SPOTLIGHT: Jenny Podewils' Strategy for Aligning Teams in Dynamic Environments - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqP2KDrjmDc

Transcript: (00:00) hi everybody Welcome to Topline Spotlight it's your hosts Sam Jacobs I'm joined by Aid Zaman CEO sales talent agency and AJ Bruno CEO of quotapath and we've got Jenny Pils the co-ceo of leapsome on the show and we're going to dive in on one of her toughest challenges Jenny welcome to Topline [Music] [Applause] [Music] Spotlight really excited to be here with you today we are excited to have you so the first thing we need to know before we dive in is a little bit about leapsome I know a little bit about the company but in your words tell us what (00:40) does leapsome do what's the problem that you solve and just a little bit of the origin story of where the company emerged from awesome very happy to tackle that um so maybe starting with the story um both my co-founder and I were involved in scaling um different technology companies but also helping bigger companies succeed and the C the problem we kept running into was making sure during phases of rapid growth or rapid change how do we make sure company stays aligned how do we make sure employees can perform at their best and (01:09) how do we make sure we really build these environments that can enable Peak Performance and that's ultimately what we tackle so leap them is an AI powered people platform that helps build really high performing team and drive ater excellence and ultimately what we see is like the people are for most of like technology companies for a lot of other companies the basis for their business success and that's ultimately already what we help uh build and we work with small startups but also big technology companies like amanda.com and also more (01:39) traditional companies like uh Mercedes b we've been around for eight years we have over 1,500 customers mainly in the US and Europe what uh and when you say you know is it an hris are you is it an employe management system are you running payroll tell us about like the different pieces of functionality that the leaps and product compasses yes love diving into that so ultimately we started being very much focused on Modern Performance Management okr School management as well as Employee Engagement um and ultimately (02:13) we have all the tools now that really help with the employee um Journey all the way from helping effective onboarding with effective work um streams work automations helping with like the clarification between a manager and an employee what's expected of them helping in on reping for example in sales organizations to get wrapped up to productivity as quickly as possible and then helping with the Performance Management over the course of an employ Journey helping having the data and the actual insights or actionable insights (02:43) from surveys to improve organizations and then everything that also drives manager Effectiveness um all the way to an AI co-pilot for example we do offer an HRS we've um shipped that in Europe first that's also going to come to the to us in the future wonderful and then the the topic of Spotlight tends to be a challenge that you've recently solved so walk us through one of the most important business problems you've solved in the last 12 to 24 months it's actually directly related to the story I just um told you of like where we started and (03:17) what we also now are shipping and doing now so we initially started building this category for people enablement Performance Management engagement okrs learning onboarding manager Effectiveness and during the times of like when we started a company 2017 I would say all the way into 2022 that really emerged or seem to merge as like an actual category so we were able to really effectively sell this alongside HRS um to customers using all different kinds of HRS systems in the market that's a lot tougher now we do see more (03:53) consolidation challenges um um and companies just really reviewing their Tex deack and um while we're still growing really strong where there's still pockets of buyers that truly understand why that people enablement system has an an own right next to a broad AG or platform I think just the size of the market um you can sell that into has shrunk a bit so we did actually take the Bold decision um about one and a half years ago to build out um a wider platform and also like to dive into that HRS space it is a very competitive (04:30) um space at the same time we also see huge opportunity given our strengths and huge outperformance of other platforms on that people Ena them inside to actually consolidate in that direction and we have really really good initial and we brought the product to Market earlier this year in An Early Access program predominantly focused at Europe right now and we see really really good uh first signs that that hypothesis actually works and uh that was a bold move um we also were in the fortunate position to have the cash and (05:00) optionality to actually execute that strategy um and we're really excited for the opportunities that brings to us in the future I that's fascinating I I was listening to the folks at ltis um talk about a similar lesson that they learned and they had to go into the hris space as well because of that H it's it's a really busy category hris you've got these large incumbents um that have the pros and cons of being the large incumbent and then you have companies like yourselves and ltis jumping in how do you find the Gap that you can run (05:36) after that little bit of white space is that the exercise or is it that there won't be that type of white space and we just need to build something that net net is better than all these other options and that's the only way to win in that space I mean I think the the the opportunity for us really arises from the fact that I mean everybody has to run HR processes and nobody necessarily loves R software and I think that's grounded to some extent also in a lot of HR software having been built for HR administrators right and the user the (06:11) manager is kind of like almost like a bit of an