Why Pathlight? Why Now?

After five and a half amazing years at Zoom, I am thrilled to announce that I have joined Pathlight! I loved my time at Zoom, and when I look back to when I started there in 2015, it was just a little company that not many people had heard of — but with a great product, an incredible team, and a lot of hard work, we transformed it into something really special. This past year, it has been incredibly rewarding to help so many people use Zoom to stay connected and accomplish more at work.

But recently I found myself longing for the challenges and fun of the start-up life again. My strength is creating marketing strategies to propel a great product into high-growth mode. I wanted to find a company that was developing a solution to solve a big market problem that also had an A+ team and attitude.

And I found it all with Pathlight. There is a huge market opportunity for the platform and when you read their mission statement, how can you not be energized? Pathlight was built to help every single person achieve their professional best. Something really magical happens when a person, a team, or an entire org knows exactly how they are doing, in real-time, and what they need to focus on. Pathlight is the ideal solution for individual contributors to see the path to success and for execs and managers to have an instant understanding of performance.

It’s so relatable. How many times have you felt like you were playing a game of Survivor instead of being evaluated for your actual work performance? Pathlight simplifies the complex world of performance management and solves a big pain point for large customer-facing teams by empowering data-driven management and coaching at every layer of the organizational chart.

Why I’m excited about Pathlight’s opportunity

The way I see it— there are currently three megatrends impacting businesses that make Pathlight a must-have solution to improve performance for customer-facing roles.

Trend 1: The Workforce is Moving to a Hybrid/Remote-Work Model

Let’s face it, managing people is hard work— it always has been. And the permanent shift to a more distributed workforce makes it even harder. With 87% of employers planning on embracing a hybrid/remote-work model with greater flexibility post-pandemic (March 2021, Mercer survey), it’s time to bolster the management toolbox.

In a remote world, managers can no longer “see” if someone is actually working, what they are working on, or if they are doing the right thing, which makes coaching really difficult. Being on Zoom and having chat applications has helped, but managers are really flying blind, and employees often feel a bit lost.

The answer is to embrace a data-driven approach. Taking a data-driven approach to management enables you to be much more effective and flexible. Since you can no longer observe how engaged your team is, the right metrics will allow you to make sure that your team is performing, which is the ultimate job of a manager—making sure your team is hitting their goals and being personally and professionally successful, no matter where they are working.

Trend 2:  Employee Happiness is Critical for Retention

It’s astounding that more than half of employees surveyed in North America plan to look for a new job in 2021 according to a recent study by The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM). The “great resignation” is a new reality and it’s incredibly disruptive to businesses. The cost associated with lost time, hiring, and onboarding is significant. Companies need to empower employees with coaching and performance data at their fingertips to feel impactful and derive more happiness in their jobs.

Because Pathlight gives instant access to performance data to everyone in real-time, it allows managers to recognize top performers, quickly gather data that identifies low performers, and create scalable coaching opportunities. Pathlight also levels the playing field and drives equality by delivering data-driven performance metrics. There is no bias involved; it allows people who perform the best to get the recognition they deserve with badging, shoutouts, and leaderboards.

Companies that adopt Pathlight create cultures where people want to work; employees are happier and more productive. In fact, over 76% of managers and directors say that Pathlight directly increases their team's performance. This is urgent:  it’s time to check in and make sure your employees are happy, empowered, and well managed. You don’t want to lose them.

Trend 3: Work has Gone Digital, but Management is Still Analog

It’s a fact that most sales, support, and field service teams use many, many different applications to do their jobs. According to Okta’s Businesses at Work Study 2021, their average customer has 88 SaaS applications. All of these apps have valuable data, but they force people to sift through mountains of spreadsheets and data to get a clear picture of their individual or team’s performance.

Instead, imagine a world where members of your organization can quickly get a pulse on how they are doing at work. As our CEO, Alex Kvamme, always says, “Employees should be able to wake up in the morning and— just like they check the weather— they should be able to understand how they're doing at work.”

Pathlight’s online and mobile apps have beautiful dashboards and simple drill-downs created with the data that teams integrate from platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Outreach, and more. These elegantly visualized dashboards provide instant insights across various parameters set by managers. Popular L.A. clothing brand, MeUndies, says that Pathlight reduced employee workload by 4+ hours per week.

On top of these trends and a rock-solid product, the Pathlight team is very impressive! Pathlight boasts Netflix, Google, and Pinterest alum— to name a few— who have all come together to form a phenomenal culture. Pathlighters have high energy, a willingness to dive in and do what is right for our customers, and a curiosity and drive to keep improving the ways in which people work.

It is exciting to be part of a solution to help companies manage better and succeed! Want to join me? I’m building out a world-class category-creating marketing team, if you're interested in getting in at the ground floor, let me know!