Bob’s Ramble: Simplifying Management with Three P’s (People, Product and Process)

Eleven years ago when we started Invoice Cloud, much of what we did was more easily defined than it is today. There were only a few of us, so it was fairly clear who was responsible for functions like strategy, sales, product, engineering, support, infrastructure, accounting and marketing. With only a few people, most of us had to wear multiple hats. I had a big role in marketing and partnering, Bob Lapides had a big role in sales, support and accounting, John Morabito and Kelton Averyt were engineering and infrastructure. We teamed on product and strategy. We had an org chart that only had our names in it.

As we grew, we created job descriptions for what we were doing ourselves, recruited talented people and replaced our names in the org chart with their names for their roles. This continued for several years but as we grew over 100 people, it became more difficult to manage the sheer complexity of the organization. This is typically where entrepreneurs who are good at starting and growing a business from scratch start to struggle – depending on their experience set. In our case, Invoice Cloud grew beyond our original vision and started to become more difficult for us to manage. We needed to bring in top level talent to augment our founder’s mentality with professional management. Giving up control to others was a challenge but it was also liberating, as we gained the opportunity to elevate to more strategic initiatives. About a year ago, I was listening to a podcast interview with Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and he laid out a simple way to think about growing businesses in terms of People, Product and Process – in that order.

Invoice Cloud has a market leading Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment platform, as measured by adoption. There is one primary reason for that – our People, including our early adopters. From inception, we started with A players to develop the platform and sold to A player Clients who told us how to make it better. That foundation has helped to carry us forward. In 2015, all our hiring managers committed to hiring A players and we adopted a straightforward methodology to do so from a book entitled Who by G H Smart. It has been game changing for us.

Product leads are challenging to maintain and require constant innovation on the things that matter most to clients and end users. In the past years, we surveyed clients for input on product that drove our major product enhancements. In the last year, our new COO Rob Autor and product leader Ryan Pieszak solicited much more extensive Voice of the Customer feedback that has provided us with extremely valuable, and more granular, product direction. Our commitment to maintain our adoption growth lead remains critical to our long-term success and our Product Team has a clear roadmap to improve key client friction points to enable that continued, positive trajectory.

The third P stands for Process as it is important that we measure our effectiveness at delivering value, satisfying clients and their customers, communicating, training, etc. We create Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) around all relevant, measurable goals and initiatives and management is responsible for removing barriers for all employees and clients so that we can all be accountable for delivering the value our clients and their customers expect from us. These KPI’s are assembled in our dashboards and reviewed with high frequency, daily for many, so that we can see negative trends and react quickly to get back on track.

People, Product and Process provide us with three foundational pillars that form the three-legged stool that helps us support Invoice Cloud. Hope there is something here that can help you too!