Automation: The Digital Transformation Accelerator with PagerDuty CEO, Jennifer Tejada

Thank you for joining us for this next session. We're excited to welcome CEO of PagerDuty, Jen Tejada. In this session, Jen's going to talk us through automation and her take on digital Transformation Accelerator. She's going to discuss the need for agility and innovation and how automation is aiding adaptability and allowing enterprises to surge ahead. Jen, thanks so much for joining us. Take it away.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry we can't all be together at SAASTR this year, but hopefully we can make the best of it over video. And I'm really looking forward to Q and A at the end where we can have a little bit more interaction. But I thought today I would start off with a little bit of good news. And that good news is the fact that I'm just going to try and get my slide to advance here. That good news is the fact that digital acceleration has truly become a reality and my slides are not moving. So hold on one second. There we go. It's truly become a reality. And with that, it's a transition that we've seen take place over several decades. I've been in software since the 90s and for over 20 years. Nearly that entire time, we've been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products and our services in a way that's optimized for a digital world. With the advent of a global pandemic and the resulting recession, transformation efforts around the world and across industries, as you've all seen, have been thrust into high gear. And for some companies, this transformation is a requirement for survival, where for other companies, it enables them to exploit opportunities that are presented by the current environment. And this current environment that we're in, marked by an ongoing global health crisis, by lockdowns, by remote work, social distancing and civil unrest and market volatility. It's challenging in new ways that we as leaders have never experienced, not the least of which by being exhausting. This shift has come suddenly, it's been extraordinarily fast, and it's been compulsory. It's not like we had a choice as opposed to more gradual, like in earlier industrial revolutions. And it'll be interesting to find out what sticks, which changes stick around and stand the test of time, and which kind of return to the way they were when we find our new normal, since the only real certainty is ongoing uncertainty. I found myself as a leader seeking inspiration and I didn't have to look very far. I looked to our customer base. Many of our customers are doing amazing things. They've helped us get through the stay at home and shelter in place orders and manage the fear and uncertainty of COVID Like Peloton I don't know about you but all of my fitness is now happening in my home and within a six mile radius of my house. Slack which has become an online collaboration lifesaver for many of us at work and also a social environment for us to engage with our peers. Netflix My daughter's using Netflix Party all the time to feel that sense of watching a movie with her friends when she can't be together with them. Shopify We've seen tremendous results from their earnings recently because they are enabling the world to transition to e commerce essentially overnight. Ocado, which is an online grocery deliverer in the uk, which is getting food to people when you need it, when you don't really want to walk into a grocery store. And of course we know Amazon has been delivering all kinds of things from desks to working at home to common household supplies. My favorite though is Zipline. Zipline is a California drone based delivery company that transports critical medical supplies like blood and vaccines in Rwanda and Ghana and in April it added COVID 19 test samples to its distribution. So it's not all terrible bad news because Winston Churchill told us never waste a good crisis. And many of our enterprise customers at Pagerduty have delivered digital transformation programs that were supposed to take years in months. That is really happening in the marketplace and it's happening at companies that are 50 or 100 years old where they're having to find new ways to reach their customers with brands and services. Some of the examples that ready come to mind are remote work, contactless curbside pickup and cashless transactions which we all experience as consumers. Some are less obvious like telehealth. This came from necessity. Teladoc Cigna Virtual Care has been super helpful to my family. Maven Clinic or even manufacturing companies like Ford and Dyson transitioning their manufacturing lines to build much needed ventilators or Estee Lauder transitioning its cosmetic lines to build hand sanitizers when New York was really struggling to stop the spread of COVID And finally, we've seen social media play a role in organizing and catalyzing the global anti racism movement. Much of this acceleration can be credited to this crisis, which while being chaotic, it's actually the perfect forcing function for change. Prior to the pandemic you had to plan and orchestrate and sell change, often you needed consultants and boards and change management experts to be involved, to help you convince your people that even if it wasn't broken, they needed to fix it, to disrupt something that was working really well. There's typically a very high internal cost of change, not to mention the external market risk and customer risk. And in this case, we're now seeing an environment where your employees and your customers not only know they need to change, change is sometimes the only or the most immediate viable path. Oops. And in that case. Hang on a second. There we go. And in that case, and in that case, this is actually a gift. I think of this crisis in some ways as a gift, because change for us is now practically free, relatively speaking. The ability to pivot your organization, the ability to move in a