going to fill it. What was the conversation like with your founders, your CEO, whoever your direct supervisor was when you wanted to make this transition? What did you say?

Or how did that conversation go? I think that'll illuminate, and you're laughing, so I feel like you're going to build me up just to break me down again. But I feel like that will illuminate a little bit of this scenario for folks who might be experiencing or want to experience the same thing.

[Matt] (6:05 - 8:09)

Yeah. Rob is smiling because I think we've talked about it. It was a little dicey for a while, to be honest with you.

I had to prove that I wasn't going to get fired. And so, there's an element of grit required to carve your own path outside of the relatively narrow options that are available to you, especially in an early-stage company. So, there was a period where I was being backfilled, and if I didn't prove that I was valuable, there was no reason why they wouldn't just let me go.

And that's still a sword over my head to a degree, but I think that's mostly conceived within my own mind. I think I've proven that there's value. And so, a big part of it is you got to just be good at your job or good at solving problems that people have at the company.

And so, I think this isn't a path for everybody. It's something that you have to be motivated to go find for yourself. But I do think that CS is a great starting off point for someone who's like, I want to get into a startup and I don't really have any skills.

CS is a great place to get in and then find problems to solve. And I think that's really the narrative of the story here. So, to be a little more specific about dealing with your question, I build custom reports.

I use AI heavily to leverage different types of data visualizations to solve issues for specific high-value customers. I handle escalations with product-specific stuff. I help with different product feedback loop stuff.

I'm working on a project to build out an LMS for our company right now. I built out a deployment system with our infrastructure team, single-handedly just working with them. So, product managing operational tools.

So, it is really a smattering of things, but it's like, hey, this is a strategic problem. It's affecting our margins because ABC, we can't be synchronously trained. We can't deliver, set up systems, tenants in our multi-tenant model efficiently.

So, finding those key levers and then making a business case to work on that stuff has been my saving grace. And fortunately, it's gone well. A lot of that I owe to awesome engineers who helped me out.

And another thing we're doing right now is working with a tool called OneSchema to build out data migration tools. That's a really interesting project that I'm working on. Yeah.

I have a question.

[Dillon] (8:09 - 8:41)

I'd like for it to be yes or no. I think you're going to say that it can't be. But in a larger organization, I know that you do a lot of the tactical work today, but it sounds like it's a lot of strategic, many-to-one impact sort of projects.

In a larger organization, are you a chief of staff? I don't regard myself in that high of stature, to be honest. But I mean...

It sounded like it. So, if anything, you've got one vote of confidence here.

[Matt] (8:41 - 9:39)

Thank you. No, I would say no. I think it's more of a...

So, I talked to our new Director of Customer Success about this. And she said she used to work at Epic, which is a huge company. And she said it was more like strategic product projects type of role.

I've also heard Solution Architect, but it's more than... Solution Architect is generally customer-facing and driven by sales. So, this is more of like, hey, we're making an investment, and then we'll have a return that's not direct to an account or a contract.

Because I think there's a lot of expense in the delivery of service to customers that you need to do projects for. But generally, product managers are incentivized to invest in operational solutions on the product. That's been my experience.

And that's where I've found a niche, is working on operational technical tools and product managing that. But it's not... At our stage, we don't have a product manager role for that.

And then there's other things too, though, the escalations and so forth. You're doing a lot.

-: 10:10

You're a generalist with a focus on... Anyway, Rob, so it sounds as though, Matt, you showed up back on our doorstep because of a conversation with Rob. I know you guys are good friends.

Rob, I want to hear what this... So, you've heard about this before. Is everything Matt says...

Look, he's in the middle of the forest. You're outside the forest. Do you see any of his experience differently than the way he just described it?

Or was there anything unique about it that you want to make sure to call out as a part of this entire experience?

[Rob] (: 10:11

I see it much the same. And Matt, you had me at nomenclature and taxonomy.

[Dillon] (: 10:16

Oh, yeah.

[Rob] (: 10:17

Different roles. I was like, come on. Oh, yes.

[Dillon] (: 10:20

Come on.

[Rob] (: 10:22

But no, actually, I think the interesting thing that I consider is there was a time where... And arguably, there still is a time where this is also customer success. We're trying to just tie this loose...

We're drawing this loose line around this bundle of things that we kind of know cluster together. And I think that a similar phenomenon applies for your role, Matt, where it's like, I know just from the outside looking in, there are problems that show up. And it's just like, oh, that's a Matt problem.

We just know that it's a Matt problem because you have a certain blend of technical skills, product expertise, and industry history and context, and also like internal knowledge of the internal organization. And that's the type of thing I would have paid good money for back in the day, because I know there were massive gaps between me and product teams that I've worked with in the past. There were product teams I've worked with where I couldn't get a hold of them, no matter how hard I tried.

They don't want to be gotten a hold of. Yeah, exactly.

[Dillon] (: 11:22

Because they know what you're going to ask them.

[Rob] (: 11:24

They don't want to be a part of it. Some of them really, yeah, they really don't want, they're like, look, let's just skip the question and we'll just let you know that the timelines are delayed. Okay, thanks.

But Matt, you have this unique ability to bridge the gap in terms of knowledge, in terms of language between departments. And that shows up to customers too. So I'm sure customers are still coming to you because they know you're the guy for certain.

[Matt] (: 11:50

It's unfortunate because sometimes they're like, oh, we want Matt as our account rep. Yeah, well, yeah.

[Rob] (: 11:57

I want to be mindful of time here, of course, but I've been looking at a few different roles recently with one client we were talking about, should we hire a solutions engineer, a solutions architect, a industry expert, a subject matter expert? And we're kicking around all these different names and we're all talking about the same thing. We called it enablement at one point too.

And we can't figure out an exact label for this thing that we know is valuable, which I just want to give you credit Matt for. It shows a lot of humility, the fact that you would prove that growth is not linear, that growth is not this singular, like, oh, I have to move up the management chain in order to grow in my organization. But that it's actually quite circuitous at times and can end up in vague roles like this, where you might not have an exact title, exact benchmarks, exact whatever, but that doesn't mean you're not valuable, incredibly valuable to the organization.

[Dillon] (: 12:51

JP, we're out of time. But not actually, because I make the rules. So I want to give you an opportunity to ask a question or a statement.

This is such an amorphous conversation that we all end up in every single day of like, who owns what? Who does this? So nobody's dealing with this thing.

How do you think about it, JP? Do you wish you had this at your company? Do you have it at your company?

[JP] (: 13:15

Matt, I bought that book while we were on this call. Do you have any other book recommendations?

[Matt] (: 13:22

Oh, man. Do I have any other book recommendations? Well, the other, you're going to laugh at me, the other book on my shelf right now is, it's called Raja Yoga.

It's like a spiritual book. JP, you're going to laugh at that. Yeah, it's the Yoga Sutras.

So that's my book recommendation, the Yoga Sutras. It'll teach you how to stay calm when customers are yelling at you.

[Dillon] (: 13:42

San Diego boy, through and through. Had to get it out there. Well, Matt, this has been fantastic.

I love this. It's so hard to wrap your head around this. Like Rob was saying, there's no labeling necessarily, but there's such cool problems to solve for.

And if you can be given the latitude to do it and keep an eye always towards how that's bringing value to the company, it's such a fun place to be. I remember being the third employee at a company and you do stuff like this all day long. That's all there is to do.

It's so cool. Come back in another few months, please, and tell us what this journey has been like for you. And JP, I promise you can be the first person to speak on that episode.

[Matt] (: 14:26

See you guys. Yeah, thank you.

[VO] (: 14:32

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.