Move Over, Sales: Why Product & Marketing are the C-Suite's New Power Partnership with Checkout.com

Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be here coming to you live from New York and Tel Aviv in Meron's case. I'm Lila Srinivasan. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Checkout. You may or may not be familiar with us. We are a global online payments platform. We focus on enabling our clients and their communities to thrive in the digital economy. And I'm joined by Meron.

Hey everyone, my name is Meron and I work on the product team at Checkout.

As in he runs it. So modest. So why are we here? We have, what, I think 20 minutes of talking and hopefully some questions at the end. We wanted to do a session on this really important relationship between product and marketing because having been, having had the opportunity and the privilege to go to a number of SaaStr events, a lot of the focus tends to be on that marketing and sales relationship, that go-to-market piece. I've been to a lot of sessions on product. I haven't been to enough sessions that talk about product and marketing and how those two pieces need to work together splendidly in order to really drive your startup. By way of intro, just a little bit of the movies, I guess you would say, that Marona and I have seen. So I cut my teeth as a marketer at LinkedIn in product marketing, and from there had the opportunity to move through various companies owning product marketing as part of that mix, first at OpenTable, then at the hiring platform Lever, and then most recently Momentive, the parent company of SurveyMonkey before I came to Checkout to meet Mehran. Mehran, tell us more about your journey.

Yeah, I really started my financial services journey at PayPal about probably too long ago, 12, 13 years. Spent some time working on the risk team, working in Europe, working in the US, and then moved to run the product team over at SoFi and then was part of the blockchain project over at Meta where we were trying to reinvent money. And more recently joined Checkout almost a year ago, so, and where I had the pleasure of meeting Leila and partnering with her.

Absolutely. And one thing to, to mention, I see we've got folks in from India and other parts of the world, uh, a number of these logos that you see on screen are from larger companies. I think the closest, um, I had to small, um, earlier stage company was Lever, which, um, was Series A and I think $3 million in ARR when I joined. Um, but what I would say about, uh, product and marketing working together is in each of these companies we might— we're actually much earlier than you might think from the logo. And so when you look under the hood or the bonnet of companies, you see very different sort of stages of product and marketing coming together. And even at checkout.com, which is a Series D company with 2,000 people, there's a lot that Mehran and I have been building over the course of the last 12 to 15 months together, which makes us feel like we're just getting started. So hopefully the lessons that we share are going to be applicable. So with that, what we thought we'd do is tackle this through the lens of 4 key ingredients that we see, or that we've seen up close at Checkout, as ingredients for a powerful partnership between marketing and product. So the first, voice of customer for the win. We're all big fans of VOC, of course. But I see this as really a shared responsibility that product and marketing can collaborate very effectively to bring to the organization as inspiration and very real input to drive the org forward. So 3 quick examples that we wanted to share. The first is, and this is something that again Moran and I have been building this year, is making sure that when you launch your products or make significant feature updates, that you have a hero customer at the center of that story. So from Checkout's perspective, 2022 has really been about going from being a single product company that was really focused on both pay-ins and payouts in the payments landscape to building and launching multiple products over the course of the last 6 months in particular. And something that we really insisted on with our client, with our teams, was making sure that we had a hero customer that was really telling that story alongside us. In the case of our Fraud Detection Pro product, which just launched in October, the client that we chose to work with was Delivery Hero. And that meant, as we'll get into this actually in some of the other tips, but over a period of months before that launch, making sure that we lined up with our product counterparts to identify almost, you know, do the talent scouting for who that hero customer might be, working very closely with them to really understand the value that they were unlocking through that product. And I think what we've seen in spaces like payments, which, you know, let's be honest, super fascinating, can be a little bit dry. Having the customer share their story and their firsthand impressions of how the product is really making a meaningful difference to them has been, I think, pretty instrumental in helping us explain the impact. But it takes product and marketing coming together early enough to identify that customer, make sure that we're on the same page about the value prop, and then listening in and partnering with that client to help make sure that we can raise that.

I think that as— and I think that, you know, if we remember the triangle that we drew in the beginning where there's also sales as the third angle, I think that here as well, yes, product, we were here to talk about product and marketing working together, but the sales aspect was very critical because the sales team, the commercial team help us source the customer, helps build the relationship in order for us to come in and build that value and tell that story in a really nice way. So yes, the new power couple, but on the other hand, we still need to incorporate commercial as part of this journey.

