Erica Jenkins

Erica Jenkins Consulting

Real talk about the uncomfortable reality of scaling SaaS companies...

Congrats you've figured out early product-market fit, revenue is flowing and the future looks bright. But... tasks that were once manageable now feel overwhelming, and the company that once moved with agility seems to be stuck in molasses. Sound familiar founders?

The early days, when you wore multiple hats and could make decisions on a dime, are long gone. As your customer base expands, so does the complexity of your operations. The founder's intuitive product leadership may no longer suffice, and the tech debt accumulated during the rush to market is starting to show its ugly face.

The team, once a cohesive unit, begins to fragment into silos, each with its own priorities and agendas. Communication breaks down, misalignments arise, and the friction between departments slows everything down to a snail's pace. These growing pains are inevitable, but they are not insurmountable. To navigate this challenging phase successfully, you need to address the root causes:

🏆 Leadership: Acknowledge that the founder's hands-on approach is no longer sustainable. Bring in experienced leaders who can oversee product, engineering, and other critical functions.

💳 Tech Debt: Prioritize tackling tech debt. Invest in refactoring and modernization to ensure your infrastructure can support future growth.

💬 Communication: Foster a culture of open communication and collaboration. 
Break down silos, encourage cross-functional teams, and establish clear communication channels.

🗞 Processes: Define and document standardized processes for onboarding, support, and other key operations. This will bring efficiency and consistency to your operations.

Scaling a SaaS business is a marathon, not a sprint. I've been there. Reach out if you need some help navigating into the next phase of growth.

Founder

Metropolitan Partners Group

Operator experts empathetically connect with management and gain new understanding of operational risks and opportunities for potential investments ranging from $10-50M. 

I offer expertise in the MarTech sector and bring a Product led viewpoint to the team.

Operating and Sector Expert

Crayon

Competitive intelligence is an emerging strategic role and Crayon's goal is to deliver a solution to assist with product marketing positioning and deliver information out to revenue teams to increase conversion rates in competitive deals. 

I've built out a team of 6 remote-based product managers and UX designers to support an aggressive roadmap innovating to validate product market fit in an emerging category. Product Management isn't done in a bubble, our engineering and customer success counterparts are integral to building a great platform for customers.  In my first quarter on the team, we launched Productboard to provide full transparency on the roadmap and aggregate all customer feedback, win/loss input, and prioritize leadership's vision. 

Our partners such as Salesforce, Gong, Hubspot, G2, Clearbit and Slack allow for Crayon to integrate into their tech stacks to meet revenue teams in their day-to-day work streams.  With over 500 customers, corporations such as DropBox, CVS Health, Zendesk, and Microsoft the product team is focused on customer-driven guidance and innovations harnessing AI.

Chief Product Officer

Meltwater

Second acquisition of our growing social media listening and marketing software led me to join Meltwater.  By automating many of today’s manual efforts within an AI powered analytics engine, marketers can turn trillions of owned and earned data points into contextual insights and predictions that drives stronger business decisions.

During my time on the team we consolidated into a new unified platform migrating 1000's of customers from a legacy software to the new solution retaining 90% of revenue.  Growth of the new unified social media management app Engage and the largest data collection of online media with Explore had 50% YoY growth.  

I worked directly with product managers and owners across 15+ development teams globally to deliver continuous improvements and features to Meltwater's marketing platform.  API integrations, scraping and whitelisted partnerships, were very much a part of my day to day processing over 750M pieces of content to surface trends and analytics to our end users.

VP Product Management

Sysomos

2017 was the year of integration for Sysomos.  A two year journey was accomplished to integrate 7 different tech stacks, databases and user repositories into a  unified single platform.  I directly managed 7 direct reports and a total team of 30+ disbursed across across three development hubs. 

Implemented a clear organizational structure with defined roles and responsibilities through two restructures, while still meeting deliverables, establishing GDPR requirements and maintaining high employee morale. 

As an executive, I often drive keynotes for customer events or joined industry panels at conferences to represent our brand and technology as thought leadership in the market. 

