Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ryan Johnson, Chief Product Officer at CallRail, a leading provider of lead intelligence software for small and medium-sized businesses. Ryan's insights into product development, customer feedback analysis, and the challenges of scaling a SaaS product in a diverse market offer valuable lessons for product leaders and founders alike. Here's what we discussed:
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ryan Johnson, Chief Product Officer at CallRail, a leading provider of lead intelligence software for small and medium-sized businesses. Ryan's insights into product development, customer feedback analysis, and the challenges of scaling a SaaS product in a diverse market offer valuable lessons for product leaders and founders alike. Here's what we discussed:
"CallRail has been around for going on twelve years now. I started about seven years ago, and the genesis of CallRail was really just what we call call tracking. Our two founders were trying to solve the problem for SMBs to attribute their marketing efforts to phone calls that were converting into customers. The technology that existed out there twelve years ago was very focused on enterprise, very expensive, and a heavy lift to get set up. So they asked, can we do a self-service, 14-day free trial to get basically call tracking up and running for these SMBs?
From there, we evolved into other channels like SMS, form tracking, and chat. In 2016, we launched our first AI-powered product called Conversation Intelligence. It started with speech-to-text, giving transcripts of recorded phone conversations. Then it went into things like keyword spotting and auto-highlighting important parts of the conversation.
I started as VP of Product, running the product and UX design team. About three years ago, engineering also rolled up to me. Most recently, I've been in the CPO role for close to two years, overseeing the product and UX design teams."
"That's one of the challenges as we've scaled. We gather information from UX interviews, PM interviews with customers, customer visits, and data coming into support. We're going through another iteration of how to share this data across teams efficiently.
It's really hard to get great voice of the customer at scale because we have over 220,000 customer businesses across almost every industry you could imagine. Unlike enterprise sales, where maybe your loudest customer dominates your roadmap, I don't have those loud customers. I have a bunch of dental offices, law offices, plumbers, and they all talk about their needs in different ways. We're trying to solve things horizontally because if I just solve it for one of them, they could be paying us $50 a month. The ROI isn't there."
"At CallRail, I would say we are ahead of the game when it comes to products that we're putting in the market and selling. We're starting to accelerate how we use AI internally, whether it's tools for our customer support team, engineering teams, or even the product team.
For me, I would love for my product team to be able to understand our customers as much as possible without having to do a lot of manual work. That's the thing I get worried about - if you're not talking to customers, you have this thing in your head of what you think they want, but it's so hard to get feedback from these SMB customers. Most of that feedback comes through support, and a lot of that is manual. In my world, utopia is that qualitative and quantitative intelligence is not the hard part - we're able to have that easily."
"Our north star from the product side is interactions with leads. We're looking at how many good interactions they're having with leads, whether it's a phone call, text message, chat, or form submission.
The next level of metrics includes things like volume of phone calls, volume of form submissions, total minutes on phone calls, and auto-scoring of phone calls as qualified or not qualified leads. We also track integrations. One of the things we know is that if our customers have at least one integration, it doesn't matter what integration it is, their likelihood to churn goes down by 50%.
We also look at whether they sign up for email notifications or utilize our APIs. We have customers that look at our dashboard every day, some that come in once a month, and others that never log in because they send all their data to Salesforce. They can all be very happy customers, but we need to pay attention to these different usage patterns."
"We learned that aligning the go-to-market team with the product team from the project kickoff leads to much more successful launches. We now ensure that Engineering, Product, Design (EPD), and the go-to-market team are attached at the hip at every team level.
Everything is very tightly integrated, and I wish we did that from day one. The results are completely dramatic, and it starts with shared goals. Our SVP of marketing literally has the same goal as me for a product. When we have a product launch, our goal is the same. We want to sell a certain number of units by the end of the year. This shared metric helps align all the teams involved."
Ryan's insights highlight several key principles for product management and customer-driven development, especially in a diverse SMB market:
1. Understand the challenges of scale: When dealing with a large, diverse customer base, it's crucial to find ways to aggregate and interpret feedback across different industries and use cases.
2. Focus on key metrics: Having a clear set of metrics, from high-level KPIs like "interactions with leads" to more specific indicators like integration usage, helps guide product decisions.
3. Leverage AI thoughtfully: While AI can be a powerful tool for product development, it's important to balance its use in customer-facing products with internal processes.
4. Foster cross-functional collaboration: Tight integration between product, engineering, design, and go-to-market teams leads to more successful product launches and better outcomes.
5. Adapt to diverse user behaviors: Recognize that different customers may use your product in vastly different ways, and design your metrics and product strategy accordingly.
6. Think horizontally: In an SMB-focused product, solutions need to work across industries rather than catering to individual loud voices.
7. Use integrations strategically: Encouraging customers to use integrations can significantly reduce churn and increase product stickiness.
By applying these principles, companies can create a more responsive, data-driven approach to product development that serves a diverse customer base effectively. As Ryan put it, "It's about understanding our customers as much as possible without having to do a lot of manual work." It's about creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement, leveraging both quantitative metrics and qualitative insights to truly understand and serve your customers.