different direction, the ability to look at all those things as a leader you had on your bucket list that you wanted to do differently or experiment with. Well, now you have that opportunity and the time is now to start ticking those things off your bucket list. The other thing that's changing and evolving really fast is the role of the leader. We now have new stakeholders and new challenges. This crisis has accelerated the change in the CEO role, permanently broadening all of our responsibilities and our constituencies. It's not enough to just make our customers happy or our employees happy. We have to think about all of the communities that we serve, our investors and the communities around us that need our help. We need to leverage our tech, our people, our position, our voices, our power. And that has become a central requirement in the CEO role. Trust has also become the most valuable currency. It takes years, years to build up trust with your customers and employees. And it can be destroyed in a heartbeat, in a minute. And that means that transparency, vulnerability, continuous engagement with our employees and our customers is now mission critical. And work is everywhere. It's all the time. The lines between work and home have blurred. So who owns the well being of our employees? We do. Who owns keeping them informed in a world of misinformation? We do. And our values have become increasingly more critical. You now have to go beyond explaining your values, making sure everybody understands them. You have to lean into them and demonstrate with a high level of empathy that every decision you make, big or small, is values led. Because your employees are looking to you, they are trusting you. They are to keep them engaged in your mission. And as CEOs and leaders, sometimes that's really challenging because we all need to provide a compelling future, a purpose to keep people who are dealing with things like isolation or their kids at Home or the prospect of school not picking up in the fall, the stress of COVID and its impact on family members. We need to keep them engaged in the purpose and the mission so that they're driven, so that they can continue to find fulfillment and enjoyment in their work. And to do this, you've got to scale it through your managers. But management has changed. You know, when I grew up in the world of, you know, management training, it was all about duty of care first, do no harm and deliver the business results. Well, we have to now start with demonstrating personal care first. And this may not naturally come to all of your managers. It may not be first nature. That role of the manager is increasingly important, that frontline manager, not simply to direct priorities and direct work, but to model, to coach, and most of all to demonstrate care to your employees. I was speaking with Brad Smith, the chairman of Intuit, the other day and he shared this simple process that they've executed at Intuit that I thought was really interesting. They've created a form and a flow for their managers to do check ins and instead of doing what we all naturally want to do, which is to check in on the project, check in on how the work's going. Like, is it going to be delivered on time? Is it going to be on budget? Will we ship it? Will customers like it? Will they understand it? Start with the people first. How are you? How are you feeling about things? How's your family? How's everything going? Right, this really resonated with me because one of PagerDuty's values is people first. And this just feels like a great executable on that. They're taking it one step further and they're tracking it in BetterWorks or Reflective or one of their HR online systems. And I think that's a really good way to help managers practice, but also hold them accountable to demonstrating that care for employees. The challenge is even the best management and training processes won't always work. They won't prevent burnout, because when we're working from home and we're supported by this technology, this great technology that we're using today, which blurs the lines between work and family time, people are going to get burned out and you're going to see that ebb and flow and going in cycles. So looking forward, we also need to innovate and automate policies around flexible working childcare and leave to address some of these challenges. For example, at pager duty, we've offered Newtonian days, spontaneous Fridays off, to really enable employees to decompress and refresh and step away from the blue screen. We've also kicked off this concept of simple Wednesdays. Simple stands for stop internal meetings, plan lots of external ones. And the idea is that on Wednesdays if we take meetings, they're going to be external, customer facing meetings. This has helped us to break up the meeting gridlock midweek and it's also turned our collective focus forward and outward towards the market and our customers, which is where our priority lies. In addition of having an existing five months of parental leave, we extended emergency and caregiver leave and launched an online mental health platform called Ginger I.O. for our employees. We also gave our employees an expense allowance for their work and home environments. And to support personal activism and anti racism, we updated our 20 hour volunteer time off policy to include peaceful demonstration, self education and voting. I'm not suggesting this is perfect, that this is all inclusive, or that you're not doing a lot of this already, or frankly that you need to do all of this. But what I am suggesting is we need to keep improving and experimenting and figure out how we create that purpose and that fulfillment for our employees while delivering on new needs for our customers. Sound easy? Not so much. One of the big questions is how do we find the capacity as leaders personally and the capacity within our organizations and our teams to get some of this