We successfully launched functionality supporting social listening, computer vision capabilities, social media management functions and extensive analytics to global brands and agencies.  The vision for a marketing platform caught the attention of many private equity firms and acquisition options.  Ultimately myself and the Sysomos leadership team were successful in being acquired in 2018.

I manage a team of 4 PM's and 2 UX/UI experts.  We own the "What" and establish the priority based on vision, strategy, and client need to drive revenue.  I oversee release planning with our executive team and hand this off to the Product Managers to scope and size with development and QA.  

My role includes:
- Quarterly meetings with executives regarding satisfaction, emerging needs or potential cross business unit opportunities for value from the VOC across paid, owned and earned on social media
- Research and analyze competitive product functionality, vertical personas and market level data to define data strategy to capture market share and new logo acquisition 
- Collaborate with our CTO to establish our software release cadence, internal tools and development state changes following Agile methodology driving a MRR of $825K at time of acquisition on the Expion platform only

Regarding the Expion application, our team has moved from a waterfall development cycle to agile methodology to deliver the highest value in a repeatable and ‘fast enough’ process based on these key principles. 

1.	Under-promise and over-deliver, without burning out the team in the process
2.	Prioritize and ‘right-size’ consistently projects based on value to customers and the business
3.	Leverage and engage customers strategically as market representatives and partners
4.	Deliver MVP features and functions that are easily consumable by customers for adoption

Although this transition has had its challenges, establishing the right tools and defined processes has made this scalable for my Product and UX team, our Critical Client Care and R&D developers.

VP of Product

Expion

My passion is fueled knowing the decisions my team makes each day will solve a business problem and improve our clients workflows. In a growth mode software company, change is mandatory and vision for a better more usable product is my daily goal.

With extensive cross-business experience in the social and analytics space, I am in my element where client requirements, technology, marketing-analytics, and a team come together.  With over 20 API's and 2000+ endpoints for measurement and analytics, our product is in constant change. Each day brings a new challenge but also allows for us to change the enterprise and align Marketing, R&D, HR, eCommerce and more through the most real time feedback engine in the world.  Think of Social CRM with engagement and deep analytics.

SVP of Product Management

As Expion scaled towards $10M in revenue, my focus shifted to hiring and expanding more leadership and management of the day-to-day while I shifted toward scaling the business processes and defining the product strategy.

SVP Customer Success and Professional Services

Over a 4 year period, I established the Client Services Organization including implementation, support and professional services for 150+ enterprise clients including Hilton Worldwide, Coca-Cola, Subway, Clinique, and iHeart Media. 

- Hired and cross trained a team of 15 to support and implement complex global customers based on specified organizational hierarchies and job roles to mimic business units structure. 
- Acting as the inside sales function for Expion, I worked directly with each key executive to drive expansion leading to $3M in revenue from existing client up sell annually. 
- Collaborated directly with Sales to institute and standardize services portfolio resulting in increased service revenue and client satisfaction.
- Determined CSO resource requirements and allocation to support a rapidly growing organization.
- Primary liaison between client and Expion development teams for feature requests needed in our roadmap.

My role was to educate and drive career development of my Account Managers to listen to clients requirement and set reasonable expectations for use of the Expion Social Management software. 

Core Focus and Expertise:
-Global Social Media Scalability
-Localized Social Media Strategy
-Governance and Efficiency for the Enterprise

VP Customer Success and Professional Services

As the Director of Client Services, it was my goal to help our clients execute their social media strategy with the Expion platform  Starting with a team of 2, I built out an implementation process, client training process and customer follow up to maintain revenue and growth.   

During this time, social media was very focused on "local" with our first implementation across 1200 Applebee's Facebook pages.  We trained at the restaurant, regional and brand level.

Director of Client Services

McClenny Properties LLC

I started my career in sales with an average annual volume of $10M.  I realized success was reliant on a solid CRM program and aggressive lead generation plan.  During a pivotal time of marketing moving online, I sold over $100K in commissions tied to online conversations through social media and forums.  

Establishing myself as a virtual real estate firm who provided blogs, video tutorials and knowledge sharing about investing was key to capturing leads.  I grew to over 300+ customers in my database inclusive of 60 investors who purchased an average of 3 homes a year each.  I maintained full project management of clients from lead to conversion, negotiation to sale and final closing. All project management was done by myself and tracked with my online office portal. 

