CXChronicles Podcast 179 with Tom Randle, CEO at Geckoboard

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #179  we welcomed Tom Randle, CEO at Geckoboard based in London, England.

Originally a UX and product guy, Tom spent the early years of his career building companies like Red Gate & Huddle in London. He leveraged those learnings and findings to become an intricate part of the Geckoboard team & eventually their CEO.

Geckoboard helps their customers access and understand their data. Their dashboard software integrates with over 80 data sources so your team can build real-time KPI dashboards that you can share with your team in minutes. 

In this episode, Tom and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #179 Highlight Reel:**

1. How UX and mechanical engineering launched Tom's customer focused journey
2. Why focusing on company culture led to the creation of incredible customer experiences
3. Leveraging dashboards and display reporting to drive performance & communication
4. Why emerging SaaS solutions are focused on managing & optimizing the customer journey
5. How informed customers & employees = industry leading businesses

Huge thanks to Tom for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the employee experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Tom Randle

Click here to learn more about Geckoboard

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#179 -- Tom Randle, CEO @ GeckoBoard

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:00) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited for today's show guys. We have Tom Randel CEO of GeckoBoard joining us, Tom, why don't you say hello to the CX nation? My friend. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:00:22) - Hi guys. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:23) - So guys, Tom is, uh, is number one. He is part of a super cool business, super cool team. And, and, and he's here to share his story with us today. Um, Tom, why don't you take the first couple of minutes of today's show, man. Uh, like we do with all of these episodes, why don't you, uh, set the stage for our listeners? Give them a sense for how you got number one into the position that you're in today is the CEO of Geckoboard, but number two, give them a sense for some of the, the, the stepping stones that you took along your way and, and how you got into this entire, uh, this entire space that you're, that you're leading the charge at today. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:00:54) - Absolutely. Um, so first I'll give you a quick introduction of board. So we are, we are a dashboarding tool or product, and we make it really easy for, uh, leaders of B2B companies to create also leaders or companies. Uh, often SMBs to create dashboards are the most important metrics to help align the team, uh, spot problems early. And we integrate with all the kind of various tools and things, uh, like Salesforce, Zenda, skins, come out kind of thing to make it really easy to pull your data, pull those places, get them in front of your team, get alignment, spot things that are interesting, build that culture around data. Um, and so my background is quite unusual, I suppose. I, uh, CEO, uh, last year I've been at the company, uh, eight years and I started my career in UX. So I, uh, I did a degree in mechanical engineering actually. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:01:47) - Uh, I've always been into computers and bad words in it. Um, and kind of during that time, I began to hear a little bit about, um, uh, you know, it's always some engineers or engineers cause I liked math and, uh, tech from Isaac because I liked designing problems, uh, designing solutions to problems. And it was quite agnostic over how I applied that. And, um, you know, this was back in, I was graduating back in 2008 and, um, I think that then, you know, uh, web 2.0 was happening, uh, it was great insight companies were being formed and that seemed a bit glamorous then, uh, working in a, kind of a fairly old school engineering company, you know, a lot of my friends are going to work and, uh, petrochemicals or energy automotive, and that didn't really appeal to me. Um, and I just kind of stumbled into a job at a really brilliant company based in Cambridge called BrainGate. And I kind of land on my feet. I'd never heard of them before, but I saw the job role. Um, and it looked interesting and they were, they were quite forward thinking they didn't want someone who'd got a degree in, um, UX design or, uh, information architecture in my that. They were like, they're acknowledged that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:08) - Well, it was probably new at that time to write time. That was probably like a newer type. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:03:11) - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I guess it didn't really exist. And therefore thinking, um, um, you know, I just, I applied on a whim really and, uh, uh, it kind of wooed me in their interview experience and she was very creative. I took a design distance design exercises, um, asked all sorts of customers and I'd kind of just went with the flow in and got the role there. Um, I was so lucky because the CEO, um, Sucio is actually, we're very kind of, um, progressive and they're really looks to, you know, we're based in Cambridge, you know, a lot of quite stuffy businesses around at the time, but they really look to, you know, the best in class. They were looking to, uh, Silicon valley for inspiration. They were bringing their flying people out outreach really early on, and that really built an amazing culture. And also they tremendously valued, uh, user experience and customer experience very early on. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:04:07) - That was there. They would be building quite boring, um, snowboarding, uh, tools for DPA's and developers, um, but their slides and it was although their kind of a punchline was ingeniously, simple tools and they, um, you know, they put a tremendous value on UX. And, uh, so I benefited from that set of big UX team, uh, really forward thinking some on lots of conferences and it really instilled in me a great, um, kind of user centric, uh, mindset and, um, yeah, for me as well, I was quite lucky. I, I joined software well before waterfall, like this was, I was on agile from there off, um, all these great practices right there, beginning of it. And, um, I really loved it and I got given a lot of responsibility early on. I very quickly ended up working on a big project to design a.

