3 leadership lessons for growth oriented IoT companies

#1 - Lead Through The Company's Vision

Everything else has failed me in providing a source of inspiration. Market excitement tends to fade away once you are part of the industry. Strategy changes over time - so if you tie your leadership to the strategy - people will get confused once you have to adjust it. Quarterly revenue or big deals are only good for a short term high. All these things are not enough. Leadership through inspiration, based on my limited experience, is the only way to align and lead your team, your customers and yourself if you want to hang around for more than a few years.

Over here at Kontakt.io we try to do this with a Vision-to-OKR framework. Kontakt.io's vision is to digitalize the physical world. Our objective in the next years is to become the most impactful and innovative beacon player globally. We measure this through different metrics across departments on a quarterly basis - on the volume of devices we ship among others.

One way for checking whether we are consistent is listening to our team's sales pitch. For example, here, when we met Stephen Statler at the RFID Journal Live in Phoenix last week.

Who is really great at this? Take a look at Zuora's pitch deck - I believe it ticks all the boxes. You can get the full deck here.

#2 - Reward Being Laser Focused

To me these are natural forces. I focus, and I get distracted. With my personal tasks, in supporting my team, in supporting the CEO. For me, the single most crucial element to focus on is your role in the value chain and the respective customers you want to serve. Focus on a set of problems. On a vertical. On a region. Focus on anything. How do I test it? Check how often the sales and leadership team says, "No, we won't do 'X' as it is not our focus because it does not support our vision and objectives". Test this by approaching our amazing sales team with a project. Then listen to the questions they ask - and the answers they give you.

Who is really great at this? Check out Samsara's website and "About us" section. It's very rare to see a new (nevertheless super experienced, co-founders of Meraki, secured a $25m round from A16Z) IoT company arise with such a focused go-to-market strategy. They are not even using the words "IoT" or "AI" on their website. That's true focus on the customer's problems. Because quite frankly, none of our customers cares about these two things.

#3 - Hire And Care For The "Growth" Mindset

Unless you're a world class, experienced team of ex-Cisco SVPs like our friends over at MIST Systems, it becomes hard to succeed otherwise.

Markets are not defined. Borders change. Customers change. Companies change. Learning and adapting is key - it's stressful as well. And very few people can really handle it. I avoid the stress if I can in the long run. Most can't and don't want to - and that's fine. But you have to embrace change and be comfortable with it. You have to optimise for learning - and not for winning or minimising loss. To succeed you need to be ultra critical of yourself. Ask question after question, day in, day out.

Read Steffen's posts on Medium - he has one of the greatest growth mindsets I have met and hired thus far. He dedicates several hours a week to pure learning. In the last 12 months at Kontakt.io he has gained 3+ years of product management experience - not because we are a start-up, not because of his background - but simply because he has the natural curiosity and is willing to put in the extra work of reading, absorbing, applying and learning the new.

Note: I only give myself a C in all the above categories. However I had to put this post out there as it helps me to publicly remind me what I want to focus on as an executive managing a team of 20+ across departments and timezones at Kontakt.io. Hopefully it helps you a bit as well - as a leader or as a customer trying to understand what we are about and what it's like on the other side.