This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Shadi Majzoub, who runs product at Postal, a leading gifting platform for offline engagement that serves sales, marketing, customer success, and people ops teams. Our conversation delved into Shadi's journey from early employee to product leader, the unique challenges of blending SaaS and physical product delivery, and the critical role that customer insights play in shaping Postal's product strategy. Here are the key takeaways from our discussion:
Q: Can you give us an overview of your role at Postal and what drew you to the company?
Shadi: I've been in product for nearly a decade, and I've been at Postal for over four years now. I was actually the first product hire, joining when we had no product and no customers - just a compelling vision and some early prototypes.
What really drew me in was the founders and their deep expertise in the offline engagement space. They had a clear understanding of the market opportunity and the customer pain points, and I believed in their ability to build a world-class team and product.
At its core, Postal is about enabling sales, marketing, customer success, and people ops teams to create memorable, personalized experiences through thoughtful gifting and offline touches at scale. We may not be the first mover in the space, but we've differentiated ourselves as agile developers, marketplace curaters, and partners with our customers.
Q: What are some of the unique product challenges you face in a business that blends software and physical goods?
Shadi: One of the biggest challenges is that we're not just driving digital engagement - every touchpoint involves a physical product that needs to be procured, inventoried, and shipped. So in addition to typical SaaS metrics around activation and usage, we're incredibly focused on our marketplace dynamics and fulfillment operations.
We have this key metric that looks at the ratio of SaaS revenue to GMV (gross merchandise value - essentially the total spend on gifts and products). It's a critical health indicator because our customers pay for the utilization of our platform in addition to their hand-selected gifts that they choose to send. So we need to drive both the right volume and the right product mix to make the economics work.
This adds an extra layer of complexity to how we think about activation and retention. We aim to educate our customers on the power of continual and regular gifing as opposed to a single send on a one-off occasion. Our goal is to help them realize the "aha" moment of offline gifting - sending the right gifts, at the right cadence, to the right recipients. This flow unlocks the growth potential for their business and the flywheel really starts to spin.
Q: How do you leverage customer insights to inform product development and prioritization?
Shadi: Being customer-centric is absolutely essential in our business. We're serving sales and marketing professionals who are under constant pressure to hit their numbers and demonstrate ROI. If we're not deeply attuned to their needs and workflows, we've lost the game before it even starts.
Historically, my favorite way to gather customer insights was through on-site visits - spending a half-day or more embedded with the team, understanding their processes, their pain points, their measures of success. Obviously, that's become harder in the post-pandemic world, but we still prioritize high-touch engagement wherever possible.
We also rely heavily on tech-touch insights - user behavior data from tools like Amplitude and Pendo, NPS and CSAT surveys, feature requests and support tickets. We have a very active early adopter program that provides invaluable input on new features and UX optimizations.
One thing I'm a big believer in is getting our developers as close to the customer as possible. I never want to be the sole conduit or translator of customer needs. So whether it's joining customer calls, listening to recorded interviews, or parsing feedback reports, I'm always looking for ways to give our technical teams that direct line of sight.
We've got a small but mighty customer success team that is instrumental here. They're the ones who are nurturing these customer relationships day in and day out. I'm in constant communication with them to understand not just the big wins and challenges, but also the more nuanced feedback around specific use cases or edge cases.
At the end of the day, all of these inputs feed into our prioritization process, which is anchored around our core business objectives and our assessment of customer impact. We have to be ruthless about saying no to good ideas that don't align with our current strategic priorities. Part of my job is explaining the "why" behind those decisions, both internally and externally, so that we can stay focused on the things that will drive the most value for our customers and our business.
Q: Looking ahead, what are some of the key product opportunities you're excited about?
Shadi: Right now, a lot of my focus is on what I call "finding the hooks" - those key activation points and habitual behaviors that drive long-term retention and expansion. We have some strong hypotheses around the types of sending motions and gift configurations that tend to result in higher CLV (customer lifetime value), and we're running a lot of experiments to pressure test and optimize around those.
More broadly, I'm really excited about the intersection of offline engagement and data. There's so much rich intent and relationship data generated through these gifting interactions, and I think there's a huge opportunity to surface those insights in more actionable ways and connect them to other parts of the revenue tech stack, helping all parties point to ROI.
Imagine being able to attribute pipeline or closed-won revenue back to a specific gifting campaign, or using gifting data to trigger personalized nurture streams or sales outreach. The possibilities are really endless, and I think we're just starting to scratch the surface in terms of the role that offline engagement can play in a holistic, data-driven GTM motion. Gifting is a special medium that keeps these data driven actions personalized, intentional, and focused on the recipient.
Of course, none of this happens without an incredible team and a culture of customer-centricity. I'm very lucky to work with folks across product, engineering, sales, success, and support who are all singularly focused on delivering value and demonstrating real empathy for our users. It's not always easy, and we don't always get it right on the first try, but that north star always keeps us calibrated.
In Conclusion
Our conversation with Shadi underscored the vital role that customer intimacy plays in driving product innovation, particularly in a complex, multi-faceted business like Postal. A few key themes emerged:
- Blending SaaS and physical product delivery introduces unique challenges around marketplace dynamics, inventory management, and fulfillment that must be carefully balanced with traditional software metrics.
- Activation and retention hinge not just on initial product usage, but on helping customers build offline engagement into their everyday cadence at the right mix of volume and type - a flywheel that requires deep customer understanding to perfect.
- Customer insights must be sourced from a wide range of touchpoints (high-touch and tech-touch) and made accessible to every part of the org, not just funneled through a single product leader or team.
- Effective prioritization requires a ruthless focus on core business objectives and a willingness to say no (with clear reasoning) to good ideas that don't align with current strategic priorities.
As Postal continues to evolve its platform and pursue new opportunities in data-driven offline engagement, Shadi's customer-centric approach to product leadership will undoubtedly be a key driver of their success. His journey offers a compelling case study in the power of empathy, experimentation, and alignment to shape products that truly resonate.
To see how Postal’s offline engagement platform focuses on the customer to execute scaled gifting campaigns for all types of stakeholders in the org (sales, marketing, customer success, and people ops), head over to their page and book a live demo with their team. Make sure to give Shadi a shoutout for his amazing customer focused product design!
Link to postal: https://www.postal.com/request-demo?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=cross_market