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:05:05) - Monitoring tool. It's his first, my first foray into dashboards actually was building a dashboarding tool for, um, DBAs to monitor their, um, their SQL servers and, um, huge amounts splits there. I got really into the data side of things as well because having done a mechanical engineering degree, it's very, very numbers. I mean, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:05:30) - And adding the numbers and the UX part, man, that's probably, probably, wouldn't got you thinking about being able to take numbers and visualize numbers and do visualization, normal people need help seeing numbers in a different type of usable way. So that's probably what got you kind of got you started with that whole space. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:05:45) - Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think like I, I'm weird. I kind of, my interests are all over the place. I love design. I love, um, things with people, understand people have problems, um, numbers, I love a lot. I, I always had a broad set of interests. So I think that design is probably problem solving and design have been the thing that kind of underpin all of that. But every, every pro every job I've had since, and, uh, you know, all my interests really kind of fall under, I guess, creative problem solving. And I see even being a CEO today that, I mean, I guess perhaps creativity, maybe you have to stretch the bounds of what, I mean, it's all about problem solving and designing stations to, um, you know, whether those are organizational or, uh, teams, uh, to, to make progress. And so, yeah, in that role, I also ended up, um, so I, I really kind of started reading up on information, uh, uh, design also, um, data visualization and, um, kind of interesting things around like how you detect anomalies and that kind of thing. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:06:58) - It's also learned back to some stuff I've done in the manufacturing parts of a degree. Um, but also I ended up getting, we had a period where there wasn't a product manager on the, um, on the project. And I learned to kind of take on a little bit of the gap that left. And, um, I really enjoyed that. And I think gradually once that project moved on, I ended up having an opportunity to do more promotion. And I think at that point I began a couple of years until I could design a design career. I kind of realized actually product management. I really enjoy it because I think I saw that still as design came maybe, or not all the UI, but you're still very much trying to work out what is the solution to your customer's problems. And I really enjoyed that. And I think, you know, as a designer, it's very frustrating when you have a product manager, you don't see eye-to-eye with as well. I think it was quite nice to be able to not have that problem anymore. It's a great product managers, but also, you know, a couple of times. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:07:59) - And, um, so part of that was always an eye up to like seeing where I thought I could have instant list, uh, other phone calls. I came to the realization that, um, you know, I enjoyed the detail. I think I, I preferred the bigger picture stuff. Um, and the strategy could never, um, even start reading about that and hearing about it and seeing other people thinking about it. I wanted in, and I think that that's a theme, I guess, to see through my career, is that like, well, I always kind of tried to kind of, uh, peek into the bits that I thought were interesting and get involved and, you know, I've been lucky that I was given opportunity to do that. Um, so I guess fast forwarding, I kind of had a bit of a period where I was both a designer and a product manager it's quite hard role to fill. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:08:42) - So I shifted more and more towards product management. Um, and then, so that's how I joined checkerboard and I was the second product manager there and, uh, said problematic views, but Geckoboard, we're a growing company at the time. I think I was only about 15 people when I joined and there wasn't, there was a lot of building a company and, uh, I really got interested in the culture side of things and having had such a great culture, uh, or exposure to such great culture reggae. And then, you know, a couple of also seen that's good side to that kind of after as well. I thought, God, yeah, I, this is something I'm really interested in. I'm really keen on, um, you know, helping forge checkerboards culture. And that was also something other people weren't interested. So like a combination. So I got involved in that, so helping set up valleys and, uh, uh, you know, I took those, um, really helping reinforce the kind of whole Lee and agile side things. Um, and you know, it was great. Yeah. That was kind of naturally where the company was going. It was just helping to reinforce, reinforce it. Um, gradually, um, Paul, our CEO kind of at one point sat me down and kind of asked me where I wanted to go. And I think I originally, I, if you'd asked, I thought eventually I might.