done. Nicole Malachowski is a retired Air Force officer and the first woman Thunderbolt pilot, and I've had the great fortune of hosting her to speak with our leaders many occasions. And one of the things that she talked about recently really struck with me. It's the fact that when you're in combat and it's chaotic, your natural instinct is to play defense. But the winning playbook to surviving and winning in a combat environment is all about seizing your advantage. And I've heard people talk about seizing opportunity, but this nuance is a little different, right? Because again, most of us normal humans in a chaotic or situation where we feel attacked and uncomfortable, we're going to shift to the back foot. We're going to shift defense. Nicole's astute point is that you are unlikely to win playing defense because you know someone's chasing you. Suddenly first you need to identify and name your advantage. That sounds pretty simple and straightforward and it can be surprisingly hard to do because we all think we're good at lots of things. We all think we have many benefits. What is your greatest advantage? Be intellectually honest. Maybe it's not that list that was in your last pitch deck, but what you truly believe your customers in the market reflect back to you as your defensible advantage. How's your product essential? Do you solve a current urgent problem? How do you point your advantage at your customer's biggest challenges? Next, focus on turbo powering that advantage. This is the hard part, because if your company is anything like mine, we have teams working on all kinds of initiatives that were super relevant in January and not so much now. But we have people that are wedded to those projects that feel a deep level of personal connection to that work. And on close examination, even though they deserve re prioritization or maybe canceling, people will be resistant to that change. Your job is to as quickly as possible shift your resources to strengthening your advantage. So how do you free up your people so that they can focus on being creative? They can shift to that advantage digging in deeper, building and building a stronger moat with that advantage, being innovative and yet finding the capacity and the time to do that. Despite all of the personal challenges I just mentioned and all of the business challenges that are in play. I'd posit that you need to automate or eliminate anything that can create capacity for the stuff that matters. That advantage that we talked about making space is literally and figuratively space for transformation. So like us, as you probably scenario planning your butts off to maximize growth and conserve cash in case this pandemic goes on for a while, which it looks like it will, how are you going to do more with less, particularly in a cash constrained world? And how do you know which projects to stop and which projects to accelerate? How do you leverage your team to do that? Well, for us, we had to start with elimination. We had to ruthlessly prioritize our team's investments and activities. And that was somewhat helped because we used the V2MOM methodology which where you stack rank all of your key initiatives, you stack rank the projects that support them. So you kind of have to challenge that stack ranking in order to keep something that's low on the list in play. Or you have to make a really good business case for reordering that stack rank. And that's precisely what we did. It allowed us to reshuffle some things. It allowed us to stop some projects or back burner some products, some projects that I particularly was very interested in and and committed to, we had to put on the back shelf. When all of when the world started to change, then you've got to assess your progress and then you've got to reprioritize again. I think the thing that surprised me was that you're constantly having to Monitor this, check your progress, potentially reprioritize. Because the market and the environment we're in is evolving faster than in any experience in my professional lifetime. And what I've learned is this is really a cycle of days and weeks, not months in this environment. I think the frustrating thing is the annual planning cycles that we've built our businesses around don't serve us. They're static and unresponsible to the evolving situation in front of us. And we need something more dynamic and more fluid. Canceling projects to promote your advantage will serve you in this environment. So while it may be hard, cross some things off the list. Now let's turn to the role that automation can play in accelerating your strategy and your business and your customer outcomes. As a startup, we cobbled a lot of processes together really quickly out of necessity and we haven't really had time or the wherewithal to go back to them and harden them for scaling. And those manual processes, they build up like plaque on your teeth. You can't really see it until it's bad and by then you've got a mouthful of decay and your teeth falling out. This whole set of painful, bigger problems that are now harder and more expensive to resolve. And that's where automation comes in. Whether you're leveraging robotic process automation from IPATH and your finance teams or your HR teams, or you use SaaS apps like Pendo to find insights and track and learn your customer behavior in your product, or you use people AI to understand the autumn and automate the process of gaining insights on sales capacity and sales productivity. All of these types of automation can not only accelerate work and get rid of manual work, they can help you institutionally learn faster, get smarter and get better faster. And those are the outcomes that we're looking for. Earlier this year we redoubled our focus on our enterprise segment where we have a strong leadership position. Think of this as something we identified as an advantage and to shift resources we had to automate more and more of our SMB offering