Introducing Pathlight: Transforming Management for a New Generation of Leaders

Managers have never been more important

Managers are the unsung heroes of the modern workplace. They are directly responsible for the professional success and personal happiness of their team, which means they are a company's most powerful lever for achieving success.

This has never been more true than today. In the span of weeks, the way we work has completely changed. Teams that once worked just a few feet apart are now miles apart. Behind every newly remote worker is a manager who is tirelessly working for their success. Their job has never been harder, and they have never been more essential.

Despite being so important, managers are deeply underserved by technology. Powerful software has streamlined every other role in the organization, but the modern manager is still wrestling a dozen tabs in their browser, a back-to-back calendar, and a sea of documents, notes, and apps in order to get their job done.

This problem is not new, but thanks to two parallel trends, we can finally solve it:

• First, our work now lives in the cloud. More and more roles – from sales to shipping – are leveraging software to digitize their work. There is finally enough data for technology to transform management.
• Second, there is a new generation in the workplace. They expect instant answers, instant feedback, and instant recognition. They expect more from technology. They expect more from their managers.

A new platform for a new generation of leaders

Pathlight is built to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization. To automate the science (and the busywork) so you can focus on the art. We do this in three steps:

1. Real-time performance intelligence

How game-changing would it be to know exactly how you and your team are doing, in real-time, wherever you are? With Pathlight, it’s as easy as checking the weather.

• You’ll never need ten browser tabs to track performance again. We seamlessly pull in data from Salesforce, Zendesk, Snowflake, and many more.
• No more spreadsheet calculations! Pathlight analyzes goals against historical trends and your org chart so you can visualize and benchmark performance.
• Your team members see the exact same intelligence – on their desktop or on their phone – so everyone is on the same page.

2. One-click, data-driven management

Understanding performance is just the first step: you need to turn data into action. We’ve built the first suite of communication tools designed to do just that.

• Instantly course-correct. Send data-driven messages to your team in one click. Charts, leaderboards, related objects are automatically embedded.
• Create a culture of success. Share wins with your team or the entire department.
• No one slips through the cracks, because every team member is getting the guidance they need.

3. World-class coaching and development

Pathlight helps you quickly turn performance intelligence into the impactful coaching that will set each team member up for success.

• Coach faster and more frequently. Templates, automatic documentation, and notifications via email, Slack, or push notifications make it effortless.
• You’re actually prepared for 1-on-1s. Agendas integrate with your calendar and are automatically enriched with data snapshots, trends, and discussion topics.
• Everyone can manage, regardless of where they fall in the org chart: manage up, coach the coach, praise a peer.

Used by teams around the world to hit their most important goals

Two years ago – as we were laying the foundations for the analysis engine that would become Pathlight – we could only dream of building a platform that’s quickly become mission-critical to companies and essential to users. 73% of managers reported a median increase in performance after using Pathlight; 94% said they could manage more people. The majority of our users – 90% of whom are individual contributors – use it every working day of the week.

By bringing transparency and creating a culture of accountability, Pathlight is helping create more equity in the workplace. A customer used Pathlight to identify a high-potential rep with an atypical background who had been previously overlooked for promotion. Another, saw a nervous first-time manager embrace Pathlight to proactively manage her team. Both became Pathlight power users and top-performing managers.

Most importantly, Pathlight is helping our customers succeed. From Revenue to CSAT to Employee Satisfaction, their most important KPIs are going up after adopting Pathlight.

$10mm raised, opening our doors to all managers.

Today, we are welcoming all metrics-driven, customer-facing teams to the Pathlight platform. This includes inside sales teams, sales development teams, customer support teams, customer success teams, and field sales.

We are also excited to announce that Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins led our Series A last year, bringing our total fundraising to over $10mm. Ilya is no stranger to backing category-defining companies and quickly saw the potential to create something special with Pathlight. With Kleiner’s support, we are continuing to grow our team — now over 50% women — and strengthen our culture.

What’s next: empowering everyone to achieve their professional best

Our vision is to empower everyone to achieve their personal best – no matter your working situation. Our first step is to supercharge managers, but our ultimate goal is to empower every employee to take charge of their own performance. We believe that transforming management ultimately means democratizing it. It’s your career – you should control it.

We are starting with customer-facing teams, but the cloud revolution is allowing more and more functions to become equally data-driven. From staffing to retail to logistics, data-driven decisions are becoming the norm. We plan to make Pathlight available to these industries in the very near future.

If you are an ambitious, forward-leaning leader and are interested in trialing Pathlight for your team, request a demo now.