What do product leaders need to consider when scaling enterprise tech businesses? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Sid Shaik, Globalization Partners SVP and Head of Product Gangadhar “GK” Konduri shares his extensive experience building and scaling products across various industries, including customer data platforms, digital customer experience, and HR tech. Listeners will gain valuable insights into establishing product-market fit, navigating compliance requirements for SaaS product, and the role of AI in product development.
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Show Notes
- GK’s journey into product management started when a mentor recognized his product management skills emerging during an engineering role at Oracle.
- GK’s favorite scaling journeys include building a customer data platform (CDP) from the ground up, creating a new business unit within a large company, and scaling a new category in HR tech and fintech.
- Customer obsession is a key tenet in scaling a product business.
- Establishing product-market fit for a new CDP product involved understanding unique enterprise requirements and making the product configurable.
- Compliance requirements, such as HIPAA and GDPR certifications, were crucial differentiators and enablers for the CDP product’s sales.
- Scaling from a single product to a portfolio required adapting sales playbooks and go-to-market strategies to different buyer personas.
- Blending digital customer experience into the product and go-to-market strategy played a significant role in scaling the business.
- Staying close to specialists on the sales side and enabling the entire sales team were key to scaling.
- Engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success are the top four functional partners for scaling a product business.
- Customers’ signals indicate when changes are needed in product development, marketing, or sales processes.
- Partnerships are crucial for enterprise software success, especially when solving larger problems.
- Scaling enterprise tech businesses requires staying close to customers and celebrating their success with the product.
- Globalization Partners aims to create a new category of global growth platforms to break down barriers to global business.
- AI is leveraged in various ways, including a global intelligence assistant.
- Patience, not confusing activity with progress, and remembering it’s a marathon, not a sprint, are key lessons for aspiring product leaders.
- Effective messaging and word choice are important when working with multiple stakeholders.
- Instrumentation and metrics are crucial for running a software business.
- Adapting sales processes for a portfolio vs. single product company is an important consideration.
- Bringing in partners can be a valuable strategy for scaling journeys.
- Sharing more stories on adapting sales processes for portfolio vs. single product companies would be valuable.
About the speaker
Gangadhar is a customer obsessed, results oriented leader with 24+ years of experience in product & engineering leadership roles across startups, mid-sized and large companies. Gangadhar is SVP and Head of Product at Globalization Partners, the pioneer in Global Growth SaaS Technology, and the leader and creator of the Employer of the Record category. He previously led the product portfolio at Medallia, the leader in Customer Experience where he grew mature product lines, grew new product lines, and acquired and integrated multiple companies, to $800M ARR. Prior to this he launched the Medallia Digital Suite, leading the integration of acquisitions - digital experience analytics and Journey orchestration - and grew it to be the fastest growing business at Medallia which grew by 140% in 5 quarters from a $50M ARR base. Gangadhar was previously SVP at Acquia, where he built and launched the Acquia Marketing Cloud, where he led the Engineering, Product, AI/ML and SaaS Ops teams. He grew the team by 50%, and integrated 3 MarTech acquisitions. Gangadhar was the Chief Product and Technology Officer of AgilOne, a Sequoia/Mayfield funded startup. He led the transformation of AgilOne to be the premier enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) through next gen replatforming and customer migration, leading to 10x increase of ARR per customer, and the successful acquisition by Acquia in Dec '19, and he helped create a new category of CDP. Gangadhar held product and engineering leadership roles at Oracle, including as Vice President for Oracle Cloud PaaS, Fusion Middleware, and Developer Tools. He drove Oracle Cloud PaaS for SaaS initiative, leading 1000+ contributors across Oracle Cloud, working with the President & head of product development of Oracle. Gangadhar has a Master's degree in EECS from M.I.T., and B.Tech degree in Computer Sciences and Engineering from I.I.T. Kharagpur, India where he graduated at the top of the class.
About the host
Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup-- Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles. As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.