A Year in Transition

I call these last 12 months a year in transition for me because I have taken on a new job with an entirely vague job description at a new company in a new sector and dealing with an entirely new nature of business. Hence, it has been learning at breakneck pace for me as I strapped on for the ride. Here are a few snippets if I were to recap what the journey has been like:   

Breaks are great!

I spent 9 years at my previous employer (InMobi), a ride which many of you are pretty familiar with and likely got to know me through. I was having a lot of fun solving problems and learning new things , till I wasn’t. When an ex colleague recently asked me why I left my answer to them was that it felt like I could sleep walk through any conversation or meeting there (at least to me). My bosses may have also felt that soon and this was a sign that challenge was dying for me. Sure there were enough problems to solve , but I wasn’t driven enough to solve them any more.

When you run long races, fatigue tends to be very real. Fatigue could come in the form of familiarity with the problems, the space you are in, people or anything else that makes it tiring for you. As athletes who play sports, casual runners or workout regulars tend to tell you, if your body is telling you to take a rest, you should listen to it. The same applies to your mind and working too. So, if your mind/brain is giving you signals, taking a break maybe the best thing you do for yourself (and your employers, both current and future).

I took a break, did nothing life changing, did not discover that I have a new purpose or discovered my inner self, was just happy to not have calendars and emails on my mind and I have been a champion of career breaks since. I have been the person who many people have reached out to just seek validation that breaks aren’t a deathly blow to their careers :). I tend to do nothing except telling most folks, “Trust yourself”.  Of course, you know your life situation, constraints and timelines best, because the switch back to work from breaks may not be as easy as you think in a tough hiring environment. So please do take that bet on yourself, but spend enough time evaluating your network, having your deadlines and constraints laid out and importantly have the backing of the important people in your life. Last thing you want is added stress during a break that is meant to recharge you.

When I joined Amagi, I was waiting for a new challenge after many months of complete nothingness and I took up everything that came my way with a lot of enthusiasm. I thought it was only in my head, but I realised it wasn’t when almost all colleagues and friends I run into recently come back with  an observation that there seems to be a visible change in my energy. So, I guess that made my reasons to champion breaks even more!

Career transitions aren’t linear

This is the second time I am doing this , I first went from investment banking into startups almost 10 years ago. All I knew at that point about startups was that working with a hotshot CEO was a great opportunity and that I could leave my formal clothes behind before I jumped. This time around I was a tad bit better informed. I knew going in that I won’t get everything I am looking for in one go. I had a list of what tradeoffs I am willing to make to begin with and what I am hoping to build / gain over time as my career rests. These varied from title , team size , compensation , location, sector and anything else that is open for you. It is important to know your negotiables and constraints. It is better to be prepared than be going in blind into a conversation with a potential employer who is trying to make room for you in their organization  chart and structures.

I went from being a GM of a $100M + business unit to being an individual contributor. But I was happy about the fact that I got to move into a SaaS from an ad tech background and put myself in a role where I could learn everything about the Go To Market strategy and growth levers of a SaaS sales motion. I could have gotten stuck on many things, but as the popular adage goes, when you think you are getting a chance to sit on what you think is a rocket ship, you don’t fight over a seat, you just accept the one that is given and then hope that you get lucky on the seat and the rocket ship choice over time.

Don’t be in a hurry to deliver

I spent my first couple of months at Amagi telling myself that it was absolutely ok to be just be an observer and not throw my hand up to solve every problem around me. As eager as I was to deliver impact and show people what I  am made of, I was also giving myself the reminder that this is a new environment, I need to learn, adapt and react only if I knew any better than the people who had spent years attacking the same problems. I was completely comfortable  just throwing questions at anybody who was willing to talk, learn from them on what had been tried in the past and think of potential tweaks that could be made. This meant that I was spending time initially building relationships internally, learning by reading, observing and asking questions and not adding to the pressure of what was already a tough switch for me by questioning myself on what I was doing here and how that compared to my past stints. Over time, I got comfortable not just asking questions, but disagreeing when I felt like that the answers could be better and adding my own caveats to why we needed to think through these questions differently. I was thankful for a book recommendation from a friend, the first 90 days for sharing in frameworks some of the thoughts and fears I already had and giving me validation that it is ok to take my time. I now have what I believe at least is a language to communicate internally, pick up arguments without any fear, great set of new friends, colleagues and relationships that I know I can count on as I continue to build and hopefully deliver outcomes for Amagi.

To draw a parallel from the jungles (which I love visiting and spending time in), not all jungles are the same. So no animal tends to operate the same way in all environments. When placed in an unfamiliar environment, it tends to spend time trying to understand the watering holes, the lay of the land, the threats, the friends and the foes before it makes it a home. There is a lot of time spent researching before it starts to mark its territory or establishing itself. Maybe there is something for us less intelligent beings to learn from that :).