and make sure that we could refine our product to make sure self service journeys were more productive and frictionless. We made in app purchases available for all of our customers and we have only mobile app that you can run an end to end incident response on, which is really important when we're talking about supporting distributed teams. Another example we've seen plenty of in the consumer in our customer world is this expedition of cloud migration. And in particular we're seeing this in retail and e commerce in traditional consumer businesses where bricks and Mortar brands have been forced to shift to 100% E commerce overnight. And I remember seeing Andy Jassy speak about this at re invent the idea of kind of cleaning out the garage and starting fresh as opposed to just digitizing the processes that were available today. So we're now seeing customers that are reinventing, reinvigorating the customer journey, leveraging the cloud as an automation platform for that. And all of you are very fortunate. Many of you are cloud native companies. And so I think there is an opportunity and potentially an advantage here. This may sound kind of primitive when we talk about customers making that shift now because you were born that way, but the biggest brands in the world didn't start here and underestimating those brands do that at your peril because many of them have some of the best marketing, product and business operators in the planet and they have now gone Mach 5 into learning how to leverage the cloud to their advantage and they may be coming after some of you. So the other thing to think about is your advantage of being a cloud based company. That may be that competitive lead or gap may be getting smaller for you and you're really going to have to innovate on behalf of your customer in other ways if you're not already. You're also going to need to retrain yourself and your teams to take a more agile approach to planning and capital allocation. Think about doing it on a rolling quarterly basis, if not a monthly basis, so you can find opportunities for automation really quickly. You can pivot when you see a project that you're investing in right now is not going to pay off for too long of a term. And at the same time, you can weigh up some of the long term initiatives that are going to be really important for the future, that are going to ensure that you can not only survive, but thrive and come out of this environment much, much stronger. So I wanted to talk a little bit about digital acceleration because we're hearing about it a lot. And what this really is is it's about expediting new ways of working. So automation is no longer, as I mentioned, simply digitizing the experience, like taking a sequential process and replacing it with a digital form or workflow and moving a physical process to the web or an app. It's more about simplifying or reinventing processes, about making sure that workflows and journeys become better outcomes. And this is where I think there is a big, a huge future sustainable opportunity because you rethink the customer journey. You start with the end in mind and this helps you get to disruptive opportunities for the market. Disruptive Interesting new ways for customers to engage with your brands and services. And we see this all the time in the SaaS industry and in consumer Internet. We've seen this with DoorDash, who's consolidated delivery logistics created reach for restaurants while offering more variety and convenience for customers. We've seen Robinhood make stock investing approachable and snackable for Millennials. And we've seen Twilio build reliable communications and apps quickly and easily with APIs. And of course Zoom. It's just a video conferencing environment that actually works. It's a beautiful thing. All of these platforms automate and eliminate historically mundane steps or friction points. But they also found better ways to do things, better ways to engage and to accelerate your digital reality. You really need to become a learning organization. And we all talk about being great learners, having a growth mindset. But by this I mean underpin your growth mindset with data and platforms that can monitor your efforts and help you capture institutional learning that you can translate into rapid change or improvement. I mean, we asked ourselves, and you should ask yourself, does your learning leverage tools that can objectively monitor, report and recommend improvements? Are you systematic in the way your approach to learning and the way you're evolving? At PagerDuty, we set to do this set out to do this for developer and product teams where we bring human and machine data together to automate in service of our users and we aggregate monitoring signals to automate. The detection of a true incident emits trillions of noisy signals. We use machine learning based pattern recognition to identify related issues so that your team focuses on the one thing versus the hundred things that potentially wreaking havoc. And then our platform can recommend the people who can help solve an issue and even potential steps that you can take to get to the actual resolution. So we're automating more of the troubleshooting and more of the resolution. And finally we learn every time an incident runs on the platform, we're leveraging analytics to heat map the health of your teams, to predict potential burnout, to recognize events that might storm, to become incidents. And this is all automation in service of the humans, in service of humanity. This is in service of getting your teams back to that purposeful work that fulfills them and drives immediate outcomes for your business. Potentially the biggest acceleration opportunity I see is in purpose and social impact. Because this crisis has also accelerated our need to demonstrate purpose and show corporate responsibility in our business. We need to shift from this concept of profit with a purpose or social giving