Streamlining Marketing Operations for Successful Product Launch

Announcer: Welcome to The Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Chad Franzen: Chad Franzen here, co-host of The Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Past guests include David Allen of Getting Things Done and Michael Gerber of The E-Myth, and many more.

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Chad Franzen: Carleen Pan has more than a decade of go-to-market experience, building, operationalizing, and launching new products and revenue opportunities in B2C and B2B industries. Most recently, she was at Videri, where she built out a new division of the company and led it’s go-to-market strategy and launch. She now consults for companies as a fractional COO and does go-to-market strategy consulting. Carleen, thanks so much for joining me. How are you?

Carleen Pan: Hi, thanks for having me.

Chad Franzen: Hey, so tell me a little bit about the consulting that you dom and then we’ll talk more about what you did for Videri.

Carleen Pan: Yeah, so I have a nontypical background where I think early on in my career, I graduated college. Didn’t know what I wanted to do and I realized I was just kind of working a lot of random projects and I realized that the main alignment between all these projects is I’m always solving problems. I’m also always helping companies get to market. Usually founders are hiring me when they’ve missed every single launch target date and like, “We needed this out yesterday.”

Carleen Pan: I got really good at understanding how to work with companies to figure out how to get them to market, and that means I’m generally working across a lot of different roles within the company. I’m understanding what the product is. I’m understanding like where we are with partnerships. I’m understanding like what our marketing is and really building out the very early infrastructure. I call it building processes until I’m replaceable, while also like simultaneously working with the product teams to build out all this infrastructure before we get to launch.

Chad Franzen: What was your educational background?

Carleen Pan: I majored in financial economics and sociology, which is a really good framework because economics is essentially working with like ambiguous information sets and trying to figure out, “If we move these levers, then what happens?” Then, sociology is very much about understanding like movements, groups of people, which the people aspect of my job is really important. I work across a lot of different industries like B2B, B2C, and I think a very common question I get asked is like, “Oh, what industries do you like working across the most? What do you specialize in?”

Carleen Pan: The fact is I work across so many different industries, but the thing that is the hardest is really understanding founders and mentality, and then also understanding like internal culture and processes within a company. You can get like a SparkNotes or a good summary on like FinTech or HealthPack or any company and really understand like, “Hey, I’m working in this industry, it’s new.”

Carleen Pan: It’s a lot harder to kind of get this like 101 in turn like what working with a specific founder is like, what internally at a company is, or why processes are broken or what the internal politics are. Understanding these nuances and having emotional intelligence and just understanding people and how they kind of connect to each other as a dot connector, I think that’s a lot harder and only been probably like the last five or six years of my career that I’ve realized that something that I’ve always known that I’ve had is probably one of my big largest strengths.

Chad Franzen: When or how did you kind of realize that problem-solving, that tackling those big problems organizationally was something that you were good at?

Carleen Pan: I think it was just talking to different people like when I would ask… I think when I’d be at parties working in tech, there’s such a gray line between what is like work and social. Sometimes I’d overhear the way people describe what I did and everyone would always use very different words because I’m holding so many different rules internally like out of company. Sometimes you do marketing, sometimes you do business development, sometimes you do product, but I realized that the one thing that was very key that people would always say is like, “Carleen’s like the best problem-solver I know. It doesn’t matter what you’re working on. She’s really good at diagnosing what the issue is and also making sure that you’re working on the right problem.”

Carleen Pan: I think that’s only really come to mind like why that’s important as I’ve been put in situations where I’m working more closely with founders on the executive level or kind of the more connections I have working internally at a company, the better able I am to kind of diagnose these problems and work with donors to really help them solve them and making sure that we’re working on what is most mission-critical.

Chad Franzen: You were working in consultation with Videri. Why did they bring you in? What did they have you doing?