Yeah, we're definitely not, we definitely can't leave them out. The other thing that I find to be really powerful, and I should have prefaced this by saying fraud, if in case it's escaped your notice, is a topic that is on everyone's mind. Anyone who's in e-commerce in 2022 has been really focused on combating fraud. By actually having not one but two hero customers with this launch, we were able to surface slightly different use cases in different industries, which also I think helps really showcase the power of the product. So definitely want to lean into that product and marketing opportunity. Next up, Meran.

Yeah, so advisory councils. So many of you, I'm sure, have been part or participated or organized advisory councils. And many times these can be commercial these can be like opportunities for the team to sell its wares, if you will. But really thinking about advisory councils as a way to get signal from customers, from your most important customers, your most engaged customers, was really the way that we structured this particular advisory council and something that we took as a learning going forward into future opportunities as well. And so really the way that the session was set up, the way that Leila and the PMM team together with the product team work together on this is like, how can we maximize the insights and how can we maximize the inputs from our customers and to really turn them into listening sessions where we could discuss our roadmap, get feedback on the roadmap, get new ideas on what was really top of mind for the merchant, for our merchants. And what actually came out of it was really a very some very deep insights that actually informed our roadmap. And so one of the things that, you know, speaking to the world of payments, one of the things that we heard from a number of our customers in this merchant council was how top of mind open banking is and how big of a concern it is for our customers. And as a result of that, we took that in, the product team really took that as an evaluation and now it's influenced our roadmap and accelerated something that we were planning to do eventually, but now has become much more important for us. As a result of creating a successful voice of customer program in the advisory council. And I've managed to talk enough for the slides to come back. So here you go.

Good, good Zoom learning. I can't actually click into the webinar chat and advance the slides. So now I know. Yeah, what I wanted to ask was how many of you were actually— had advisory councils in place at your company? Because to me, this is something that I've put in place at multiple companies now, and I found it to be incredibly powerful for just getting that voice of customer firsthand and also this great opportunity to work very closely with, with product. And what I would say about the advisory council we launched here at Checkout was, yes, marketing facilitates, marketing helps to line up the right customers, marketing helps to structure the day, but it only really works if product is really leaning in and, you know, making sure that they are having active conversation and then taking those learnings back and incorporating them into the roadmap. And one of my proudest moments was hearing in our QBRs that we ran right after the advisory council how various product managers were invoking some of the language that they heard from, from advisory council. So definitely encourage you to lean into advisory councils, and we can totally answer questions on how to set those up at the end if that's of interest. The third piece of the VOC opportunity is really around using research to inform really all aspects of, of go-to-market, but specifically in the product and marketing context— naming, features, positioning, product gaps, and so forth. Hopefully a number of you are already thinking about how to measure customer feedback. Of course, being ex-Momentive and SurveyMonkey, that's a great solution that you can use, but there are many different tools on the market. This year we launched our first consistent, uh, what we call relational NPS survey. So Net Promoter Score being a very popular way to understand the ultimate loyalty of your client and their willingness to recommend you to, to others like them. And the whole point of NPS, yes, you get a score that you can fixate on, but really it's the drivers of that score that are super important for making progress as a company. And the other questions that you can layer into an NPS survey help to drive the insight that you need internally to move your product roadmap forward. So in this instance, what you see here, one of the questions literally from our NPS survey is two different 2 questions, one asking them what's the main benefit they've received from working with Checkout, and then secondly asking us where we can best improve or where, where we should be focusing our efforts to improve their experience working with Checkout. And you see those green and red bars juxtaposed, and clearly on feature benefit C, we see that that is a relatively important benefit that we deliver to the customer, but we have the biggest opportunity to improve. So this is the kind of data that I love to bring back to Maroun and his team to make sure that we're having real conversations about real feedback as it's coming in from customers. With that, there's much more we could say there, but let's keep moving. Okay, second thing, being on the same page and having the same goals, I think, is absolutely critical to product and marketing organizations working well together. So we like to talk about extreme clarity at checkout.com. It's, it's one of the phrases that gets kicked around a lot. And I think between product and marketing, what's worked well this year is having extreme alignment on our timelines and our goals. So, uh, you know, and it sounds pedantic, but sometimes you actually need the right artifacts at the heart of your efforts in order to get that extreme alignment. So this is a literal screenshot of what our go-to-market, uh, kind of single source of truth is that we use across product, uh, marketing and also pulling in our commercial counterparts. Uh, so in this artifact We, uh, first of all, we, we spell out exactly how the initiative or the launch maps into our company OKRs and what the team is tasked with doing, just so we can really drive that alignment with the overall company objectives. We give clarity on who the key stakeholders are across the organization, who's giving approval, for example, to make sure that it's very clear how we advance as we move through the, the life cycle. We also try and provide as much visibility and clarity as possible. I've worked on teams in in the past where there's almost been like a, uh, like a reluctance or a, uh, to, to share and to, uh, almost because maybe, maybe teams don't want the criticism or want to, you know, believe they know what they're doing and don't necessarily want to invite dialogue around it. I think we tend to take the opposite, uh, opposite path here at checkout.com. Uh, more input is better, and making sure that you get to the best possible answer does require you, uh, to basically provide that visibility and be open to dialogue around it. So we link out openly and freely to all of the different key assets that we want the team to have access to. And then the last thing is, of course, very importantly, is making sure we're aligned on what success looks like. We do use OKRs here at checkout.com, so objectives and key results. For any launch, we also want to really define what success looks like and have specific KPIs that we commit to as a combined team so that we can really track progress. Anything you'd add on this, Morad?