equals social impact mindset to really designing our companies to solve the world's hard big problems. These are problems that we as leaders may not have had exposure to in the past or may not have experienced ourselves, but problems that are amplified by COVID 19 for example, in the US not to mention many other parts of the world, schools have historically provided meals for many underprivileged children. With schools not in session, children are not getting nutrition. Covid is also taking a disproportionate toll on underrepresented people and we're seeing this every day in the news. One vector, one of many vectors is unemployment. So how can we as a community create access to employment opportunities for black and brown people or offer skill building to position people for modern knowledge worker opportunities, even if that's not the educational background that they have. These communities also disproportionately participate in frontline high risk jobs and also already have less access to health care. In addition, the gender gap will likely widen as a result of COVID as women are frequently small business owners hit hardest by shutdowns. Working women are also doing what we call a double shift, taking care of their households, sometimes their children and elderly parents at the same time they're trying to get their jobs done. We all have a role to play in finding innovative solutions for these challenges like food and healthcare, security and access and preparation for employment opportunities to re employ many of the unemployed people out there. And we have to help society emerge from COVID stronger. This is now Table stakes for Modern Leadership Remember when I said the leadership role is changing now? Even if you don't build a product, even if you don't build a product that directly solves some of these problems, you can be part of the solution. You can be systematic in the way you drive change in your companies today. For instance, you can redesign your hiring and your onboarding and your training practices and thoughtfully partner with diverse organizations to create more access and opportunity for people of color. You could go beyond simply automating your supply chain or your procurement processes and design them to eliminate corruption like child labor or racism. And make sure that you're leveraging diverse vendors, that you're asking vendors to provide diversity information to you. And you choose your vendors based on their demonstration of being inclusive and diverse within their own organizations. And finally, there's never been a forcing function, never been a better forcing function to think about how you make a dent in the universe by putting a sustainable plan in place for social giving. If you're early stage or you're private. Making the 1% pledge, where you donate 1% of your equity, your time, your products and or your process profits for social impact is a huge opportunity. And the PledgeOne team has automated some of the design and diligence process for you by creating a playbook to accelerate your efforts. So it's never too early to talk to your board and your investors about this, and it's never too early to think about the role you could play in solving some of humanity's most challenging problems. So key takeaways really quickly. I mean, digital transformation, it's real, it's here, but it's about redesigning experiences, not just digitizing. Process and change, frankly, is on sale. The crisis creates this burning platform for you to drive changes in your business that maybe you thought were gonna take years or you weren't ready for. Now is the time to start crossing those things off your bucket list. Make those changes now. Automation and elimination are necessary to create the additional personal capacity and your team's capacity that you need to accelerate your business and thrive on the other side of the crisis and frankly, to support your customers in getting through this crisis and being stronger. Trust is now the world's most valuable currency, and transparency, continuous engagement with your employees and customers is now critical. And I really want all of you to think about seizing your advantage. Like what really truly is your advantage. How do you lean into that strength? How do you rally around that strength and, and fortify it in the market in the months and quarters to come? Name it and lean into it, Play to your strengths. And then, you know, your leadership role is changing. It's compulsory that you change. You don't get a choice. You probably don't really get to have an opinion on the fact that your stakeholder group is widened. Your need to participate in being a socially responsible leader and company, it is burning. It's more important than ever in the environment that we and we have to come together to solve this. And so I'd ask you to think about designing social responsibility into your planning, your operations and your culture. Don't wait until you're closer to going public. Don't wait until it's compulsory. From a compliance perspective, now is the time that the world needs us to drive change and solve some of society's biggest challenges. Finally, and I haven't mentioned this earlier, like, you know, don't try this at home by yourself. Don't go it alone. Surround yourself with peers and your team and share some of these big challenges and share the big decisions and get input I have been super fortunate to be surrounded by a group of peer public company SaaS, CEOs. And we share lots of ideas, we share lots of experiments that we're running to try and advance the industry and our customers and society, frankly, forward faster. So I'd ask you to open yourselves up, maybe be a little bit more vulnerable and look to your peers and your team for support. Lean into those people because I'm sure they're one of your biggest advantages. Thank you. And I'm excited to take your questions. I'm going to see if I can stop sharing this.