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:10:03) - Double down on product and like being a VP of product be great. But, but actually I think I realized that no, it was more, more general, but I enjoyed. And like I was, um, you know, it started getting a little bit more involved in marketing, kind of helping them with various releases or, um, uh, like actually writing content for them. I, you know, I, I'm a bit of a Google sheets, nerd and compost and that kind of thing, or, you know, being a bit of a data nerd as well. I'd got a lot of ideas around kind of data, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:10:31) - Good skills. Those are good skills, time. Good skills to have man. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:10:35) - Yeah. I mean, everyone benefits from writing. I feel like I've maybe got worse. I've got some really great rights. We've got particularly great rights, but, um, yeah, I think writing is an incredibly important skill. Um, but yeah, in regards to got more exposed to marketing and then, uh, we did a big, um, when I'm back then our VP of marketing left and having, I transitioned to that point into like an operations role where I was working, not marketing, working a lot with, um, CS, uh, setting strategy, thinking about things like OKR, but, um, I kind of ended up stepping into marketing for awhile, uh, whilst we hired a replacement. And that was really interesting baptism of fire, which I enjoyed both at the same time, but I think, uh, yeah, it was, it was interesting, but, um, and then we went through a big rebrand. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:11:29) - I ended up helping out with that. Cause again, like skills wise had design, marketing, project management and help. Um, I knew the company inside out so ends up. Uh, I've been very involved in big, uh, rebrand. And then, uh, and then, um, our VP of marketing scopy has done track of your marketing, ended up going on maternity leave and saying, let's come back. And so I ended up kind of stepping in that again, once more to marketing and I'm still very much involved actually. And uh, the second round it's been a lot more engaged, more fruitful, I think. Um, I feel like I've learned more and, um, got a small but really good team there now. And, um, it's been really great to have some wins on inbound marketing and uh, slightly more effective paid. And we've got some grand plans now for brand awareness and demand generation, which I'm really excited about. Um, and then, yeah, last year, basically it was me and Paul had had over the years, a few conversations like w what if he ever wants to sit down, what would we do? Would I be interested? And I kind of said, well, maybe I'm not sure. I never thought, thank you very much. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:12:41) - It's a tough job, man. Being at the top. Right. It's, it's, it's everybody thinks it's, uh, it's like the, the dream stage, but you've got a lot on your plate, every single solitary day, right? Yeah. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:12:50) - I think I've throughout my life. I've always quite liked being, you want to sit down like the mind behind like the state. Um, and I think, yeah, but I, I could really, I felt like it was enough. I couldn't refuse. Um, I think, you know, very much like it wasn't something I ever planned or wanted that, um, you know, posed, I think that it's just like, again, like, I guess be responsible for it more and shaping a little bit more future. And, um, I think perhaps like is slightly different as well being the CEO comes in rather than the founder. Like you're, you've got a little bit more, it's a bit less, you know, it's really, yeah. It's all consuming, but it's not quite as emotionally kind of. So, um, so yeah, sorry. I agreed when, um, Pope Paul kind of pose this to me last summer and, um, we kind of managed it. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:13:46) - So we told Timmy it's quite early on. We, I gradually kind of took on and he was still there. He's still our chairman, so I'm still, I'm still ready to catch out with him and get his support straight. But, um, we kind of phased it. We told the team internally about a month in advance, but as soon as we told them, I was kind of calling the shots and I went, sorry, I think also luckily I was, you know, a continuity candidate rather than someone there to rip up the wheel and, um, and then start again and say, um, that, that made my life easier. Um, and yeah, it's been an interesting ride since really, I think, um, you know, I guess like my first, well there's, there's been also sorts. I think you definitely feel a little, maybe a little bit more alone in the role. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:14:31) - I think there are some things that ultimately you are now solely responsible for. Um, I think that money quite a lot more, um, which I don't particularly like, can we spend this go spend that or budgeting that, you know, like, um, you find yourself thinking about that a lot. Um, but yeah, overall I think I struggled with the public speaking side of things. I've never like sought to do much of that. And, um, it's not the thing I love most. Um, but in terms of, I think working with a team to develop strategy, working out, um, where the big opportunities are helping the team leads. I love that. And, um, that's been really enjoyable for me. Um, so, so far so good. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:15:20) - That's awesome, Tom. Well, number one, thank you so much for sharing kind of the setting, the stage of setting, um, sharing the story. Um, I'd love for you to jump into the first CX pillar team. Man, give us a sense for how the Geckoboard team was kind of built. And obviously you've been, you're a bit of an OGE, you've seen all of it in the, the abs the flows, and you've probably, you said, you know, when he started, there was 15 people. Um, so you've seen the growth and you've seen the changes over the years. What does the team look like at Geckoboard give us a sense for sort of how you have the different players laid out on the pitch today. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:15:50) - Yeah, I can. Christian. So we're about 35 people now. Uh, the biggest team is product and engineering or about 20 next biggest team is yes. Uh, and we have a, uh, very support. We're very support, um, sorry, um, you know, support rather than customer success. Um, and we, we don't have a sales team. We have a small marketing team of, uh, soon to be four people and we actually, that that's kind of it. Um, and, um, yeah, so we're quite unusual. We don't have a sales team, uh, which you might elaborate on a little bit. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:16:32) - You see, I've got, I gotta ask you, how do you guys get away with, um, with growing the business and finding new customers, getting new logos and getting, getting Geckoboard and all these different businesses without a sales team? How does that even work? 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:16:43) - Yeah, well, so we've, we've always invested in marketing and a lot of, uh, almost all of these for a long time. Now I've been inbound. So, uh, you know, organically searching for high intent keywords, or actually just recognize the name because we've been around a while, you know, the 10 year old stuff that we have got relatively good brand recognition amongst certain segments. So, um, so as a word of mouth element too, um, but it's really one of my biggest pieces. You, as a leader, you've got this, you want to see your metrics, you, you, you feel like your company would benefit from great stage presence, transparency, maybe like, um, maybe you so bad when that happens. What are your numbers? No one spotted it for awhile. And you're like, you don't want that to happen again. Or your, um, know maybe there's a lack of alignment over what your main objectives are and what your main KPIs. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:17:32) - And so you as a leader very much have this problem, but you don't want to derail your team by getting to go and pull this data from these different tools and do that. So you, you want to be able to make progress on that yourself. And so one of the key things about the product is that we enable you to make progress. So you, as a leader can very easily build a dashboard or your most important metrics in a couple of hours yourself. And so we didn't want to put any friction in the way that, and when we tried doing that, like it kind of ended up alienating. One of our USBs is that it should be really easy to do this yourself. You want to kind of not call your engineers to come and build this yourself. We'll have to spend thousands of pounds, um, using contractors dollar, sorry, uh, using contractors. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:18:15) - So, um, so, so, so like this we've always been built around a 14 day free trial, um, or well, as long as actually we shortened it for various reasons, but, um, I've always been built around a free trial and kind of not wanting to dive friction. And we were incredibly we're spiritually. We're very much a product company. Um, I've I found a poll very much pro person, uh, of product me, my background in product, very kind of spiritual product. And then it's the biggest team not having a sales team and we didn't have that kind of big pull in that kind of commercial direction. Um, so a lot of the things we've, um, we've done, I've always been very kind of product and then things, sorry, be that the other thing is our pricing points as well. So we don't, we've always, um, pitch yourselves more the, a SME market. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:19:10) - So that means that we're not charging tens of thousands of pounds a year, um, or dollars, sorry to use, to use Geckoboard where, um, we, we want to be something that you can kind of spell piece. We don't want to be, we want to be relevant to that, that SMB audience and say, um, that doesn't really lend itself to an enterprise sales thing where your sales team are incentivized by, um, high commissions. And so we've always taken a very, that, so price point, the fact that, um, you know, ease of getting up, uh, being able to get up and running yourself as a leader, and then also the products kind of angled to the company meant that we've always taken very light touch approach. And we're very, um, so our support team actually helped try it.

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:20:00) - And our answer pricing questions and things like that. We just don't have a sense that we dabbled, but it didn't really work because we tried to apply an inspire sales approach to, um, some just lends itself to that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:20:12) - Yeah, Tom, I don't, I don't, um, I guess I was telling Tom before, uh, when we were getting ready for the show, um, one of the, one of the companies that, that, that I helped to build in New York city time, each bloom, it was one of the country's fastest growing, um, floral subscription companies. And I always tell people, no, I never thought it was going to be a flower salesman, but long story short, we were using gecko board for a really cool reason. We were, we had one of the most beautiful floral studios in Manhattan. We were set up on west 28th street and the west side highway, and we had this big, beautiful, like an old factory type of building that we took over to take, take, take to build our flower studio. And we had our delivery vans coming in and out of there and picking up flowers and bringing them to hedge funds and retail space, all these gorgeous places in Manhattan. And we would literally have our gecko boards around the studio because it was one of the easiest ways 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:00) - You can kind of keep track of, um, deliveries that were going out, deliveries that were pending. We would keep, we would keep, um, uh, we would keep pace of our actual progress for the day, right? Because people don't think about it, but like when you start to do $25 million, a flower sales, that's a flower factory. Right? And so to be just even daily progress or weekly progress, or some of these orders that we would get with these huge national brands, you know, you'd have a thousand orchids that needed to be produced then. So we would use Geckoboard to be able to connect the studio with more of the startup-y part of our office, where we were thinking about sales and marketing and support and success. And it was the easiest way that we could kind of connect the dots and kind of have our, our production team and our sales team and our support team, seeing the same thing and kind of following the same pace for sort of what was happening. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:47) - So it makes a ton of sense that you guys have been able to hit, hit an excellent strides, sort of with the S and D side and helping people that need help with visualization. That's the other part, I'm glad, I'm glad you called out the part. Some of this stuff's hard, right? Unless you're, um, you already have a full blown team of analysts, or you've already got some, some senior individuals that have spent much of their career building and visualizing and storytelling with data, man, when you're starting a business, you're starting a company it's hard, it's hard to see the important things. It's hard to socialize. Those matters with your team or your customers, depending on sort of how you're, how you're positioning things. But, um, I love, I love that you guys have been able to really kind of hit that sweet spot. Go ahead. Go ahead. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:22:25) - So I think for me, I think it's very much, it's about feedback to that as well. So, for a team to know how I'm doing, to be motivated, you need to be able to see what impact you're having, and there's no better way of that than having like these metrics that you understand being back to you and as, you know, as close to real-time as possible, um, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:22:45) - Um, Tom had lifted, I'd love to jump into the second seat pillar tools, man, spend some, spend a couple minutes talking about some of the tools that you guys have used to build. Geckoboard I know number one, I know that you have integrations with a bunch of the world's leading tools, so I'm sure that's part of it, but what were some of the tools that you and the early team at Geckoboard had to kind of leverage and had to use to, to grow the business and to grow the customer portfolio and, and to be able to allow you guys to kind of keep the train on the tracks each and every day, 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:23:14) - Real, quite early adopters of Intercom. Um, and I think that that made life a lot easier in terms of, uh, actually originally we w we were the early days of that and we implemented it to help the product team get in touch with customers. So we see a huge, huge kind of part of the business is talking to customers. We try and talk to them as much as possible, and that's across the business, um, you know, from engineering to marketing CS, obviously. Um, and so it's come really helped us with that because we could trigger messages, both in-app, so can just have chats, but also use that, uh, far calls. Um, we don't actually have to this date, we don't have a more advanced, um, CRM. I am now beginning to wonder about that, because I think one of the things where we're looking into doing is implementing more of a customer success function and better nurturing our trialists because at the moment, um, yeah, we think there's an opportunity there. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:24:15) - Um, so that's kind of back radars, cause I think Intercom we're beginning to, I guess, hit limitations and what we're able to do that from what we want in terms of marketing or more, not sales, but sales slant to that other tools, Mixpanel has been great to us over the years. We've used that to really understand, uh, how people use our product again, and actually some events, their feedback into our Intercom triggers. Um, I would say those are really the, because obviously things like slack, we're going to be very early adopters of that. Um, for fraternal chat, we hardly use any email. Um, we are very early on we're early adopters zoom as well. Um, that's been really key. We have some internal tools, um, for, uh, helping us support our customers that we've built.

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:25:01) - Um, that enabled you to kind of diagnose issues with that. We're just, we use our engineering team use tools like honeycomb to, again, help track down problems with, um, you know, technical issues people might be having with our integrations, um, or just in the product. Um, yeah, and we hostings, and they do ask for years Google docs. Um, I guess we've always, we've always tried to lean towards using the best tools possible. Um, we, you know, integrating all the partners we do as well, we try and make sure that we're, even if we're not using an, a, um, production real sense internally, we'd have, try and make sure that we're up to speed with all the big players as well. Um, so for instance, something like Salesforce, we have a Salesforce integration should be important to us, but we don't quite have the sales team to justify Salesforce, please. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:25:57) - So, um, so we have that, but I think those are, I mean, I guess he's guided by tools. I think, um, I sometimes went to a little bit when I've been told we're using something. I think that rather than this, um, uh, I guess that's a big one. I really like is marrow. You know, it's a very simple product that infinite canvas, um, which is the quarter is so handy for all sorts of things, whether that's, uh, implicating us working remote as well, being able to kind of real-time pan between that while you're on a call and we use it for retros and, um, you know, even we used it for, uh, when we do brand work and we want to kind of pull together all the things we have, all the asks have right now and discuss those kind of even, uh, discuss design and stuff. It's really, for that we use Figma and the design team, uh, as well, the design team, it's hard to keep up. Uh, but I I'd say those are probably the big ones. Obviously we use things like get hub and, um, you know, all these obvious kind of everything's run on AWS, but yeah, those are the big, the big players. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:27:05) - That's awesome. And I thank you for sharing that time. I think one thing that you just mentioned though, that I want to, I want to hit on is, um, your comment about the CRM. I think it's funny, man, the more incredible customer focused business leaders like yourself that we get on the show. It's, it's interesting. You hear, um, that piece come up a lot, which is regardless of which CRM or customer relationship management tool, a given company is using. It's funny, especially when you start to have some of the CX and the CS crowd coming on the show, the traditional best in class, you know, um, industry leading CRMs, they didn't necessarily think about CX or CS when they originally came up with the idea yet it's an excellent way of keeping your names and your contacts and your contact information and maybe activities and, um, obviously documentation encapsulation, where you can put, put your documents in your contracts and said, well, what Tondra said right there, guys about like the CS part, this is why you're seeing some of these other, um, mega SAS companies like a churn zero or a Qualtrecs or some of these other, these other solutions that are client success. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:28:07) - Like they're actually being built to help companies and to help business leaders think about the customer success piece, meaning understanding the lifetime value, understanding what has or has not happened, uh, with a given account, understanding flags for points of contacts or flags for accounts, whether those flags are good or bad, right? Like a good, good flag might be indication or, or, or a signal that somebody is ripe or ready for upselling. And cross-selling bad flag might be something like customer just had a really bad, um, situation with your business might be a churn indication, right? It might be a possibility we would try to look at one of your market competitors, but it's funny, man. I think that it's interesting. I think that as we move forward into the future, you're going to see, I think you're going to see a shift that I'm not, I'm certainly not hating on Salesforce. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:28:49) - Salesforce sells $20 billion a year product, right? So they're obviously doing something exceptionally well, but it's going to be interesting because you're going to see, I think emerging technology and emerging software solutions that do really help people think about the journey, right? The customer journey. And they help people understand all of the different facets of the journey. But more importantly, if you're thinking about going back to Tom's original point here, guys, like when you're growing a business and you're scaling a business and you're not at a billion dollar mark yet, but rather you're trying to figure out how to put together the first 1 million or 5 million or $10 million of annual recurring revenue. You need to like, have almost like a maniacal sense of attention towards the different milestone moments that matter to the customer. Right. And when I say milestone moments, what are the things that are going to make them go talk about your brand or talk about your business, become a promoter, right? Like literally help to Thomas White and maybe you don't even need a sales team if you've got an army of promoters telling the whole market about why you're the best. Um, or again, thinking about some of the different graduate graduate Tory states, right? Like some of the different milestone moments where like, they're literally whether it's utilizing the tool or whether it's like pushing through to the hundredth seat or whether it's just expanding their usability.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:57) - That's just going to be huge guys. I think it's going to be really interesting to see sort of where that market goes down over, over, over the next five and 10 years. And I really do think that you're going to see more and more of these leading SAS solutions. Very much focused on CS, very much focused on customer experience, maybe even employee experience to where, where you've got some of the IEX part baked into it. But, um, this is huge time, huge, huge sharing that list. Um, I'd love to dive into the third six pillar process then. Um, so as you guys have been building Geckoboard and you just gave us a laundry list of the tools that you're using, how do you guys kind of manage and wrangle processes? You were scaling the business and growing the business. What were, was there some, some, some tricks or some best practices, or maybe even some, uh, some, some things that your team was doing to, to keep your playbooks and your process aligned as you were scaling? 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:30:43) - Um, we've always tried to be, I think it's a philosophy that underpins everything, which is we try and believe. So we try and put stuff out early, get feedback, not work on huge projects that you're waiting till the last minute to see whether it's going to be effective or not. So learning learning is a key kind of undermined a fundamental kind of philosophy behind everything we do. We, um, do call them work on strategy. So, um, there's a really great book called good strategy, bad strategy that kind of all red. And I think that trying to be really clear on what it is, what's the situation we're in. Uh, what's the, um, what's our, uh, slot on that, on how we're going to, um, overcome that. And, uh, we've always done a lot of work on that. We dabbled with OTRs, um, which I didn't work for us and I forgot a couple of years. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:31:32) - And I think that, you know, it's very easy to blame the framework as well. And, um, the, there are lots of valid, but I think what we struggled with with it was that it too tightly coupled, um, kind of the sense of success with, so for something to be successful, you both have to kind of execute on what you intended to do, but what you're intended to do also has to have been the right thing when, when we were an early stage company, like what you're intending to do, what you're trying to achieve, there's risk to that. And yeah, that, that, that set by your entire company strategy. And when you try it, like the whole spirit of my counselor is very much that, um, or at least in some readings of it is that the team warts wearing the full on outcome. And if that actual business outcome wasn't successful, then that team is just going so slowly. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:32:25) - And ultimately they end up feeling bad about that. Whereas actually like relative the matter is, is that, you know, like I am happy if a team, if the bet we we've kind of agreed as a company that we wanted to make, um, wasn't successful, but the team did a great job of putting it out there, learning. Then we found it hard to go that way with anyone else to be dejected because this maybe relatively risky approach, we take all of this approach that we would never, we would, it would take months to learn whether it was actually successful and where maybe we'd moved on. By that point, we just reached over the scoring. It was a bit of a distraction actually think it's more useful to decouple those two things. So the team pretty much involved in the strategy and the outcome, but you kind of need to be evaluating the outcome differently from your execution. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:33:12) - And so we've kind of abandoned. Uh, and also, you know, it's a company, it's a system that's designed for the likes of Google and a bit different to those companies, or there are big and you need something quite so complicated. Yeah. I've had some very heated debates with some people I regard as being very clever about my needs. I, uh, uh, uh, um, practice and approach. And I think, yeah, it's a distraction. I think, um, I'm a big fan of first principles. And so we've kind of, that's what we've done. We're kind of going back to first principles. We, uh, now use Coda to every team has a little write-up of what project they're working on, why without kind of trying to achieve. And then each week we update the status of it. And we, um, share that in slack. So you can see that, like this project, this is outcome, and this is what we're doing now. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:34:05) - And everyone follows confer that long. All these things need a little bit of shepherding and placing. I think the temptation can be like, oh, that person usually writes itself this week, or, oh, I forgot. And it needs a little bit of pushing along. And I think it's so easy to look like that, but it's really important. And I think this is the best we've got so far. I think we still need to work on making sure that all the meetings and followups, it's not you, don't kind of sometimes when a project maybe Peters out and you kind of decided that actually this is the right thing to do. You make sure that you still write it up and you learn from it. And you've got that Dosser evidence. And also when new people join, you kind of want to understand why the hell you did something and maybe a little bit sloppy there in the past. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:34:45) - And I, I'm lazy to go to documentation heavy. I think you can waste a lot of time on that, but I think we needed a little bit more, so that's what we're doing right now. Um, what else do we do? We, we, we do, we build software as very agile. We, um, have kind of weekly planning. We don't bother with reservations like that. So it's the time that we, uh, that's really core. We run retrospectives and we have daily stand ups, I think since we've become remote, um, or remote first, the standards of maybe kind of in something stretched out a little bit to be built on social, because that's kind of, there's a point where you actually get to have your small talk, you know, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:35:25) - She's your team time at a remote world. That's the time that you literally get to kind of chat with the team and, and brainstorm and come up with ideas. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:35:32) - Yeah, exactly. So, um, that's really important. We have an all hands, um, uh, once a month, uh, each team kind of presents what they're doing and why. Um, yeah, that's kind of the key pieces. I think things like NCS, we do other stuff as well. So we use class to evaluate support tickets, um, which I think has been really, really valuable. Um, and the other kind of Mike presses around, around the business when we have an outage, we have a post-mortem and that kind of thing. So there's lots of really good, um, techniques there. And we're very much, we have one of our core values as businesses to not be stuck in our ways and to always consider new ways of doing things and, um, improve that. And we're always doing that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:36:17) - I love it. So a couple of, couple of things, Tom, that I just, I think is super important for the listeners. Number one, I'm glad you called out like, okay, ours are developed by Google, right? So if you're, if you're a 35 person company or a 35,000 person company, the way that you need to think about objectives and key results and goals, and, um, progression towards goals is going to be different, right? When you're a 30 person team, there's, there's, there's all these different things you can be doing. But I think the important, the most important thing that Tom just highlighted for us guys is like doing something, right? Whether it's stand-ups, whether it's, um, your end of week, end of week reporting. I love the idea that you just said, Tom, where your team is, uh, minimally once a month, you have each team, each department, each department head making sure that you're getting up in front of an all hands and you're having those guys and gals share their story. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:02) - Talk about who the players are that are driving the progress. Talk about some of the fundamental pieces that you're hoping to accomplish from focusing on those things. But lastly, the last part that you just said, man, that I couldn't agree more with is like, when you have people joining your business, joining your team, maybe you have people moving different roles. It's very common for, for great, excellent employees that maybe they bounce around. Maybe they start in marketing, but then the move to sales, maybe they moved to success. But think about it. What Tom, just highlighted first guys, that's one of the easiest ways that you share that tribal knowledge. It's one of the easiest ways that you share the gains of all the different things that your teams in your departments are working on, but more important. I've always said it like this time, this is one of the easiest ways that you can help your team load their lips around all the incredible things that your business is doing. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:44) - And regardless of what your position, regardless of what your team role is, when you're talking with customers or you're working with customers or you're helping your customers through throughout these different things, then the, the, the, the, some of the best organizations they've got their, their employees lips loaded at all times, they know what's happening on the sales and the marketing efforts. They know what's happening on the product side. They have a sense for what's happening with support or success. And I just think it makes for such a better, um, brand experience, uh, both, both on a customer experience lens and an employee experience lens, right? Because employees like being in companies where they feel included, they feel, they feel like they feel like they're informed, right? Like that's, that's a fun place to be. Sometimes when you're working at a place where you're kind of always in the dark and there's only like two or three people doing all the talking, you kind of start to wonder what's going on. So I love it. I love it. You call that out. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:38:31) - It's really important to me that everyone in the company has a good sense of what's going on and why. I hate the notion that you're in your department and you don't care about what marketing are doing. That could mean hire people that are interested in that kind of thing. And I think it's really important to cultivate.  The other thing I do actually that I kind of introduced, um, was I write an update once a once a month as well. I go through all the financials. I explain that. I explain what the project is going on. I  talk about the strategy and  we were hyper transparent with all our financials in terms of, it's got a good sense of that, where the reassurance that builds. And I think it just helps explain where I'm coming from, team is coming from when we talk about different projects or timelines of things. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:39:14) - And, um, you know, I enjoy doing that. I kind of quite takes maybe a day them on find it right. And it also helps me, um, actually like I just my thoughts and like, yeah, for sure. Um, yeah, mean, I'm lucky that I think that made the size and the fact that I've, you know, I was in the engineering team, I was in the marketing team. I've worked really closely, says I've still got quite a good, it doesn't take much for someone to kind of say, paraphrase what they're doing for me to have a pretty good on stone as well. So I can also, when I spot that people don't understand stuff, um, I can kind of make sure they talk to each other or, um, or, you know, there's like a gap in terms of understanding over, uh, what one team's doing. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:39:52) - I love it. I love it. Tyler steady into the fourth and the final seeks pillar feedback, spend a minute or two talking about, um, you kind of hit on this earlier.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:40:00) - We talked about the process side, but how have you guys, how has the team at Geckoboard really kind of leveraged, um, some of the customer feedback that you've gotten over the years, and then I'd love to also know kind of how, how you guys have leveraged some of the employee feedback. And I imagine on the product side for you in the UX side for you early on, you guys probably had a ton of different ideas that you were seeing, feeling, hearing usability panel. So you're probably looking at literally the ways that people were clicking or scrolling or what the heatmaps looked like, but spending a minute as you, you're talking about feedback, how have you guys really kind of thought about feedback as you scale the business? 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:40:28) - So, so the most important type of feedback we do is customer calls. Um, we spend a lot of time towards, cause I would say that we probably on average a week, two across the company, maybe half a dozen customer calls. Um, and we have that continually going, we have automated condoms. So when certain customers reach certain stages in that lifestyle, maybe like a month after subscribing and we'll do that and then we'll do a stew batches as well. Um, and then we do different types of calls with those. Some of them will be, uh, we like jobs to be done at Geckoboard it's from the frameworks we use. Um, and there's a really good, um, style of interview that we run sometimes ultimately what the triggers and pools, the fundamental love that. Uh, but we also do kind of very, um, targeted usability kind of research as well. So if we, if we know that we want to make an improvement, so integration or if is a big problem with the product we'll, um, focusing on that. So we'll try and find people that are using that and lunch with them. Um, and so like, you know, it's great, like this uplifting effect, like I find even now, yay. They're like, if I go like a few weeks, I haven't done one of these calls, I feel like 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:41:44) - You're missing stuff. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:41:47) - So we do it and we try and, uh, um, you know, we times overwhelmed calls, but we'll always have at least two people on the call so that we can make the most of that and incentivize customers sometimes that was about some stuff at the time. Um, so that's really, that is fundamentally the most important. We obviously it'd be a data company we've we, um, we have a lot of data, the cats as well. Um, and that's really important from kind of prime analytics, looking at conversion funnels, that kind of thing, um, through to kind of more financial data as well, or we don't use heat maps. I don't like them. I've never found them really work. Um, and we try not to be too, um, kind of invasive with, with, with, with the tracking what you do. Okay. Um, so, um, yeah. And then what else do we do? 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:42:34) - We don't, we don't really do focus groups or anything like that either. Cause I think we find that this is much better to talk to people. One-on-one, there's definitely an art to it. I think that you can sometimes see that maybe we, you can over literally interpret what someone's saying rather than actually see what they want rather than what they're saying. I think that there's a bit of a skill there and maybe a couple of times have maybe gone a bit wrong there, but, um, I think that's something you get through experience. Um, what else do we do? We do the occasional customer survey, um, and they can be really useful for certain things. Uh, cause there are certain things that actually we Geckoboard, for instance, not the consumption is on TV dashboards, the office. And so you don't get data for how many people are looking at it and on the wall. 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:43:19) - Um, and so it can be useful to answering questions like that. Um, what else do we do? So in terminally, um, I just get the all one-to-one the whole company, try it every six months or so we do regular one-to-one retrospectives. Um, we always try and keep open doors suggestions, uh, in terms of, uh, you know, this meeting for outside. Well, I kind of thing, um, as a certain CSPs cost to, um, sort of evaluate kind of how we've done in support tickets, um, what else do we do those? I would say those are the core, the core things we do. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:43:55) - Those are fantastic. Um, Tom, look, this is, this is so many awesome ideas, so many different ways for our listeners to kind of take back to their own teams in their own businesses, around some of the things that you guys have done at Geckoboard number one, huge thank you for sharing the story and really kind of highlighting all the incredible things that Geico board's doing to tackle the four, six pillars today. Before we let you go, my friend, where can people find out more about Geckoboard and where can people get in touch with you or your team, if they're interested in learning more about how they can start using Geckoboard today? 

Tom, GeckoBoard (00:44:25) - Great. So geckoboard.com is where to go to find out more about products. I'd actually to sign for trial first, um, cause you can get up and running very quickly yourself. Um, but uh, I suppose kind of contact details are all on the website everywhere. And then if you want to, um, get in touch with me, I recommend, uh, hunting down on LinkedIn. I swear on my house where I'm hanging out these days. I think LinkedIn's rights. So yeah, very happy to if anyone's got any interest in talking about metrics, process running, uh, you know, a SAS business or anything like that, I'm all I'd love that racking. I mean, I'm trying to do more of, and I think in this kind of remote world, it's harder. So I would actually love to chat to anyone about anything like that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:45:08) - A hundred percent will Tom rando, CEO of Geckoboard. Thank you so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast. I'll be sure to tell him to put those, um, those links in the, in our show notes too, so that people can find you guys, but absolute pleasure. My friend, thank you so much for joining the show today.