Carleen Pan: Yeah, so I was hired… Videri is a B2B hardware-software company. In New York city, it’s been the last few years that people have started seeing our product out in the wild. We are in every single New York city subway system. We are the technology partner for Outfront Media, which is the largest out-of-home advertiser in the U.S. Outfront Media is the advertising partner of the MTA, meaning that anytime you’re on the New York City Subway System and you see advertising. That used to be the boards like as you’re holding onto the subway and looking at like, “Where’s the seven train going?”, and you’d see a small ad for like Oscar Health, or if you are on the subway platform and you look across the platform and you see a large sticker that says, “Spider-Man.”

Carleen Pan: We’re the technology partner for them. We make hardware. Make it really easy for Outfront Media to better program digital ads so that they can serve different content to really target exactly who they are trying to reach. Videri was trying to built out a new division of the company. They wanted to build out consumer hardware, and my experience working really closely with founders to build out new divisions and then launch them, that’s exactly what I was brought in to do. I spent that first year working and building out this new division. Really turning it from a concept to figuring out how we are actually going to go to market. “What is our go-to-market strategy? How are we going to launch? How are we going to work in tandem with the larger parent company? Are we going to just work as a new division? Are we going to be as a completely separate company?”

Carleen Pan: These questions are really important because with hardware, we have the additional swim lane versus a normal tech company, and that hardware has a timeframe of anywhere from like one to two more years in a normal like mobile app that you’re building. We’re dealing with different funding timelines. We’re dealing with different business models, different funding needs, like how you’d work with B2B. There was an instant revenue source that was really easy that was repeatable. It’s very obvious versus consumer. It’s a much longer play, so these really large questions of asking, “We need to really figure out how we’re going to build out this company from an operational perspective because it really definitely is going to affect our actual branding.”

Carleen Pan: I think another nuance to that that’s really important is because our parent company worked with advertising and it’s very prominent, that was another reason why that nuanced difference of how we were going to approach building out our company and from the branding perspective because we don’t want the words “advertising” to be associated with a consumer hybrid product that people have in their homes. That was another reason why we were really thoughtful about that. I worked on that for the consumer division and then I worked with a larger company to figure out how to operationalize new product and revenue opportunities, and then also spending a lot of my time building internal processes and trying to manage the chaos and making sure that we at the parent company weren’t just playing defense.

Carleen Pan: I think working in startups, it’s really easy to kind of spend your day-to-day just kind of like fighting all of these problems, but not thinking about the larger product roadmap, not thinking about the larger mission a company is, how the company makes money because there’s always problems to solve, but with the limited time you have, you’re really thinking about like, “In the grand scheme of things, does this customer ticket really matter? Or should we be thinking about, ‘Hey, let’s spend more of our time building out new features rather than fixing problems that people have kind of come in on?'” Kind of like changing the approach and how we worked was what I got to spend a bunch of time doing.

Chad Franzen: Sure, sure. We’ll talk about how you helped out with the new development they were working on in a second, but you also talked about calming the chaos was something that they were already doing. What kinds of processes did you kind of help implement to calm that chaos?

Carleen Pan: Yeah, so one thing that was really interesting is I remember we were working on one of the largest product releases we had ever worked on and I asked people at the company like, “Hey, can you kind of walk me through? Can you just kind of show me the documentation on some of the past product products we’ve released?” I asked a few different people from different departments and everyone gave me a different answer ranging from, “I have no idea. Why would you be asking me? I’m not in charge of that.” To, “I don’t even know who you would ask. You really have to ask… I just know it’s not my department.” People were all sorts of generally confused. I was getting bits and scraps of like documentation, but what I saw was a very fragmented process where no one was on the same page.

Carleen Pan: Not… I don’t even think I had two or three of the same answers from any department. I noticed that people were sending release notes like via text message to the client. I was getting emails that I saw customer service was sending that were just unbranded, untrackable, and I just… It was very chaotic and I was just genuinely very confused about everything because I just couldn’t understand why we were working so hard and doing so much work, but none of it was being documented properly. None of it was scalable. That was the biggest thing. You know, none of this is scalable.

