Why Product @ Paperless Parts?

If you’re reading this then you likely have at least a passing interest in Paperless Parts and the Product Management team here. Maybe you’ve seen our hiring blitz – we’re hiring a lot of people across the entire company! Maybe your background is in manufacturing or design and you’re excited about the prospect of working at a customer-centric small startup. Maybe you’re a seasoned product manager who is looking for a new challenge. These are all great reasons to be thinking about Paperless.

Before we dive into the product, our customers, and our business, I should introduce myself I’m a Boston-area native, growing up in Brookline and attending Brandeis. There, I made the financially wise decision to pursue a combined BA/MA in Comparative History. I almost stayed to do a PhD, but didn’t because in the back of my head I knew that path wouldn’t stretch me outside of my comfort zone. Instead, I entered the job market and spent the first few years kicking around a few software companies.

My product career was entirely accidental. In high school and into my professional career, I moonlighted as a mediocre software developer. I mostly wrote little bots and scripts that helped me do my job better. I ended up getting into SEO and paid campaign management and took a job at a direct to consumer eCommerce company back in 2012. After about six months on the job, they asked me if I wanted to become their first product manager and help them prioritize enhancements and changes to their proprietary ad tracking technology.

Most of my career has been a crash course in figuring it out on my own and it wasn’t until I arrived at Salsify that I felt like I developed a network of mentors and role models to help me understand what good looked like as a PM. This experience, struggling to understand my role and how to contribute, is a big factor in why I choose to manage people now. I don’t want my direct reports to have the same experience I had – I want to provide a solid foundation on which they can launch or grow their careers.?

If you think of your career as a movie, I can firmly say that Paperless is in the part I’ve already seen. I was the first individual contributor product manager hired at Salsify (~70 employees) and I helped drive the company to over 750 people and $100 million. I managed the core product, spearheading and then overseeing new functionality which underpinned about $40 million of new sales. In my last two years there, I managed a team of three overseeing the suite of core offerings at Salsify.?

The most fun I’ve ever had as a product manager was at Salsify. When we were in the midst of deploying critical enterprise functionality, I spent my days bouncing from customer interviews and feedback calls, to design and engineering sessions, and to sales calls where we were showing mocks and designs to prospective customers. The most satisfying part of the project was that at the end we not only delivered something that seriously leveled up our users and made them look like heroes, we unblocked a critical sales issue which was preventing prospective customers from seeing the true value of our platform.

Paperless is in the exact same spot and it’s fun. It’s a chance to build skills that you’ll never acquire in another situation -- we have a lot to figure out in terms of how we build our product, how we operate as a company, and the path we'll take to scale (there are almost too many good opportunities). You’ll get thrown into all sorts of new situations and challenges and be empowered and supported to tackle them.

Outside of work, I spend most of my time trying to be active through cycling or racing sailboats (no, that’s not as fancy as it sounds -- the club I race out of is much closer to the Grand Budapest Hotel than the New York Yacht Club). I’m also a big fan of books with my go-to genre being science fiction, though I read anything and everything. Best books? Hyperion is the best science fiction book I’ve ever read, The Shadow of the Wind is probably my favorite novel, and Blood Meridian is simply too outstanding to be left off of any list.

Our Philosophy

Play the Game Well

A fundamental truth about product management is that you won’t win every hand you’re dealt.?

In fact, you’re likely going to lose or push a good number of them. The key to becoming excellent in this role is to learn how to play each hand as best you can. It’s a lot like poker (before you ask, I don’t play poker at all) – you are dealt hands of random cards and the best players are able to use environmental cues, competitor behavior, mathematics, and intuition to determine how to play a hand. The key takeaway though is that you can play a hand perfectly and still lose!

That’s why poker is a much better analog for product management than a game like chess. Chess is a game of complete information where chance, luck, and personality have little to no sway in the outcome. Theoretically, given a position on a board you can compute who will win regardless of what your opponent does. Product isn’t like that at all. You’re making an educated and informed series of guesses based on data you're observing from the outside world. You never truly “know” you’re right, which is why you do things like deliver small incremental units of value to check that you’re on the right track, constantly interview customers, and take in feedback from the organization. You’re trying to build the most probabilistically correct understanding of a given problem and solution. It’s too expensive and time-consuming to be 100% certain and, by the time you are, someone else will have beaten you to the opportunity.

This is an important distinction because becoming a great product manager means not only focusing on the outcome and the underlying process. We very much believe in celebrating the wins – “sell the dream” is how we talk about internally, but as a coach, I focus a lot of my energy on helping ensure that we’re playing each hand as best we can. We don’t want to go through the motions of validating our opportunities, we want to make sure we’re taking every opportunity to examine our process and figure out what could be better.

That means that smashing successes get equal scrutiny as underwhelming feature launches – there’s always something to learn, always something to do better. My job on the team is to help look at your hands, dissect what is happening, and suggest ways to play it. If you stumble, that’s okay! Let’s take a look together at what you knew and did. Was there a process breakdown? Did we lack a process?

Make (the Right) Mistakes

To me, you cannot learn without making mistakes. When we develop product managers here, we embrace the fact that they’re going to make mistakes as they grow. The key is that we try to have appropriate guardrails in place. I never let my team make catastrophic mistakes that I see coming, but rather I try to give them advice and let them make decisions. It’s far more impactful to live a small-scale stressful event rather than have seemingly arbitrary written policies. As you grow in your career, you get fewer guardrails and eventually you graduate to making net-new mistakes that none of us have experienced before.