See?

Okay.

Amazing.

Here we are.

Jen, thank you so much. That was great. Really tactical insights and love the examples that you walked through to make it really relevant for the audience. So we have a ton of questions coming through. We have about 10 minutes, 10, 12 minutes to run through them. So I'm just going to jump in and get to some Q and A from the audience. So. Awesome. First one, what advice would you give for sales organizations that typically meet with prospects in person and are now needing to engage with prospects digitally?

Well, that's a great question. We talked a lot about this earlier when Covid really was evolving in February, March, April, and it was really uncomfortable for salespeople to reach out and be promotional. So was less about I can't physically go see a customer anymore and more about if I can't have that personal touch, what's the appropriate way to engage our customers? And so we talked about one starting with empathy. So again, that sort of people first, transparency, demonstrating vulnerability, checking in with the person first, how are you? How are your families? Even some of my toughest customers open meetings by saying, man, how are you doing? And it is surprising how much of a connection that's created. And then the second thing is to really listen to how the customer's problem sets have changed. Yes, your sales team has a job to do and they're trying to get your product in the hands of your customers. But a big part of the sales role is to deliver a solution to a clearly understood problem. And so get back to focusing on making sure you understand the problem space. And that's a lot more listening than it is talking because customers are trying to figure out what their biggest problems are as they evolve right now. And then the last thing I would say is, you know, shift from promotion to education. So our teams have spent a lot of time in the last several months talking about best practices and automation and how to how to improve remote working environments, etc. Without selling. One other thing I guess I would add is that make sure your customers are getting value out of the investments they've already made, because they're all going to be looking for ways to save money. And if they can't see that the products and services you've delivered to them are essential, you know, high on the priority list, delivering clear, quantifiable value, then you know, you're going to be up for a little bit of a haircut at renewal or potentially, you know, turn it renewal. And on the flip side, if you can demonstrate to your customer that you care about them getting value from the investments they've already made, that's going to go a long way to the long term customer relationship.

Awesome. I love that. That's great. Another question. How do you think about building and reinforcing company culture in an environment like today's?

Well, I mean, I've been a very obnoxiously loud proponent of culture being strategic and not something that you do because you know you have to do it. You do it because it actually drives better business outcomes and better employee experiences. And so I think one, if you have a strong culture, lean into it, continue to develop it, and think about how that culture manifests itself and the decisions that you need to make and the way you need to prioritize. And so, you know, from, from a cultural perspective, you know, one of our cultural values is champion the customer. And so really helping our entire company understand some of the challenges our customers were feeling when, when Covid started really impacting the economy became a big part of my job, like making sure they could see the world through the lens of our customers. We talk about being forward and outward, even though all we really want to do is talk about how hard it is to work at home and how long this is taking and how difficult it's been. So, you know, lean into those values, but think about how they manifest themselves in the, in the way the world's presenting itself to you. Another one is people first. I mean, for us, people first means really checking in on people's wellbeing. As I mentioned, another one of our values is bring yourself. And you know, that's never been more important given the civil unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement and frankly, the failure that we've seen to really create equitable opportunities for all people. And that's something that we've doubled down to and really committed to. But it's also meant you've got to have a lot of open and uncomfortable and some painful conversations to get to the right next steps. And I think as a leader, if you're not open to doing that, you're not open to learning and you're not really open to advancing your business to be more equitable and, and more inclusive.

