Process Street’s products get a lot of kudos, and with good reason. I know how much easier my job is with workflows, Pages, and Automations; I can only imagine what the impact spread across an entire company would be.
But Process Street is about people as much as products. It’s super easy for all those people keeping the gears moving behind the scenes to miss out on their own well-deserved recognition.
Last time, I sat down with RevOps VP Tara Larson to find out what makes her tick. (Definitely read if you haven’t yet; she’s an impressive person by any measure.) This time around, I set my sights on Jason MacMurray, our VP of Customer Success.
You’ll notice that many of us at Process Street really love outdoor activities. And Jason? Well, he lives on a boat.
Content Advisory: Included photos have been known to inspire a serious case of FOMO.
Q: Obviously, I have to ask about the boat. How did that happen? What’s it like? Tell me everything.
It’s something that we’ve been loosely playing with for a while. I grew up around boats, so it was more comfortable for me. My wife was less convinced.
Then it got to a point where our two daughters were going to school at home and it didn’t look like things were going to change anytime soon. We just thought this could be an interesting time to try boat life. That was around March or April, and by June, we started thinking pretty seriously about it.
The market was just heating up as we were doing that because there were a lot of other people thinking the same thing. It was pretty crazy. We ended up having to buy the boat sight unseen in Puerto Rico because we couldn’t get there for the survey and stuff like that.
Within six weeks, we packed up the house, bought some plane tickets, and off we went. We’ve basically been bouncing around since.
Q: Has your experience with boats changed your perspective any?
It’s interesting when you see people that do this, and then six months later they’ve sold the boat because it wasn’t what they thought it was going to be.
For the people that are into it and it really clicks with them, I think there are a few things they have in common. One is they really like different cultures and different places. I don’t know how many countries we’ve been to, but call it 12 or 13. It’s different everywhere. That’s something that’s life-changing. My guess is that my kids will travel based on this experience and certainly not be afraid to travel to other places.
There’s also a certain amount of minimalism and survival. Like when things break, you gotta figure it out. There’s a lot of creativity that goes into that. That’s a really valuable lesson.
I also know there’s a certain amount of self-reliance when you’re out in the middle of the ocean. There’s no one around for 50 miles or 100 miles. You’re kind of on your own. I love that, but it is a little overwhelming at first.
Q: What’s been the impact on your work life?
For the most part, it’s really seamless. There have been a few places where the internet has been slightly sketchy, but generally, I’ve been able to get a pretty strong connection.
There was that time in St. Vincent we had a hurricane bearing down on us and I literally had to tell everyone at work, ‘I’ll talk to you in three days. Sorry, I’m out of here.’ And we just took off. Fortunately, everyone was able to pick up the slack for me.
The interesting thing for me was, we were always in California so for me, I would generally be up relatively early and end up working all day. But when we were in the Caribbean and on Atlantic Time, my day started a little bit later because we have mostly US-based employees.
That was kinda cool because we could go get a bunch of stuff done. I could go snorkeling or go to the beach with the kids for like an hour in the morning and then go to work. That was different for us and we’d never experienced it before. It’s pretty cool, though. We like that.
Q: How is disconnecting at the end of your day? Is it something that just happens because you have to do things with the boat or is it more difficult?
So the thing is, in most of the places we’ve been, the sun comes up really early and it goes down pretty early, too. It’s less so now because we’re in the Bahamas, but in most of the Caribbean, the sun comes up at like 5:30 in the morning. Then it goes down at 6:00 at night.
I think our hours just shifted. We all would get up around 5:30 in the morning, which I wouldn’t do at home.
Things do go quiet in the evenings. When I bail, we eat dinner, and we’ve got two kids so there’s getting them ready for bed. They’re old enough that they can do it themselves, but there’s still a certain amount of time with that.
There’s maybe an hour or so after that I spend ready at night and then people go to bed.
Honestly, sometimes it’s a little bit hard because it’s 8:00 PM in the Atlantic Timezone but only 5:00 PM on the west coast so I’m still answering Slack messages and talking to people. We also knew that would probably happen, though so I get to start my day later and then I work a little bit later, too.
And that’s fine. It’s the reality of these jobs. We’re often in the middle of nowhere, though, where we have no internet. We obviously don’t do that during the week, but on the weekends that’s when we go venture into national parks or areas we know have no internet.
I think that’s my way. I disconnect kind of by force by removing the internet. Plus we go hiking and stuff like that near the mountains where there’s just no connection and it forces shut down.
Honestly, I feel guilty about that, but at the same time, I’ve been at this long enough to realize that everyone survives and knows how to get things done.
Q: Onto the more work-oriented questions. You oversee several teams – Process Pros & Support, Customer Success, Customer Content, and Workflow Consulting. How do you keep them in sync across their overlapping objectives?
Most of my employees are in the US, but we probably have the most widely-dispersed team. It’s an interesting contrast. In terms of the different groups, my teams are all very customer-facing.
One thing that has helped tremendously is now we have a really good set of managers in those areas. Whether it’s Tarik [Ameen-Ali, Process Pros & Support] or Blake [Bailey, Customer Success] – they’re very self-directed. They’re definitely deputized to make calls and do what needs to be done.