Carleen Pan: I think the way that you as a company work on things when you only have like one or two clients, it’s very different from the moment you start expanding. If you could build out a process for three or four clients and you know that you can keep that same process when you’re 15, 20, 50 clients, you’re doing less work and that should be the ideal way to think. I was really happy that I got to work with all the different departments to build out this actual release process that made sense for us internally, building out education internally at the company, making sure that we’re on the same page with, “Hey, this new release is coming out. This is what is happening in the release. Here’s all the different documentation. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page with usability. Does everyone understand what new features are coming in in the release?”

Carleen Pan: Then, documenting all of this so the client can go back and refer to it so that the client’s not coming back and asking us questions because if we can save the client asking us even like three or five questions a day, that’s quite scalable if we have like 20, 30 different clients and that’s 60 less customer tickets that we’re getting a day. Suddenly, we’re freeing up customer service’s time. That was probably one of the more exciting things we got to work on because it’s such a large, immediate impact internally at the company.

Chad Franzen: What about building operations for the new kind of department that you were brought in to help start up?

Carleen Pan: Yeah, so that was really interesting. When I had started, it was very much like a development-focused company, so every few months… There was no consistent timeline of when they were doing releases. Again, it was just very chaotic. They would ship out a new version of the app, but there had been no product roadmap, so people were just kind of shipping things based on new features that they thought would be really interesting where the founder would come in and see, but it was my job. I worked with the chief product officer and the founder to really figure out, “All right. When you say you all want to launch, what does that mean? What is the ultimate goal of the company?” It makes a difference if you were trying to tackle and say like, “We want to be a $100 million company,” or, “We just want to be this like fun idea, this fun accessory that people buy and we know we’re not going to make that much money.”

Carleen Pan: These goals are really important, so I can kind of time and make sure that our product and our business and our marketing timelines all kind of match up with that timeline. Essentially, the first thing I did was really figuring out the gaps of like, “Hey, what different departments are we going to need to build out to get to launch? Obviously, we don’t have customer service. We don’t have someone who understands like growth marketing. We don’t have anyone dedicated to actually doing partnerships.” Like I mentioned customer service, “We need a dedicated person to doing operations. We need someone to really understand. We need someone to own and understand the market competition.”

Carleen Pan: There are all these different gaps that we had to really figure out what they were and then figuring out, “Hey, at what stages are these different roles… when are they really important?” Then, figuring out, “Is this full-time staff that we need? Or is this like contract agencies that we can hire?” Then figuring out milestones. “Okay, what are the different milestones we need to hit before we get to launch?” I realized, “Oh, we’ve never actually internally tested what our actual product is. No one internally at the company can really describe to me what the product is.”

Carleen Pan: I was actually really surprised that a lot of people actually didn’t have the hardware besides like access to it in the office, and this is a product that we are selling for people’s homes. You should really understand how people are living with it because seeing a product that’s in the office that you have access to and are seeing in the background is very different from, “Hey, this is a product that I have at home.” Just like if you’d worked at Alexa and you were working at Amazon before they had launched, the way you’d be using Alexa would be very different in the office. I highly doubt you’re saying, “Alexa, play music,” as you’re eating your lunch versus while you’re cooking, so very much like very similar to that. Figuring out what these different milestones are and then making sure that… I would say another thing I really did was… Oh, sorry, my music’s playing. My Alexa started.

Chad Franzen: I was really wondering if that was going to happen.

Carleen Pan: I have like… I forgot that I have a daily alarm every day around this time to remind me of going on walks because of the sunset.

Chad Franzen: Oh, yeah. Nice.

Carleen Pan: I would say like another problem that I tackled maybe six months in is after I built out all these different functions and built out what the actual go-to-market plan was and figure out what our beta launch plan was, to really test drive and figure out what these gaps are. The next thing I really do is just trying to figure out, “All right, here are the resource gaps I really need. How much money do we actually need to launch?” Going to the founder and saying like, “Hey, you’ve talked about what you want for launch, and if we are launching with 50,000 units versus a hundred thousand units, this is how much money we’re going to need. This is the timeline that we need to match that. Again, we’re hardware, so I’m going to need at least nine months or 12 months of a heads-up before we can actually start selling it to the public.”