Yeah, similar question or I think a great transition to another question is what recommendations do you have to embed social responsibility into company culture?

Well, I talked about what pledge 1% was something we did. We took that pledge between our series C and our series D, which was super late actually, because at that point in time your equity already has a very high value. So it's dilutive to everybody in the cap table to set aside a point of equity for social good. But we felt like it was super important to link our business strategy and our product to a broader purpose beyond capitalism. And then we got employees heavily involved in that. So we have mass programs twice a year on volunteer weeks within the business so that employees get out into the communities. We also a lot of our employee resource groups drive charitable drives and volunteer activities. And then we give employees 20 hours a week or 20 hours a year to volunteer. And we've expanded the definition of volunteer work. So that includes personal activism, peaceful demonstration and even voting and voter activation. And all of those things we do to engage employees in our goals around social impact, which is to improve time sensitive global health access and care for people that don't currently have it and to create sustainable and equitable communities around us. I mean, I'm a big believer in creating access to people maybe with less traditional backgrounds to roles in tech. I have a liberal arts degree. I come from a small town and a lower middle class family. And I'm not your typical deep Technology Enterprise SaaS Tech CEO. And I was fortunate that that access was created for me and that I was able to find or create opportunities in my career. But not everybody has as equal of a shot. So think about where you're hiring people. Now that we're getting the hang of remote work, the barriers to being in certain geographies should come down and the axis should go up. But it's not going to happen overnight. Instead of thinking about creating a funnel of opportunities, think about how you leverage your employees to build access for people to learn about opportunities in your company. Think about it through the lens of the candidate instead of the lens of the recruiter.

Great, thank you. Question more about how you guys are approaching this. What's been the hardest thing you face in the last six months when it comes to doubling down on your company's competitive advantage?

Slideshare and Zoom. I mean, I clearly suck at that. No, the hardest thing that we faced in terms of doubling down the advantage first was isolating it. Because, you know, like I said, I think we all feel like we're good at many things. We have multiple engines for growth. And one of the single biggest challenges in a high growth company or a high growth startup is that you have so many opportunities or directions you can go in and lack of focus will kill you. And that's even more true today when you got constrained resources, constrained time, employees that may not be as productive or in some cases more productive than they used to be. Focus really, really matters. And I think getting your employee, you're getting your team to sort of name and agree on what the one or two strategic advantages are and then look at all of your initiatives and activities and figure out like, is this serving that advantage, strengthening that advantage or not? And if it's not, then what's the business case for keeping it? Why should we continue? Likewise, what's the business case for canceling it to double down on the, on the strategic effort. So much of it too is about driving alignment through the organization. And this is still a work in progress for us. You know, we, we have really expanded and increased the amount of communication we have with the employee base. I do weekly ask me anythings, we do monthly town halls. On top of that, we're doing fireside chats with leaders who are sharing some of how they're hacking their way through all of this. And we're also, all of the leaders in my team of managers are doing more check ins than I think we've ever done with our employees. And as we've gotten video fatigue, we're even trying to be inventive in ways to do that. But all of that's in service of making sure people are aligned to the people are well first and they're aligned to the right priorities second. And third, you're learning, you're learning what's happening in the organization, you're learning what's working and what's not so that you can constantly be readjusting. I just had a conversation with my team this week and there was talk about annual planning and I'm like, we have to forget annual planning. We have to plan on a rolling basis. We need a long term, three to five year plan and we need to constantly be evolving, you know, the plan that we have today with a clear set of priorities. And that's where really isolating that advantage is important.

Great. And there was a question about kind of competing priorities. You know, with companies, a lot of new priorities are popping up with, whether it's how to address the pandemic and everything going on or something internally with their organization. Any other advice for prioritization or how companies can handle, you know, the big projects or priorities that now have gotten pushed to the bottom of the list.

