Before you Invest in Tools, Heed this Advice From Pendo’s CEO

The Breakout Growth Podcast

According to Todd Olson, Pendo’s founder and CEO, ‘the market isn’t just receptive to AI, it’s demanding it!’ So in this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr dive deep with Todd, to better understand what this and other changes in the world of product, marketing, and growth will mean for businesses.

Pendo helps companies accelerate how they build and launch products that customers actually want by combining the power of analytics tools with messaging and customer experience features. For Product-Led Growth companies, this can be quite powerful as it helps teams intelligently use analytics to understand and drive specific valuable behaviors.

In this spirited and fun conversation, we get a sense of Todd’s approach and philosophy, and how that has helped drive Pendo’s international growth over the past 10 years. From the outset, the company was focused on improving customer experiences in software, but in the past few years, they have been able to accelerate that mission by investing in machine learning.

Todd says it’s really important to understand that the “mindset drives the tech,” not the other way around, and he’s built a culture to support that. Just as with our last podcast episode with the VP of EMEA from Moloco, Todd is laser-focused on building enthusiasm around outcomes from technology, not on the technology itself.

He says teams have a tendency to celebrate when they ship software, but really the celebration should start when the desired outcome is achieved. It’s this kind of candid and thoughtful growt-minded thinking that made for a great discussion and undoubtedly has been foundational to Pendo’s success thus far.

So jump in! And thanks for listening to the Breakout Growth Podcast. Don’t forget, to watch us and subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-K_CY4-IrZ_auEIs0j97zA/featured

We discussed:

* Building Pendo with a mission to improve experiences in software (06:10)

* Speed of innovation is important, but we have to balance change (13:22)

* What AI means for businesses and how to embrace it (18:14)

* Marketing and product’s relationship to data has changed at a different pace (22:00)

* In the future, every PM is thinking about growth (37:31)

* Smarter and more efficient: the impact of a down economy (47:58)

And much, much, more . . .

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seanellis.substack.com