SaaStr Podcast #209: Amanda Kleha, Chief Customer Officer @ Figma Discusses How To Ensure Successful Cross-Functional Communication
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This post is by Harry Stebbings from SaaStr
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Welcome to Episode 209! Amanda Kleha is the Chief Customer Officer @ Figma, the startup that allows you to turn ideas into products faster through design, prototyping and feedback gathering, all in one place. To date, Figma have raised over $42m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and former guests on 20VC, Daniel Gross and Adam Nash. Prior to Figma, Amanda held numerous roles at Zendesk including SVP of Marketing and Sales Strategy. Amanda joined Zendesk as the first marketing hire and over the next 7 years Zendesk grew to over 2,000 employees. Before Zendesk, Amanda worked on the marketing team for Google’s Enterprise SaaS businesses. If that was not enough Amanda is also an advisor at Airtable and Smartling.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
- How Amanda made her way into the world of SaaS and to join Zendesk as their first marketing hire seeing the company scale to over 2,000 over the next 7 years.
What were some of Amanda’s biggest learnings from seeing Zendesk scale from 12 to 2,000? How does one determine those that can vs cannot grow with the business? What is the sign a stretch VP is a stretch too far? How does Amanda balance between a culture of risk taking but also not accepting failure to easily?
How does Amanda like to run the interview process? Why does Amanda like to not show emotion when interviewing a candidate? What are the benefits of this for the brand of your company? What single question does Amanda find most revealing in showing the abilities and character of a candidate in an interview?
What does Amanda mean when she says “pricing is made up of 3 components?” Where does Amanda believe most people go wrong with pricing? Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing? How does Amanda think the go-to-market has to change with every stage of development? What are the challenges with this?
How does the structure of decision-making change with scale? What are the inflection points? When does both decision-making and communication tend to break down? What can be done to ensure seamless cross-functional communication across the org? Where do most people fail here?
Amanda’s 60 Second SaaStr:
- What does Amanda know now that she wishes she had known when she started in SaaS?
Is there such thing as no man’s land in SaaS pricing?
How to ensure customer support is strategic and not just reactionary?
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Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Amanda Kleha
Transcript
Harry Stebbings: You are back with me, Harry Stebbings at hstebbings1996 with two Bs on Instagram. And my word, what an episode we have in store for you today. An individual who’s seen the scaling from start up to multi-billion dollar public company. With that, I’m thrilled to welcome Amanda Kleha. Amanda is the Chief Customer Officer at Figma, the start up that allows you to turn ideas into products faster through design prototyping and gathering feedback all in one place. To date, Figma have raised over 42 million dollars in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, and former 20 VC guests, Daniel Gross and Adam Nash.
Harry Stebbings: And prior to Figma, Amanda held numerous roles at Zendesk including SVP of marketing and sales strategy. And Amanda joined Zendesk as the first marketing hire and over the next seven years, Zendesk grew to, check this out, over 2,000 employees. And before Zendesk, Amanda worked on the marketing team for Google’s enterprise SaaS business. And if that wasn’t enough, Amanda is also today an advisor at Airtable and Smartling.
Harry Stebbings: I do also have say a huge thank you to Anne Raimondi for the fantastic intro to Amanda today. I really do so appreciate that, Anne. But that’s enough of my British voice drearing on, and so now I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Amanda Kleha at Figma.
Harry Stebbings: Amanda, a huge welcome to the show. I’ve heard many great things from Dylan and Anne. So a huge thank you for joining me today.
Amanda Kleha: Thank you so much, Harry. It’s great to be here and have a chance to chat with you.
Harry Stebbings: Absolutely. But I want to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, Amanda, how did you make your way into the world of SaaS, exactly 10 years ago from my stalking of the LinkedIn profile, and come to be the chief customer officer at Figma. What is that story?
Amanda Kleha: Yeah. You know I got started in SaaS really by accident. I was working in the back office of tech doing IT development work, and I realized I wanted to get closer to the customer. I ended up pursuing an MBA at Yale and as that was wrapping up, an alumni talked me into joining a security SaaS company called Postini. So after grad school, I took a job in marketing at Postini because it fit the goal of getting closer to the customer. And right as I started, Google acquired the company, so I ended up working at Google for a few years, and then I got introduced to Mikkel, the CEO of Zendesk.
Amanda Kleha: And joining Zendesk really changed the trajectory of everything for me. I didn’t know how much my career was going to change at the time, but Zendesk had a great product market fit, and I was on a growth path there that was just unstoppable. And for the first time in my life, I actually jumped out of bed on Monday mornings. So I was just in love with learning how we would evolve every six months. And I think that combination of me loving my job and being at a successful place took me to a lot of new places. I really wasn’t concerned with what my title was or what my job was even, I was just really excited to be there every day. And I think that attitude helped me be successful, as well as just outlast the change of every phase.
Amanda Kleha: And so by the time I left Zendesk seven and a half years later, I had the marketing experience I needed to go run marketing, but I also knew I could do more because I’d started a cross-functional business unit there that was focused on online sales. I’d also run sales strategy for the company right before I left. And in addition, for support, because we sold to that buyer and department, I learned a lot about support. So I really felt like I was a potential candidate for a COO type role at the right place. And now here I am at Figma, in charge of all go-to-market, which is super exciting for me.
Harry Stebbi
United States