Carleen Pan: It was really interesting to work on something that had such large… that had so many different swim lanes and thinking about things that were very physical, physical being the actual hardware that we’re selling, but then the digital aspects being like the product and thinking about that entire experience beginning to end.

Chad Franzen: When you are kind of implementing all of these new things, how important is documentation> You mentioned it a lot when you’re trying to calm that chaos. What about when you’re doing something new like that?

Carleen Pan: So important. Actually, the first… I think one of the documents that I need that I’d use to get everyone on the same page from like a bird’s eye-level perspective, I think I called it Carleen’s Go-To-Market Bible. I think I literally put Bible in the name of it because it was just that important, and I wanted people to have this document open at least once or twice a week so they could really understand how we were tracking our progress towards go-to-market and this larger timeline. Documentation at this company was something that wasn’t really prioritized or really appreciated before I joined the company. I remember asking people very early on my first week, asking them, “Hey, can you show me like where things have been documented?”

Carleen Pan: I was shocked to find that there was no documentation. There was no documentation into like, “Hey, this is what we’re working on. This is what we are hoping to release at the end of the month for this mobile app.” Instead, I did see documentation after things had been shipped, meaning that when the QA team finished testing different features, I saw past reports of, “There are different bugs that we found,” but there was nothing to compare it to. There was no metric of, “This is how we compared versus what we thought we were going to do,” because that hadn’t been documented. This lack of documentations is especially concerning for a company that there was at least 20-something people in this division, so pretty large division, especially like people who are spread across remote across the world.

Carleen Pan: We had people working in three different countries, four different cities, so the fact that we already know they’re physically not in the same office and there was no set of internal collaborative set of notes that people refer to is really concerning. The only way that information transfer really happened was if someone was doing a presentation. Every few months, there’d be a new presentation deck or something, or if someone took notes from a meeting, but there was no progress that people were using to kind of have as, “This is the master document I’m referring to. This is the source of truth.” There was no source of truth.

Chad Franzen: What did you guys use? Or how did you and your staff, then, document the procedures once you had kind of implemented documentation?

Carleen Pan: Yeah, so the first thing I had done when I realized that there’s this massive problem, I also… I spent the first month kind of observing to see how people were actually working in this absence of documentation. I saw some people were taking notes, some people write emails, or a lot of things on Slack. There’s no cohesive place, and I realized that the company as a whole, they’re using Outlook, and so we had access to SharePoint, Microsoft Document and stuff. I saw that people were sending documents through back and forth sometimes as attachments through Slack, sometimes over email. Sometimes people were sending text messages for important information, which I thought was bananas. There was no master place, so the first thing I did was actually I did an audit to figure out, “All right, we need to adopt a cloud solution [inaudible 00:21:18]. We need to adopt a cloud solution. It’s going to be really vital to the way we operate and succeed in.”

Carleen Pan: I picked Google Suite as the right option for us. I really liked how collaborative and how you were able to like write documents in real time. Suddenly, even like meetings changed. We’d be in meetings and you could send up the strategy doc before the meeting, have people read over. You could screen share while you’re at the meeting. While we’re in the meeting, you can write notes within like, “Hey, these are action items we need to follow up on.” Suddenly, things were just so much easier that meetings were more efficient. You cut down on the number of meetings. Suddenly, people all over the world like… Even if you weren’t necessarily in that meeting, you could go back and reference. Everyone had access to all the product requirements. Everyone had access to, “Here’s the milestone track that we’re using for the beta release.”

Carleen Pan: Everyone now had this autonomy to understand like… had better understanding of how they were contributing to the larger company. They could just also read and understand things that other people were working on, which actually built this little trust that hadn’t really existed before, so that was also really exciting.

Chad Franzen: Has this appreciation for documentation creeped into other parts of your life?