afterthought whereas we've taken a very very different approach like our purpose as the companies to make work fulfilling and we've really started build our product from the vantage point of how do we generate true alignment in an organization how do we help employees understand what's expected of them how do we guide employees through their their Journey as an employee through their Journey as a manager so we always had this focus on the manager and the individual (06:38) contributor Persona and ultimately what that means if if you build the platform this way is that you actually generate like build a platform that drives higher adoption and higher engagement because it actually de delivers True Value to the end user there's also huge benefit of that to the HR Persona because HR peoples don't like policing the rest of our the organization to I don't know update their information or put in this or that and if you actually have an interface where people truly interact with it on a very regular basis like all (07:11) of these things kind of happen on the sides in a much much more easier way and I think the second big um changer like change comes we're now having all this opportunity to leverage generative AI to truly make our lives easier and if we look at HR teams they've been massively cut um through the past few years they often cut even more than other teams um so disproportionately more than other teams in the organizations then a lot of pressure so if we can make their lives easier that's a huge benefit if we look (07:43) at managers managers jobs have become increasingly more intense through the pandemic moving into like hybrid remote settings without necessarily always getting all the support they needed now managers are asked to achieve a lot more with less um the of controls have risen the pressure managers has risen so what we are doing for example our AI co-pilot is making manager lives to manage actually easier right so for example when you write um provide feedback performance feedback you actually have um sort of an initial starting point (08:19) through the AI co-pilot to help you generate good feedback or if you have a tricky one-on-one with one of your sellers or one of your direct reports like you cannect use the coach to prepare for the uh the conversation to have that coach by your side to actually be well prepared and I think the advantage of doing that in a tool like leap suum versus like cat GPT is we have the contextual data we understand the goals we understand what you're working with with your employees we know the right permissions like which data is (08:50) available to whom and we can make data truly actionable because like if you look at a heat map or some data like it's not easy to understand for everyone's where could actually help people interpret the data and defi determine the next best action based on this data and I think that's the power um of a system like ours that's just very differently built from the entire architecture and a product philosophy than like traditional HR System I mean given that your company is so Global and you say HR like there's a (09:20) standardization but obviously that there's a lot of complexity and I know you have a go to market team here in the US uh and there's probably folks around world how do you you're talking about leaps in the tool but how do you manage your own company in this way and create that world because that sounds very overwhelming and complex can get really complex quickly yeah um and I I think the level of complexity for us is really step changed with the move into HRS because on the people enablement side Performance Management engagement (09:51) surveys um okr still work fairly similarly across like the world where on the HS side absence um payroll Etc that just becomes a lot more complex so I think we're also adding a lot of complexity that we're now learning to adequately manage um so I think we're all still in the process of um further evolving there but I think historically what really has been behind our success is honestly like eating our own dog food or drinking your own champagne maybe that one sounds love nicer and it's truly building an organization that (10:28) around a strong purpose like people join leaps because they want to really work on solving this big challenge we have always focused very much on like really having very very strong alignment like Clarity at what are what are the most important objectives okrs we work on as a company in a given period of time making sure people know what their specific role is and ultimately driving these forward making sure people have like a lot of clarity as to what is expected of them how they can grow supporting managers and their (10:59) development so it's like trully building a really Talent dence team that's very focused and very much sort of moving in in sync and also like the way that's really unlocked that for us is like we've always been focused on scaling with the leanest team possible so part of our history and I didn't mention this yet is actually we were bootstrapped Beyond 10 million AR and uh we then raised a big round with inside Partners in New York so top tier investor amazing Partners um by the way uh Jenny I don't know if you know (11:31) this uh Kitty Bullard I think was uh part of your board she was also part of ours I'm an Insight company as well so we share that as well yeah no I think they're amazing um and um and I think we right after Technic funding I think there was a slight period of time where we also maybe diverged from our own principle of like staying really lean um for um for for a few quarters and we learned the hard way that that's not the best way for us to scale actually and now we're much more focused again have really clearly written down our (12:06) operating principles again so everybody really knows what they're buying into how we work how we operate and I think this is really something that's at the core of enabling us to move at the speed we're moving and get the things done we got done one of the challenges um a lot of Founders have right now is that they have learned these lessons and become