My role here isn’t to be the subject matter expert. We have so many smart people (and need so many more!) who deeply understand the manufacturing space. Instead, I came here to help build a team. I do that through a lot of coaching, a lot of document review, and a lot of conversations. Our roadmaps are generated by combining strategic initiatives which a team might not discover on their own (for instance, work required to execute a partnership) with bottoms-up data from the teams about what is most critical to address.

Sell the Dream

To me, “selling the dream” is one of the most important core skills of being a product manager. If you think about it, your job is to align stakeholders around your vision (which is often an aggregated vision from across the company), to get your engineers fired up about working on a project, and to hop on the phone with a customer or prospect and sell them the value of your product.?

Why Paperless Parts?

There are three reasons I came to Paperless Parts: the people, the opportunity, and the mission. It's rare that you can meaningfully impact small and medium sized businesses across the country alongside kind, intelligent, and passionate coworkers in an industry that is absolutely essential to our modern way of life.?

The People

From a people perspective, Jason sets the tone here and, the minute you meet him, you get it. He’s a rare blend of business savvy and compassion which makes him an exceptional leader. He’s dedicated to his craft of leading and spends an enormous amount of time trying to understand how to do his job better, how to mirror what other successful companies have done, and how to motivate and align the entire company around key objectives.

It didn’t take me long into our first call to realize that Jason was not only someone I respected immensely, but someone who would push me to do my best. He’s the kind of person who will be in the office at 7 am emptying the dishwasher and still there at 7pm chatting with someone about their career, their hobbies, or the company. He has a strong vision for what the business should be (and more importantly, what it shouldn’t be!), a deep understanding of the manufacturing industry, and an outward personality that is reflected across the entire organization.

The rest of our company follows Jason’s lead. The people I work with every day are dedicated to our mission, focused on making our customers successful, and open to change / new ideas / new ways of working.

The Opportunity

Beyond our people, the opportunity in front of us is tremendous and Paperless is uniquely positioned to capitalize on it.?

No, really. Manufacturing is a difficult space. The perception is that our customers don’t like change, dislike new technology, and are so hesitant to adopt software that selling to them is fruitless. The perception is that the market is too fractured to be interesting to a software company.

And, yes, the market is fractured. And, yes, the software they do use is outdated, on-premise and is about as user-friendly as Windows 95. They’re routinely ignored by their vendors and are charged huge dollars for products which barely work. But the reality is that this fractured market is hungry for new solutions, eager to change, and looking for help.

There’s a generational change happening in US manufacturing as most shops are in the process of being passed to the next generation or sold to private equity. These new players are looking to modernize the shop floor and are especially concerned about losing the tribal knowledge of their parents’ generation; estimating the cost of a job is equal parts science and intuition built over decades of experience. Letting that type of information walk out the door into retirement would cripple most shops’ ability to win new profitable business.

In addition, this market is facing a huge labor shortage. From machinists to programmers to estimators, there are many, many more job openings than there are bodies interested in filling them. And what’s strange is that these aren’t bad jobs! They pay well, some offer benefits, and once you have experience you have a huge amount of job security.

This is a $200+ billion industry which is absolutely essential to our modern economy. Our shops make everything from rocket components, to airplanes, to race cars. They make brackets that go into soda machines, screws, rods, and plates that go into your body during surgery, and the railings, signposts, and traffic lights you see every day. For businesses like Bose, SpaceX, Tesla, Ford, GM, Stryker, and John Deere these shops are vital to product innovation, serving as the physical equivalent of AWS. They enable US-based companies to iterate quickly on designs by delivering rapid (sometimes overnight!) prototypes for field testing. They make long-run production, too. This includes everything from parts for aircraft to the components that go into infrared sensors, to the medical equipment doctors rely on every day.

After working at Paperless, you’ll look at the world differently. You’ll see how many things we all just assume are made in a factory are actually made in bits and pieces by hand using computer-controlled high-precision cutting machines. It’s truly eye-opening.

The Mission

Our goal is to be the ally of the 35,000 machine shops in the United States.?

We’re helping them solve front-office labor shortage problem by making their existing estimators much more efficient (going from quoting parts in days to hours), making it easier to onboard new estimators (no more futzing around in excel), and reducing the mistakes (most shops have horror stories of losing tens of thousands of dollars on a job because of a mistake in estimating or purchasing). We’re not automating people out of work, we’re filling gaps that are never going to be addressed by people.?

We’re helping them win new business by responding to requests for quotes faster, giving them a professional look when interacting with their customers, and providing them with insights that help them understand which jobs they should prioritize based on past historical win rates.

This time frees them up to spend more time with their families, invest in sustainable practices, and grow as a result of new opportunities. And that’s not just some marketing nonsense. Kim Sweeney, whose father left his corporate job to start a machine shop, describes the experience of her dad coming home from a long day of work and then spending all night trying to get quotes out the door. Our customers depend on us to get their jobs done.

Ultimately, our mission is to be manufacturers’ closest ally, a business they look to as an accelerator to their own, one which uniquely understands their problems and offers innovative solutions and out-of-the-box ideas so that this absolutely essential sector can modernize, grow, and thrive. Coming here isn’t coming into a role where you’re selling software that’s one of several “apps” used by software companies to sell software to other companies; you’re coming here because you want to make a meaningful impact on real people and help drive the next wave of innovation in this country.

Want to learn more? Check out our careers page or reach out to me on LinkedIn.