Building a strong, customer-obsessed go-to-market team

I’m thrilled to share that after almost eight years at Slack, I’ve joined Glean to drive our go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Glean is positioned to redefine and lead the category of enterprise search and knowledge management. This opportunity demands that we build a world-class GTM organization—one that will help the working world solve one of the biggest problems facing employees today: finding and discovering the information and knowledge needed to do their best work. 

Enterprise search is arguably not a new category and it’s forever been considered the “holy grail” as a way for CIOs and executives to empower their teams and companies to be more efficient and productive.

The problem for decades, however, has been the inability to connect an organization’s information and knowledge silos into a single source of truth in a seamless and personalized way. It’s an issue that has only been exacerbated by the explosion of SaaS tools, the consumerization of IT, employee tool choice and a pandemic that forced many of us out of the office and into a fully remote and digital world.

Today, information and knowledge silos are bigger and more complex than ever, which means the problem is more acute than ever—both at the individual employee level and the company level. This is why I’m joining Glean. Solving this ubiquitous problem is such an exciting mission. I’m a stickler for productivity and efficiency and I cannot think of a single product and mission that will more significantly enhance productivity in the world than what Glean is building. The ambitions of the product extend well beyond just search and delve into innovative ways to solve the knowledge management problem that intranets have failed to solve for a decade. 

Beyond the mission, product category, and potential impact of Glean on the world, the most impressive part of Glean is the team. The culture of transparency and continuous learning, among other aspects, that I felt and saw during the interview process were genuine and differentiated. I learned that Glean’s board meetings are run with every employee in attendance. I also asked Arvind about a specific project he worked on in the past that failed and what he learned from it—his humble approach to the answer alongside his thoughtful analysis both from a personal and business standpoint compelled me to want to build something great with this team. 

Finally, the specific opportunity to head up GTM and take all of my learnings from building and leading innovative sales teams and cultures at Facebook and Slack made the decision to join a no-brainer. Arvind’s, his team’s, and the board’s faith in me to lead this function to both deliver strong results and build a unique culture that attracts the best talent in the world were humbling and exhilarating at the same time. The team already built a strong foundation with Josh Chang’s leadership, and I am excited to take it to the next level. 

The most important part of our GTM strategy will be hiring high-caliber people who are passionate about the product and problem we are solving and who love being customer-obsessed. Customer success-focused is the defining characteristic of the culture I helped to build at Slack and that is the type of GTM culture we are building at Glean. The customer obsession ethos combined with a team who proactively collaborates with product and engineering to be the voice of the customer and to help improve the product experience will be key to how we scale. I saw this firsthand at Slack and this is especially true in the enterprise segment where customer’s product and feature requests become more unique and challenging to prioritize.

Rest assured though, whether you are a small business or one of the largest multinational companies in the world, Glean and our GTM team will be here to partner with you every step of the journey, helping your company more easily discover information and knowledge to do your best work. We’ll be supporting you and driving your success with a diverse, fun team of people across GTM, product, and engineering who think in a collaborative, customer-obsessed way to help you with your business problems.

Come try out our product or join our team!