Navigating Tension: Learning from Struggle in Product and Sales Collaboration

We’re featuring another popular session from ELC Annual 2023 – welcome to “Healthy Tension: GTM & Product/Eng Collaboration at Hundreds of Millions ARR Scale” with Tido Carriero, (Co-Founder @ Koala and Former VPE @ Segment) and Joe Morrissey (General Partner @ a16z & Former CRO @ Segment)! Tido & Joe share stories from the beginning of their partnership at Segment, including their first cross-functional annual planning meeting. They highlight lessons learned from those early days and how others can implement annual planning session frameworks to develop value drivers for their org in order to better serve customers & create products with value. Joe & Tido also cover how to build a healthy, trusting relationship between product & eng when it comes to building / executing a successful GTM strategy.

ABOUT TIDO CARREIRO

Tido is the Co-Founder & CEO of Koala. Prior to Koala, he led the Product & Engineering team at Segment from less than $5M in ARR to their $3.2B acquisition by Twilio.

“I had been at Segment for four years. The big unlock for me and I think what I needed to lean into more in retrospect from a trust perspective was that Joe was really going to be a different kind of go to market partner. We had zoomed way out. We had looked at a multi-year strategy, not just a list of 25 features and ordering them quarter by quarter by quarter.”

- Tido Carriero   

ABOUT JOE MORRISSEY

Joe Morrissey is a general partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining a16z, Joe was chief revenue officer at Segment, where he scaled revenues to upwards of $200M ARR in advance of the company’s $3.2B acquisition by Twilio. Before Segment, he was was the EMEA vice president and general manager for three open source software companies: Hortonworks, which combined with Cloudera in a $5.2B merger in 2019; MongoDB, which went public in 2017; and MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1B in 2008. Joe holds a bachelor’s degree in business studies from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He currently serves on the boards of Neon Inc., and Hopsworks AB and lives in Menlo Park with his wife and two kids.

"You've got to go through this tension and I think one of the things that can happen is you avoid the tension, you avoid the conflict, you say yes to things that maybe you're not comfortable with both on the product and on the go to market side then the plan goes wrong, right? So I really think like the tension is the critical thing and that the struggle is the critical thing and that's where the learning is.”

- Joe Morrissey   

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SHOW NOTES:

• Joe’s first impressions of Tido & the beginning of their relationship (2:28)
• The story of their low point & working together on annual planning (5:32)
• What was agreed on in the annual planning session (7:44)
• Focusing on value drivers & building a trusting GTM partnership (10:55)
• Why it’s necessary to embrace tension in order to drive growth (15:01)
• Tido’s lessons learned leading eng product & sales @ Koala (16:05)
• Audience Q&A: Frameworks for narrowing down value drivers (19:00)
• The importance of cross-functional participation in planning sessions (22:21)
• An inside look at the exercise of identifying value drivers (24:02)
• How deep should salespeople go on the product? (26:27)
• How does annual planning change day-to-day operations for the year? (27:56)
• Describing the Lighthouse program (30:10)
• Reorganizing the org to meet the three identified value drivers (32:32)
• Engineering leadership’s involvement during the annual plan (35:24)
• Strategy behind building a platform (38:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Video version of this episode
• More sessions from ELC Annual

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/