It's such a hard thing and, you know, I just want to acknowledge that, like I can get up here and give a talk and make it sound like we got it all nailed and it's so easy. Prioritization and focus and then aligning people around those priorities, particularly as they shift, is really hard and it doesn't happen overnight. But I think one of the things that can help is, you know, staying focused on the North Star. And in our case, like the North Star is our customers. And to take that one step further, just given the environment that we're in, the North Star is the long term relationship with our customers. Right. Which means typically in the past you were protecting revenue and trying to protect growth and improve your expansion, et cetera. But if you have a customer that has true financial hardship, then I want to prioritize keeping that customer and keeping them engaged and helping them through this, knowing that it's a long term partnership and that after, you know, after this is over and you know, we move on to maybe a more normal world, post vaccine, et cetera, then in that environment, that customer is going to demonstrate that loyalty to us. But that's, you know, you have to really think about the partnership as opposed to living transactionally quarter to quarter or funding round to funding round, et cetera. And you know, if you're in a position where cash is constrained and you're worried about raising cash and worried about the longevity of your company and your customer relationships, all I would say is like, rip the band aid off fast. The death by a thousand cuts is hard. Cut harder than you think you need to because some of it will grow back. But cut hard so that in service of the long game, in service of being able to continue to deliver the commitments you made to your customers already and in some cases your shareholders, and that's a really hard thing, we hire our employees. I mean, I love our company, I love our employees. And when you have to, when you're in a hard position where you have to make decisions to reduce your cost run rate, which no one likes to talk about in the growth world, that's a very personal thing. It's where empathy really matters. And I think, you know, we've seen recently in the last several months. It's where transparency really matters. I think being honest and heartfelt and thoughtful about how you manage these transitions is just as important as the strategy behind the transition itself. I cannot hear you for some reason. There you go.

I thought I was on mute.

We're good. I thought. I love that.

And we have time for one more question. So you mentioned Brad Smith from Intuit. Who are other leaders that you respect in terms of how they approach culture?

I mean, gosh, I have so many. I mean, Eric Yuan and I have been friends for a long time and we were on the road for IPO together. And I mean, I'm so incredibly happy for him and his success. But I'm not surprised because he's always been relentlessly focused on customer happiness. And he's always been just phenomenally transparent and honest. And that is so refreshing. Right? And when someone is open and honest and vulnerable with you, it allows you to open up and share some of the things that you're worried about. And suddenly now we're both learning and building and growing together. And so, you know, he would be one person. Elena Gomez is an audit chair. She's the audit chair on our board. And she's just a. She learns out loud. She just asks some of the most insightful, thoughtful questions. But she does it in a way that feels like she's kind of on our team working with us. And that's made me think a lot about, you know, my behavior as a board member, my behavior as a leader. We tend to be interrogative. It can set. We tend to be hardest on the people we care the most about. And really like looking at it through the lens of how do I learn more so that I can support the board and the management team. Learning more, I think, has really been important. Zach Nelson is another person on our board. And I remember when I came in to an early board meeting, I'm on the Essay Lauder board and they have a big position in China. And so I saw Covid happening earlier than maybe we felt it in North America. And when I started talking about it with the board, I remember Zach saying, like, look, you know, all of your growth could go to zero. And that's okay because it's going to be about fortifying the business, focusing on those long term customer relationships and building it back over time. But, like, he wasn't panicking. He was sharing a lot of his experience. And I think many of you are building your boards and thinking about independent directors. It is never too early to bring on an independent that has experience, experience that's sat in your chair before, that has CEO or executive or operator empathy, but also can help you, like, not repeat the mistakes that maybe they made and learned from, or look ahead, further ahead, and anticipate some of the things that you're going to need to plan for and invest in. So I'm so lucky that I have so many peers within the SAS industry as well. And we get together frequently to really share ideas and frankly, even for a little therapy, because there's a reason they say it's a lonely job and you do have a choice to not make it be as lonely, but you need to be open and you also need to give back. Right? I mean, we're sharing things from our teams across some of these big challenges in service of taking care of employees more broadly, not just building competitive advantage within our companies. And I think that's the right choice for this moment.

Sure. Well, Jen, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time. We really appreciate it, welcoming us into your home. These slides and the recording will be available. Just make sure that you guys subscribe to the Sasa YouTube and follow us on Twitter.

Jen, thank you again. Thank you so much for having me and I hope everybody stays well and wear your masks, please. Let's try and stop the spread of this thing and get back to business. Thanks and have a great day.