more efficient in a down market and there's this premium on growth versus margin that's always in the market and it evolves based on the state of the economy and so the premium on growth had (12:42) gone down the premium on margin hence efficiency had gone up that's going to shift in favor of growth a little bit and a lot of Founders are concerned that I'm going to lose a little bit of that control I had like the Market Force is going to create almost a little bit more inefficiency in how we run businesses and decisions we make um sometimes it's competitive pressure my my competitor is throwing all this fuel on fire to capture the market I've got to push a little bit harder than I'd like to how are you thinking about maintaining these (13:14) lessons how do you and you from the HR space you probably have a good view on this how do you really hold on to lessons um at a time where it might be harder to hold on to it which is an improving Market yeah and I think of I think the difference between sort of the next sort of phase of I think growth that's heading towards us versus the past is like I think we do have a different level we've always had the ability to automate right but I think now we have much more powerful technology at our fingertips so I think (13:47) there's going to be a certain decoupling of really radical growth strategies and necessarily like hiring or employe growth in organizations and I think there's this interest um um Paradigm that zapier also seems to be using which is I think bot borrow uh built by so whenever you want to hire someone like ask yourself like is this actually something that um maybe could be automated um in a really smart way and I do believe like I'm I'm that's so interesting Jenny what do you think is the downstream implication of that on (14:26) the world of HR so U we there was this news article two weeks ago about how Microsoft is having to now talk about how if you buy our AI tools it will genuinely save you from uh hiring more people like there's this connection to less human capital because of AI and they were kind of stay away from that value positioning and now they have to lean into ITR C customers at the point where they're saying if I'm spending this money realistically efficiency means less people can I actually achieve that and so we've heard about what's (14:58) possible in engineering what's what's possible in marketing Etc very curious what do you think is possible in HR where let's say a company at a certain size had a 10 person HR team can they get by with like three people in AI now in the near future like do you see that happening I mean I would actually say I wouldn't limit it to any Department neither engineering nor HR I think this is actually something that spend the entire organization like how we market right like what a marketer can achieve what is salesperson can achieve uh what (15:32) ratio of sdrs to AES actually still makes sense so I think this actually spends the entire organization it definitely also uh spend the HR department just because you can automate processes you can Source candidates much faster um so I think it's just a bit big productivity lever across ultimately really honestly every team of the organization I think support is something where we've seen really good applications um um of of generative I uh to really truly like level up the productivity and I think I Al also like (16:05) I'm I'm employee Centric right I don't want to get rid of people like I love working with smart talented individuals but I think it just generates a lot different opportunity for impact for every every person and I mean ultimately I think we have so many big challenges we need to solve as a society so if we can deploy the talent we have um across even more topics we can work on and solve and teackle um I think that's my optimistic view but I think there's also going to be certain tasks in every job that are going to be able to be fully (16:38) fully automated and I think really that element of having a co-pilot to managers to really help managers being better managers provide better feedback like have better hard conversations know how to best sort of um motivate engage their team I think that's also one of the huge like um application that applications that's going to bring two huge business value to companies whether that's a sales leader or natur leader or an engineering leader I think that's that's also like a really a use case I'm very excited about (17:13) I love that Jenny we're about at the end of our time together what we like to do at the very end is get some inspiration follow the breadcrumb trail a little bit so uh what's what's an interesting it could be a book it could be a podcast it could be an event uh what's something in it could be a mentor or a former boss but what's what's an idea we should know about uh that's influenced you in the last couple of weeks or months I'm a mom of two pregnant with number three so I feel like actually don't have that much time (17:44) to read anymore these days so it's usually just podcasts at this stage I honestly really enjoy hardw work from The New York Times um that's probably one of of the ones I managed to somehow squeeze into the days with everything going going on but um yeah that's the first one that comes to mind hard works great very funny uh very funny yeah good it's great content um Jenny if folks want to reach out to you maybe they want to buy leaps some maybe they want to become a customer it's Q4 we want to help you close although when people (18:14) listen to this it'll be q1 but you'll need to close deals in q1 I would imagine what's the best way to get in touch with you so definitely either LinkedIn Jenny pil leum or also like happy for folks to reach out to me by email that's jenny. poil p o d ws leap.com and yeah let me know what you think and what your thoughts are I'm happy to connect wonderful thanks so much for being a guest on Topline Spotlight we hope to see you in New Orleans uh at the CEO Summit for Pavilion but if not we'll talk to you soon thank you so much for having me (18:49) thanks thank you thank you so much [Music] n [Music]