This experience was crucial to my application and understanding of process automation when I co-founded Expion.  I took my smaller pain points and applied them to larger enterprise marketing efforts.

Company Owner and Broker in Charge

Over 30K hours in B2B Product Management | Co-founder @Expion (acquired 2015) | CPO @Sysomos (acquired 2018) | VP of Product @Meltwater (IPO in 2020) | Seeking next B2B SaaS Leadership role

Over 30,000 hours in B2B Enterprise SaaS heading up Product, UX, and GTM teams for 15 years from startup to scale over $100M on a global MarTech platform gives me a different perspective on technology. 

In 2009 Erica Co-Founded Expion, a bootstrapped social media management SaaS platform which enabled B2C brands to engage and measure their paid, earned, and owned marketing campaigns. Expion was acquired in 2015 by Sysomos, a leader in social listening. I spearheaded the repackaging of the combined platform to bring 3 new solutions to market and again was acquired in 2018 by Meltwater.

From 2018 to 2021, the marketing SaaS product lines generated a 200% revenue growth. In 2021, Erica was recruited by Crayon's Founder and CEO after their Series B round to transform the product and engineering organization to shift into a PLG motion to deliver a best-in-class competitive intelligence enablement solution to brands like Dropbox, Gong, Microsoft, and Salsify.

Erica is seeking to find the next team to join where her head of product management experience and focus on bringing delightful user experiences to market will be valuable to drive revenue and reduce churn.

Competitive intelligence isn't a new term but it is an emerging strategic role in many mid-market to enterprise business.  Understanding what the competition is pushing out to the market to attract prospects and positioning helps businesses inform sales enablement. 

I've built out a team of 6 remote based product managers and UX designers to support an aggressive roadmap innovating to validate product market fit in an emerging category. Product Management isn't done in a bubble, our engineering and customer success counterparts are integral to building a great platform for our customers.  In my first quarter on the team, we launched Productboard to provide full transparency on the roadmap and to aggregate all customer feedback, win/loss input and prioritize leadership vision. 

We are striving to create an API integrated ecosystem of partners such as Gong, Hubspot, Salesforce and Slack. We have a proprietary data ingestion curating digital content, social media, web site changes, SEC filings and firmographics on any company you care to monitor.

Myself and the team work with large B2B tech corporations such as DropBox, Salesforce, Zendesk and hundreds of other notable brands.  The team is positioned strongly with Series B funding and strong double digit growth year of year.

Fractional leadership gives B2B SaaS companies a leg up on their competition. Why? 

1️⃣  72.8% of us have over 15 years in our field. People like myself are seasoned operators who can transform your team and process and we hit the ground running with little ramp-up needed.

2️⃣ Fractional is not part-time or consulting, it's full-time thinking with fewer hours meaning you can hire someone you generally can't afford full-time. Growth has been crazy in 2024! 

3️⃣ The stage of Scale-Up is ideal to bring someone in to help you avoid mistakes. A been there, done that person can save you a ton of money in the long run. 

A bonus of hiring a fractional executive is their broad learning across multiple companies. I'm seeing a trend with my clients who have similar pain points. CRM needs work and integration for customer success. Product analytics are in place to drive decision-making. The help center and support processes need refinement. 

A fractional leader can provide real-world experience and fast-track initiatives based on work they've already tackled. It's a superpower for my clients and it enables me to drive change, quickly. 

If you haven't thought about bringing an expert to your team, even if it's for the coaching and growth of a more junior person, you should. 

I welcome introductions to anyone you know who might need a leg up. My team is ready to tackle BIG problems in 2025.

👋 Erica Jenkins

Product Executive with 30K+ hours | $500M+ in revenue | 2x acquired, 1 IPO | SaaS Founders see transformation with my team, guaranteed.

Stats were from the Summer 2024 State of Fractional Industry Report https://frak.kit.com/02b4cb388e

Taplio

👋 Erica Jenkins's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}👋 Erica Jenkins's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

👋 Erica Jenkins's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts (last 30 days)