81: ClickUp Chief Business Officer Tommy Wang - how to handle product-led hypergrowth
By taking a unique user-oriented approach to workflow organization, ClickUp has managed to see extraordinary success in an already crowded market. Because of this, ClickUp has had to navigate and find solutions to the problems common among all fast-growing startups. Head of Global Revenue Tommy Wang has been with ClickUp since its earliest stages and joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the complexity problem of user-oriented products, how to find the best hires, and how to adapt your company and yourself during hypergrowth. Here are some quick takeaways: Different people and different teams work best in different ways. If you can, make your software configurable and flexible to meet each client’s needs. At the cost of complexity in your go-to-market, this can lead to faster growth and better net retention. Knowing what customer behavior(s) indicate healthy usage of your software is a difficult but important question. Try to find which measures for customer usage lead to the best outcome so you can train on those behaviors. Relying on other peoples’ judgements is crucial for finding and hiring the best-in-class. When working with a limited network, you can ask coworkers at other companies who their strongest peers are. With a more involved network, talk to well-known leaders and enlist the help of professionals to get a better idea of what talent looks like. During hypergrowth, your company quickly becomes less nimble - you need to make sure you make the right decisions at the start because changing direction later is almost impossible. Context is more important than experience here: look at the history of companies and institutions in similar situations. Almost every team in hypergrowth will hit an inflection point for communication: people start to lose connection with the larger team as they’re subdivided into more and more groups. Having a single place to connect workflows helps with this, but you may also have to hire roles focused on intercommunication. Having a good market is more important than having a good team. Focus first on making sure there’s a good market for your product, then focus on making sure you have a solid team - don’t waste time on trying to start a business with a perfect idea.