Carleen Pan: It is. My friends really joke and make fun of me that in so many different ways, I’m such an organized person like to the point where if I’m hanging out with friends, I’ll actually send them a calendar invite with location, what time we’re meeting, if there’s anything… and if there are any other details like, “Hey, there’s a dress code for this event. Here’s a link for the tickets.” It’s all in there, and they now know that if I don’t send them a calendar invite, I haven’t officially confirmed plans with them. I’m also the person who plans all our vacations and camping trips, and I think the best example is last fall. My friends and I did a trip to Acadia National Park, and this is in the middle of COVID, so there’s a lot of really strict guidelines in place.

Carleen Pan: A lot of restaurants, they require reservations, or if there’s more than four people, you have to make advanced reservations. There were different opening and closing times. Some places were outdoor dining-only versus some places did allow indoor. You should make special reservations for parking. We were really a pretty big group. It was like seven of us plus a dog, so even though we had done this exact trip a year prior, this trip just required so much more planning versus the prior year that I put together a six-page document.

Carleen Pan: Everything was very well organized, like a table of contents where if you clicked on something, you can easily jump to whichever section you wanted to hear… whichever section you want to look at. Whether it was, “Here is a packing list that everyone needs to pack for themselves,” versus, “Here are items that we collectively as a group still need,” to, “Here are all of our meal options and this is where we’re eating every single day.”

Carleen Pan: It was organized in a really easy way that you could just click around and read about whatever you wanted. Of course, they asked people if they had any suggestions or things they really wanted to do. I’m sad to say that most of my friends did not read it, but the ones who did and offered suggestions, I did follow and all all of that to the itinerary. One of my friends who’s a product manager, he works for a pretty well-known Fortune 50 company. He looked at the document and said… I think he had actually opened up the document when he was like in a work meeting because he was so excited about it and everyone saw his face.

Carleen Pan: He actually ended up screen sharing the document for a little bit and everyone was saying like, “Oh, wow, this is more organized than our internal Jira and all of our product release notes,” because everything was so well linked out and very condensed. My friends make fun of me for this, but they genuinely appreciate my skills and being able to organize and convey information very effectively.

Chad Franzen: I love it. That’s a great story. Why did you decide to make that document? Or is that just what you do? That was like your first instinct?

Carleen Pan: This is honestly something that like probably took me less than two hours and I was probably like watching TV while I was doing this because this is information that I needed to look up anyway and I needed to have one central place to put it. I wanted to make something that like everyone could have access to whether or not they were going to ask questions for it. I think most of my friends are pretty easygoing, so they didn’t really need it, but I needed a place where I could go back and reference because otherwise it would just kind of be scattered all over the place.

Carleen Pan: Being able to organize a document in such a way that anyone could kind of get access to what they wanted without having to ask me questions was really important to me, and that’s also like one of the core cornerstones for like when you think about documentation. If someone has no context on what this is, are they able to self-navigate through themselves? They were, yeah.

Chad Franzen: Hey, if people… Oh, this is my last question for you. If people are looking for somebody to come in and help them scale their operations or solve a problem, is there a way that they can connect with you?

Carleen Pan: Yeah. I’m super easy to find online. Actually, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. They can follow me on Twitter. I’m super easy to find, just “Carleen Pan” is what they would type on Google or it’s just carleenlikes on Twitter. My DMs are open, so I’m super easy to reach. I also like do consulting for companies, so I think the more common use cases, a lot of people come to me when they have a problem and they’re really not sure what it is. They’re like, “Hey, I just want to talk to you about something,” because I think a lot of times they don’t know what the actual problem is. They know that things are wrong and they’re struggling with a bunch of different things, but they’re not really able to identify what that core problem is or figure out like, what is the thing that they actually need to do? I’m a good person to kind of kind of chat through and help them diagnose with us.

Chad Franzen: Sure, definitely. I can tell. Well, Hey, it’s been great to talk to you today, Carleen. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining me.

Carleen Pan: Thanks so much, Chad. Bye.

Chad Franzen: So long, everybody.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk-free 14-day trial.

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