One of the keys to the remote thing, in particular, is that you have to have mature people that you trust to make decisions. You can’t be involved in every single decision that happens. You can’t be second-guessing whether or not they’re going to make the right decision.
That just doesn’t work because you don’t have the same level of supervision as sitting next to someone in the office. That’s not fun, anyway. That sucks.
I think I have the right people in the right place. Making sure that they know they’re empowered to make those decisions is really important. If I’m completely honest, I think that’s something we’re still working out.
So, the support team is 24 by 5. We literally have people around the world. We have mostly North American timezones, but we also have people in Europe, the Philippines, Malaysia, and India.
We’re literally all over the place and that makes it difficult. For example, we can’t have one stand-up [meeting] for the whole team, which is a transition for us. We do two stand-ups per day.
I think we do a decent job communicating on Slack. That’s something we try to do to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on.
Q: You mentioned the sales team. How much cross-departmental collaboration is there between the two teams?
There’s quite a bit. So, I’m in all the sales meetings so that there is a tighter bridge there. Now that we have John [Cunningham, Sales] and Jacob [McCormick, Sales] working as Relationship Managers, they’re handling the commercial stuff for our existing customers. So, they’re part of the Sales team, but they’re working with existing customers.
I think that bond has become tighter than ever because the Customer Success Managers are working with the Relationship Managers to strategize on, Okay, how are we going to make this customer successful? And once we make them successful, how are we going to help them expand or upgrade? What’s that path look like?
We work really close on that, and it’s just getting closer and closer.
I would say, in general, I have a really good relationship with Kevin [Michaelis, VP of Sales], which is really important to me because, ultimately, they’re selling the deals that we have to implement. If that’s not a good relationship, then it can get ugly.
And to his credit, Kevin is always like, ‘This is what I’m thinking of selling. What do you think?’
If I don’t like it, then we’ll either change it or we won’t sell it. But honestly, I don’t have to exercise that too often because Kevin and his team are very interested in selling exactly what we can deliver on.
That’s the good thing about Process Street. We’re very customer-focused so nothing’s being sold that we can’t deliver on or that we don’t think we can deliver on as a team.
Q: So, I did some recon with your teams. Pretty much all of them emphasized you’re able to make them feel appreciated and recognized even when you have a million things going on. How do you balance that?
First of all, I’m really excited if that’s the case because that’s the hardest thing we deal with in these companies. You’re always under-resourced and there’s always too much to do.
I wish I had a conscious thing I could pick out and point to as an answer to that. I think it’s somewhat unconscious because I grew up in these businesses. My dad owned his own company. My uncle is a VC. That’s just how my family runs. So I think I’ve seen it from a young age. They were a relatively small company where everyone is family. Not like they’re technically family, but everyone’s treated like family.
I felt really fortunate that when I got here, we already had very capable people. We put some direction and processes in place and changed a little bit of strategy, but the people didn’t change. A lot of people on my team have longer tenure here than I do, which is awesome.
It’s important that you like the people that you work with. You don’t necessarily have to hang out with them, but you have to enjoy being around them and talking to them every day. [laughs] We talk to each other all the time. I think that’s big.
In terms of prioritization… I don’t know. These businesses are tough, right? You’re always struggling to survive. When you’re in trouble, you just focus on, what can we do to survive until tomorrow?
We haven’t been in that situation in a long time, but once you have, it makes every day less intense. You’re just like, Okay, what do we need to do next? Ultimately, you just break it down into small pieces and do what needs to be done today, and then get to what needs to be done tomorrow.
Q: When it comes to bringing a new person into an existing team, there are a million things that can go wrong. How do you, as a manager, keep that process as smooth as possible for everybody involved?
I think incorporating new people into the team is less of a challenge for us because the team is super open, super supportive. Part of that is having good people, right? You bring in good people, then you have that foundation.
One of the bigger challenges for us when we bring new people on is getting them to understand that they’ll go through this moment. We try to prep them for it in advance and have that support in place, but every single one of them thinks, I don’t know if I can do it. A few days later, it clicks and they’re like, I got it.
Anyone on the team will tell you that there was a moment they didn’t know if they could be successful in this job. That’s something we need to keep working on because I don’t want people to feel that way. But the important thing is that you got the support if you do feel that way.
Q: Since we are actively looking for two Customer Success Managers at the moment. How do you determine which candidates will be a good fit?
That’s a good question. I wish it was more formulaic. Blake [Bailey, Customer Success] and I talk about this often, especially now that we’re hiring.
The one thing we shoot for that is hard to get a read on is an entrepreneurial streak. We’ve identified that people who have that do particularly well with us and that’s harder to see from a resume.
At the end of the day, it just comes down to interviews and whether you have a good feeling about the person. To mitigate the risks, we have at least three people across the team talk to them. Generally, after three interviews and the brief test, we have a pretty good read on whether or not that person would be a good fit for us.
Then you gotta be confident and just go for it.
The post Employee Spotlight: Jason MacMurray, VP Customer Success first appeared on Process Street | Checklist, Workflow and SOP Software.
0 Commentaires