Yeah, and if I can add something, I think that one thing to remember is that go-to-market Like this may seem pedantic and initially the first time we go, right, the first time we did this, it was rather painful. Like we didn't have all the deliverables that we needed to, we had a number of iterations, but go-to-market is really a muscle and, you know, it becomes easier and easier over time and people sort of fall into like, oh, I know how to do this. And we've improved and become more efficient over time, especially as a company that moves from like having, quite a few launches last year to a large number of launches this year. I think that the rigor and the progress is visible. The other piece is around leveraging the feedback that Leela mentioned from before, like the feedback on the assets as a way to improve the broader organization. So leveraging the teaching moments and the opportunities to provide feedback for a particular thing, not as, you know, this is input on a particular sentence in a webpage, but rather, how do we take that and turn it into a learning that can then be replicated to all of the other things so that Mila and I don't need to provide that feedback next time around? So that visibility provides that ability for a larger stakeholder group to learn from these teaching moments.

Indeed. Good stuff. All right, let's move on. Brutal honesty. Oh, I'll let you take this one.

Yes, so this is another thing that we try to practice as much as possible at Checkout. And in this particular case, this is a moment where the team, if you can move to the next slide, the team was really gearing up towards a launch. It's the same launch that we talked about last time around, the one around fraud detection. And the team was gearing up, everything was lining up for a Q2 launch, and someone on the from the product marketing team raised their hand and said, you know, you know what, in a meeting with the product managers, with Lila and myself preparing for the launch, that, you know, I've been talking to a few customers, we've been looking at a number of their inputs, and I'm really concerned about this launch. There are some things here that don't pan out. The feedback is generally good, but the customers are talking about a few key gaps. And there was a moment in time you know, we had a choice. We, we could continue and plow on and, and launch with full steam ahead. On the other hand, we could also say, actually, the bar, the quality bar that we expect from ourselves is, is different. The quality bar that we expect from ourselves is that we meet and solve certain customer needs. Of course, there's always the notion of MVP, launching quickly, putting something in market and iterating from there. But does this particular launch meet the bar for us, meet the minimum viable, the minimum and viable aspects of the minimum viable product. And the answer that we came to, that I came to at that point in time, is that the answer is no. And thank God that the PMM raised this at that moment in time because it enabled us to take that feedback and introspectively look within the product team of, are we really, have we really met the bar or not? Come to the conclusion that the answer is no. And then we did a number of feature development on the back of that, that took a little bit of time, took 6 months. So it was not, it was not a trivial delay, but then come out with a launch later in the year that was much more successful and that was really well received by the market, by our customers, and with a lot of interest there. And so I think that this was a moment of like brutal honesty and also quite frankly, you know, if you sometimes, if you look at organizations, they tend to be, have siloed thinking and sort of calcify around the org structure. That's something that we try to avoid. And because Leila and I have joint goals and are marching towards the same set of things, we really wanted to amplify that and move forward with a more successful launch based on feedback that was coming in from her team.

