The End of our Tech Childhood
Since the start of Covid, I've developed an anxiety about how my career, and society as a whole, is going to end up in my lifetime. It feels like the social fabric has been torn and we're unwilling or unable to fix it. I feel like a pawn in other peoples games and I've struggled with what I can do to change it.
I feel like my naive innocence for what we do in tech has met the brutal reality of an industry that's growing up.
I've found solace in biographies and historical novels as it's clear that our fears are certainly not unique - even if the circumstances are new (rec's below)
One of the common themes from every biography is that unless people like us create the future, our fears for how things will be are likely to become true.
At 33, I have doubts about how I will provide for my family for the next 30 years working in tech. The direction its going feels hollow, manufactured, and unsustainable.
So how do we create the future we want?
Two mouths and one ear
Very few creators built the future by pontificating on what great invention they alone could imagine. In most instances the creators went out into the world and saw people and their problems for what they were, and created their solution around them.
I think part of the reason tech has found itself in this chasm of doubt is we've developed two mouths for every ear. That is - we are not listening to each other.
When I started Relevance , I thought I could take what I had individually had success with and build it into a software and *poof* problem solved. However, the more conversations I've had, the more I've realized that what our early adopters really needed was somebody to hear them and their problems - not just to tell them their problems had been solved.
And so we've listened and my goodness was I wrong about what was needed.
We started this company with the goal of helping sellers source revenue from partners and that is still true. However, before we can help partner teams we've realized we need to help revenue teams first.
So what are our revenue teams saying?
The past few months have been hard for all of us. Here's what we keep hearing:
We're scared for the future.
Many of our organizations have laid off us or our friends, pulled-back on investing in our development, and while many executive teams have discussed how difficult a decision it was - very few are making different decisions to prevent it happening again.
We're tired and would rather just go through the motions
One of the biggest challenges we face as a startup right now is not from competition, it's from apathy of our buyers. We get it, we're tired too.
Both buyers and sales leadership don't respect us as sellers
Direct approaches feel like a marriage that isn't working anymore. Our buyers and sellers have not been communicating with each other for so long that it's not clear if we need revenue therapy or a fresh start. It's not helped by the fact that in tough times sellers are defined by their targets regardless of how unrealistic they are.
Partnerships is full of talkers that don't help us
Partnerships feels like the step-child in the relationship. While it's loved by our revenue parents, sellers aren't totally sure what to do with us. Further, partner teams aren't really sure what to do with themselves. How exactly is having a partnership agreement helpful if it doesn't have an integration or marketing as to why it's important?
The only things I do are those required to do my job because everyone else is doing the same.
The combination of the rise of individual remote-work, the private-sector obsession about growth above profits, and the public-sector willingness to print money to solve problems has led to a cacophony of noise and what feels like the drowning out of non-shareholders. What is the advantage of doing more?
How can we create a better future?
领英推荐
My heart hurts when I talk with revenue teams. I believe there is so much pain below the surface for many of us and an acceptance that this is the future.
#1 We need collaboration software that listens before it executes
When you peel back the onion of what revenue teams and buyers are strulgging with, the most common theme is "nobody is listening to me".
In it's literal definition, collaboration is about working together but somehow that word has shifted to getting things done.
#2 We need prioritization advice that helps us choose what to do next
The next common problem we've heard is that I have 1,000 things that I'm expected to do and not enough time. We've boiled this down to an issue of priortiziation. It's not that we're expected to get evertying done but rather that we're expected to choose the right things to do first.
#3 We need tools that enable the people that do the work...to do the work
The third common problem we've heard is that there are multiple systems that track or monitor what I do but almost none that enable me to do my job better. Even tools like Gong, Outreach, and Salesloft are being used primarley as monitoring tools not enablement tools.
#4 We need tools that help buyers self-qualify for what they need
Lastly, the biggest problem we've heard from buyers is that they know they have problems that software could help them with - but they have no idea where to start in discovering the best combination of solutions and they don't want to sit through multiple "qulaification" calls and demo's and have to figure out how to stitch it together themselves
The rise of the partnerships engineer
When we sat down to map out where our current product roadmap would take us, it became clear that the current set of roles & responsibilites would likely need to change for what we're trying to acheive.
Revenue teams want productivity software and partner teams want project management software. However, buyers want solution architecture software.
In that vein, we believe that as more partner programs find success through tools like us that there will be a strong need for a "partnerships engineer"
We already have "solution engineers" who aritect the customer solution on behalf of our own product. As enterprise deals become larger and more integrated, we are going to need internal resources who are customer experts on how our product fits into the larger market.
We haven't seen this role exist to date - but we'd love to hear from you if you know of a company that does have this role!
The Boggle
One of the best employee perks I had was access to the?Daily Calm ?app. There was one particular talk called "The Boggle" from?Jeff Warren ?which I regulalry come back to when I'm feeling down:?
Sometimes we’re in the boggle, life is throwing everything at us: complicated situations, complicated relationships, we have all these feelings, all these impulses pulling us in different directions, and we have no idea what to do. No idea how to resolve it all. Even no idea what self-care strategy to implement right now. So what’s interesting about the boggle is that there’s the challenge of the situation itself, or situations, and there’s the added challenge of the confusion of it, the scrambling to make sense of everything. So we’re going to try something different, we’re going to stop scrambling and accept, even forgive, the boggle. We’re going to let ourselves be right here, inside any confusion, and take a break from trying to fix any of it. That’s the itinerary, let’s go.?
I think revenue teams, and tech in general, is in the boggle.
Sometimes we need to be present with ourselves and our peers before we can fix anything.
Keep the faith.
Love,
Tom
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