A SaaS-y year

I learnt a lot about SaaS as I sat around and observed India’s SaaS story from the sidelines, read a lot of blogs, listened to a lot of podcasts (whose volumes have only gone up since). Heck, I made a case to InMobi leadership to acquire a SaaS company and made a terrible failure out of that acquisition (lessons for another day). So when I was switching roles, it was only natural for me to be eager for a switch into what was a super hot sector. Though, as my luck would have it , too many people are now predicting the downfall of SaaS (including Satya Nadella), but hey you got to roll the dice at some point.

The fact that metrics can tell you a story, that you can diagnose what’s going wrong in your business by just looking at a few key metrics is great. The fact that you are not looking at those metrics often enough is sad. Too many tools and frameworks exist around helping you look at the health of your company and way too much money and time is spent deciding which ones to buy, way too little time is spent actually using them effectively or measuring what they actually deliver for you once you purchase them. When I made the switch, I did not know that Vertical SaaS was a completely different from conventional SaaS. But, 12 months in, I am harping every conversation internally and externally on the fact that we are a vertical SaaS company and hence we do things very differently compared to what would be considered standard (don’t ask me for a list, I am hopefully adding enough in my story for another day bucket). I am still learning, but I do think that making a SaaS business actually predictable is the holy grail that a lot of SaaS companies tend to struggle with and if you manage to get it right, I would love to hear how you did it.

Be happy doing the unsexy things

Amagi has been a bit tougher to explain to friends as to what we do because only those tracking the sector seem to know about us, but know very little about what we actually do (at InMobi I used to go with “the ads that you hate on your phone, there is a fat chance that we were behind it”). But, I now realise that it does not matter whether you are building the in-thing , a generative AI product or what would conventionally defined an old school product, the only moat that really matters is Customer Love. Building a sticky product which your customers  love is the sure shot way to success. The challenge of course is building it in a path that is super critical and important to them. As I kept looking at our suite of products, I realise that our customers relied on us for their channels and content to be on air in front of the users, so every small thing that we did wrong meant that we were letting them down. Hence, the bar for expectations with our customers is super high and that has been driving our success (or failure). It is a huge risk and huge load to bear, but that is what businesses are built on. Sometimes, it is ok to not be in the forefront, but in the background doing something that is important and critical to the customer.

I took on the same learning for my role here too. I now no longer do sales, make amazing pitches to customers or spend time building out stories that make it easy to sell products. Despite being somebody who wrote a long post articulating why I think sales is a super critical function and how much I enjoy it, I now spend a lot of time looking at what my sales people are doing rather than actually selling. I am comfortable with it because I realise that RevOps plays a very different role in B2B SaaS companies and if done right, can deliver significant outcomes for the company. I see RevOps as the Product function within Go To Market engines - lot of problem solving, limited customer context, but the metrics and data can tell the story of what's going on very easily. (I know I may get a lot of hate for saying this, but there are lots of parallels to draw with RevOps in B2B and performance marketing in a B2C company, but hey that's just me.).

Been less than a year doing this role, but every month I stumble upon something new that I can do better. There is  nothing better than this snippet I heard on this SaaStr podcast (at around 24:00 mark) which I keep going back to for a lot of decisions, “Sales people are like airplanes, they only make money when they are in the air”. So now I see RevOps as the ground crew that can make this a reality, I am still sucking at it (as my sales team will be the first ones to point out), but I now have a metric to measure myself on. And hence, to all those sellers who complain or are worried about why we are looking into too many metrics or questioning what this function is doing looking over their shoulder, maybe this is why most RevOps leaders are doing what they do. And just like every other person who does their job, I think RevOps is a very thankless job. My first task when I took up the role was to set quotas and goals for the Sales team at the start of the year and my immediate reflection was - there is no way in which I am getting this right. At the end of the year, the only question is going to be who is going to be left unhappy, the sales team because they missed their numbers or the CFO because everybody smashed their numbers, but we now have to pay out a lot! I am now in the thick of doing this a second year, and hoping to be slight better at it. Again, more lessons and more exciting problems to solve !

The thing that I am most proud of in my 12 months here - starting an internal monthly newsletter and sticking to it consistently over the last year. So yeah, most often it is a habit of doing things and doing it repeatedly, even if unsexy that makes you the happiest :).

Fin.

I am not going to try and make this 12 lessons for the new year because this is all there is for me to share :). I will go back to my shell soon and forget that I should be sharing more here to learn from many of you, but I will try and be somewhat consistent with writing  here more often. To any more builders/founders of RevOps tools trying to pitch to me to solve what I call as problems above, please know that I have no budgets to spend any more :D .

Here’s to an exciting 2025 for everyone busy grinding your time at work, hope you all get to learn more, take some breaks and take on some new challenges.