Indeed. All right, we're getting— I know we're falling behind on time. So let me go quickly just to say that honesty goes both ways. So we had a different moment as it related to the naming of this product. And just a quick note that wherever you're operating, I would really advise you to have a philosophy or a framework around, you know, how you think about product naming as you— if you're moving to multi-product status. For what it's worth, checkout.com has decided that descriptive names are the way forward. In other words, it's kind of, you know, what it says on the tin is the product. So, and, you know, we landed on the name Fraud Detection for this particular product. But prior to that, the product team had been running with the name Prism. So there were moments of honesty in either direction. First of all, product marketing coming in saying, eh, we don't think that Prism is the right name for this product. We actually did some research to show that Prism was actually the company that people in this space would bet against performing well. So there was that. But then the product team then came back with their own brutal honesty of the next, next name that we chose, Fraud Secure, didn't exactly fit into this name of purely descriptive. And so we basically ended up compromising. And, you know, in that instance, I was on, you know, on the side of, or at least very open to product feedback on the naming and making sure that we really stayed true to our, to our framework and the way we wanted to proceed. So I think honesty in both directions is the best policy. The last tip we have here is around speaking the same language as your partner, basically. And by that, I mean, you know, we— you can look at this as sort of product and marketing side by side. But the reality is, as Maroun said, we have the same goals. We're all working together for the same greater good. And what I love to see is the better product managers leaning into some responsibilities that are often led by marketing, and then vice versa, PMMs leaning into some of the work that, uh, to support their product colleagues. So the example I would give on PMs really getting involved in marketing the product or solution internally and externally, this is something Marwan has really championed, is in this case Augustine, uh, really kind of when the product launches, him being the face and the voice of that product, him working, partnering very closely and effectively with our PMM and our content team to make sure that we're putting out the right content into market and really celebrating the wins as well as they occur. So there's no need that for marketing to be the sole custodian of getting the word out both internally and externally. I think that can be done effectively as a partnership across the PM-PMM relationship.

Yeah, and similarly, on the PMMs leaning into work that in some places may be considered product manager's work, as you, as you probably noticed from the previous example, many of our PMMs have pretty deep knowledge within the product and, and sometimes get into the, the technical aspects as well. And so we've, we've seen examples of some of our top product marketers that actually tag team or even provide the full training sessions, commercial enablement, and build out the majority of the material on their own. And I think that the higher level takeaway is, in my experience, you know, when you see great team working together, sometimes it's hard to determine who does exactly what role. So the lines are blurring and someone is jumping into this and someone's jumping into that, especially as the company is smaller, but also in smaller teams where, you know, the lines get blurred. And so those are the types of things that we like to see in high-functioning teams, and we've seen happen time and time again this year.

Absolutely. And just as you need extreme clarity and extreme alignment, you need extreme communication in that instance so that you're not treading on one another's toes. But again, there's almost a yin and a yang that works quite nicely between PM and PMM. So those are our 4 key ingredients: voice of customer, same goal, same page, brutal honesty, and then speaking the same language. I think at this point we can probably go to, uh, to questions, and maybe I'll stop sharing so that I don't create havoc again with, uh, with slides. So let's bash through these. Amanda asks, what kind of trainings do you do to align product and marketing teams? A couple of thoughts here. One is, for me, it's maybe less about trainings and more about making sure that product marketing is in the dialogue early enough and part of the team meetings with the full technical squad so that they can really start to get up to speed and understand, uh, you know, and be in a position to really help shape that value prop as it goes forward. So less about training for me and more by being involved early enough to really make a difference and be part of the dialogue. Moran, how would you answer that?

