Diary of a FinTech CMO: How to Get your Old School Tech Company Thinking Like a Startup

First, we looked to our foundation- our core Craft. This is the product or service that differentiates your company to your customers/users and, hopefully creates sustained growth.

For TT, our craft is technology, specifically technology for traders. So, we went to our end users to better understand how to build for the future. From that insight, we build a new platform from the ground up. Plus, internally we organized our product development teams for a more agile environment and streamlined decision making.

The end result? We went from our legacy, install-based, software platform to an SaaS delivery model and a hybrid-cloud infrastructure. While this has proven to be a fairly radical transition for our industry, it allows for greater flexibility to address user’s needs, faster updates, newer functionality and the ability for users to access our technology from anywhere via tablet, mobile, etc. And, we were ahead of the curve.

Key learnings from the ‘Craft’ are:

• Be user-centric. While it may seem intuitive, at a large global company (or even a small one), it’s easy to get away from anticipating your customer’s/user’s needs;
• Set a vision, and if need be, pivot dramatically with your leadership to drive it across and through your organization;
• Obsess on the details in pursuit of that vision;
• Organize internally, so teams and workflows can be as nimble as possible.

In conjunction with Craft we had to take a hard look at Communication. As the marketing guy, this is my favorite. But, this wasn’t the flashy stuff like advertising and PR. This was focused internally to create new ways to share information, establish a higher level of transparency (sharing both the good and bad) and to get buy-in and alignment among all departments.

As mentioned above, we were changing many things at TT at one time- the product, department structure, leadership and even our physical offices.

We needed to get everyone on the same page and engaged as a cohesive team globally toward the end goal.

It can be challenging to do this at a startup, but typically, at least everyone is in the same room. With a global company, we had to learn how to effectively communicate across 13 offices on 5 continents.

Key Learnings from refocusing our “Communication,” are:

• Establish and live by the company vision and goals;
• Embark on “listening tours,” where leadership can hear first-hand about concerns, challenges, wins, etc. and share vision and goals in-person with as many employees as possible;
• Launch monthly “all-hands” meetings (in person, Google Hang, conf call- whatever it takes.) to share product updates, challenges that are being addressed, customer successes, team wins, etc.
• Put more focus on effective comm channels like internal newsletters, G+ or email updates direct from leadership, daily social media feeds, etc.
• Most importantly, no matter how you communicate, make it consistent, make it honest (share the challenges too) and make it fun.

There’s a lot written out there about the importance of corporate Culture. It’s the DNA of any organization, but can be tough to define. Through our process, we decided that Craft (in our case our technology) plus Communication (from leadership, among co-workers, with partners, customers and the community) leads to Culture.

With the aforementioned changes, some that ‘rocked the boat’ a bit, we knew TT culture needed special focus in order to preserve what was strong, yet evolve for the future.

And, we knew our most important asset, our lifeblood, is our people.

So, we refocused on growth and professional development for our team, but also identified gaps and made new hires as needed to help us move forward.

We also made the decision to flatten the organization. Today, many TT employees wear many hats in order to gain cross-functional experience and a deeper understanding of how departments affect each other. For example, our C-level folks often sit in open spaces with the development team and, at times, even code side by side with them.

We knew that flexible work schedules and environment were also very important and a ‘must have,’ when competing for scarce, tech talent. We went through major renovations to support a mobile workplace and opened up our space to create areas for collaboration as well as recreation and respite. Craft beer on tap also helps. . .

Key Learnings from nurturing our Culture are:

• Continually evaluate talent. Identify where you can close gaps by fostering growth and professional dev from within, but also by bringing in fresh blood;
• While modeling culture is everyone’s responsibility, leadership must drive change by living their words through action;
• Create a work environment that is conducive to supporting your company’s personality. This includes everything from office spaces and common areas to flexible work schedules and benefits. From our experience, making this a focus really helps to cultivate happiness, engender loyalty and generate greater creativity and productivity.

While the TT ‘reinvention’ is not complete, we’ve come a long way. The new SaaS-delivered TT platform, which has been available for just over a year now, is the fastest commercially available platform on the market. Qualitatively, employee morale is noticeably higher, our global offices are much more in sync and we’re growing. Over the last year, we’ve hired around 80 new employees around the world.

Getting your organization thinking like a startup after 20 years isn’t easy. It requires a deep dive from the inside out. And, driving the change that needs to happen can be challenging at times. That being said, if you don’t make your people the core focus, you won’t have an outstanding product or company that’s poised to evolve to meet tomorrow’s landscape.

In subsequent posts, I will be sharing more details of our reinvention, through the lense of the 3-C’s -Craft, Communication, and Culture- as well as provide updates on TT’s continued evolution.

I look forward to your thoughts, questions and feedback.

Until next time,

Brian Mehta, CMO, Trading Technologies