I don't have much to add on that one. I can, given that we have a few, a few more questions, I'll jump to the next one. So there's a question here on, you know, checkout using OKRs to drive clarity. How does the executive leadership team see all the org initiatives, not just between product and marketing, and related OKRs, Google Spreadsheet, Dashboard, or another tool? So it's a really good question. I think that there's— the nature of OKRs is that they cascade. And I think that for OKRs to be effective at a company our size, they also need to be succinct in the sense that we can't have— be looking at 500 OKRs every week and looking at how the— what the performance is. And So it's really about— and we spent a lot of time in this. We spent, I would say, a few days over iterating over a relatively long period of time to really set up the right set of OKRs before the beginning of the year, share them early so that we drive clarity throughout the coming year. And so really the process for 2023 OKRs started, I think, in July or August for us, and we share them relatively early in late late September, early October, even if they were not final, even if some of the wording was changing over time, those were things that we were sharing early. Then I think it's— so we've selected the few, and those are the ones that we really look at. So we have 5 objectives, some of them have KRs underneath that, and all of them have OKRs underneath them, but it's really about finding those key things that we want to do. And then each department takes those OKRs and translates and cascades it down. In many cases, we joint OKRs. For example, technology and product have joint OKRs. We don't have separate ones because we are, we're working on exactly the same set of things. But really, at the executive team level, we look at, at that initial set that, that I mentioned. The other thing to, to, to highlight in the way that we operate as a team and what's been effective for us is that we started in the beginning of this year something that we called a big rock review or initiative review. And those are really stem from the big OKRs, but really require— are the ones that really require a lot of cross-functional work. And so we bring— we appoint a leader for each initiative, for each big rock. They have a team around them that's usually very, very, very cross-functional. And we have a subset of the executive team that sits in these sessions and really reviews what is the status of the initiative, how do we make it, how do we unblock it, how do we create unclog clogs that exist between organizations that really enable us to operate really quickly. And so those are not exactly the OKRs, but they translate from them and tie into them really, really well. The idea is that each one of these initiatives drives one of the key OKRs. So hopefully that—

Yeah, it's a great question. We probably have time for one, maybe two more questions. I will highlight the question, how do you engage or incentivize customers to take on advisory roles? Oh, I have a point of view on this one. So The advisory councils I've set up, we've gone back and forth on what sort of quote unquote incentive we offer. And by and large, we've decided not to offer any sort of financial compensation or stock-based incentive, although that idea has been floated over time. And these are advisory councils as opposed to company advisors. I've been an advisor and I am an advisor to startups where there is a, like an options-based approach. But for advisory councils, you have to find the right customers that are really in it for the right reason. And the right reasons would be, because they, while they may have, and you hope that they have, lots of constructive feedback, they're essentially on board and they're supporters of the, the company in some shape or form. They are not afraid to voice an opinion. They will do so constructively. They see value in having the opportunity to, you know, help mold the organization. They want access to the Chief Product Officer and the CEO to kind of come behind the curtain for the organization. And then often and frankly, they're the kind of person who sees benefit in playing that status role with an organization. Because once you're an advisor at a company, that can lead to speaking opportunities, thought leadership. You really end up being front and center often in that company's narrative. So that is not necessarily appealing to every customer. But part of, I think, what you try and do in these conversations, as you're picking an advisory council, is almost like be feeling out the customer to make sure they understand that this is this is a commitment. There are benefits to them in terms of, you know, getting much closer to the company, shaping its roadmap, but also developing this set of peers that can be a real sounding board to them for life. And I'm still in touch with advisors that were on my first advisory council at LinkedIn back in 2010, and they're still in touch with one another. So these are really lifelong, lasting relationships that can be formed. It's not for everyone, but I think it's very, very beneficial. Beneficial on both sides when you can find the right advisors. And then we'll close with one last question. Maroun, how much customer feedback is too much? What would you say to that?

I would actually say that there's no such thing as too much. Like, I think that customer feedback is always good. It's always welcome. It's, I think, from a product manager, understanding what your customers want and need is is critical for us to do our role. It has to be timely. It has to be in a relevant point in time where it actually could influence the roadmap. But that is really something that, you know, we value and we look for. So I think it's more about not the amount, but more about the timeliness so that it comes in at the time, at a point in time where it could actually influence how we're building.

Yeah, I'll add one final point before we get the hook here, which is it's what you do with it. So we all know the whole adage around Henry Ford board and, you know, faster horse versus a car. Um, you know, one of the things I took away from Lever, which was a design thinking shop, was asking the question of why. Like, what was, what was driving that feedback? So it may not be that the customer literally wants the thing they want. It's trying to understand the motivation. What are they trying to accomplish, and how can you best help them do that?