• 29
  • May

In conversation with… Cassio Sampaio

Cassio Sampaio is Vice President, Product at Auth0—a leader in what’s sometimes called identity and access management (IAM). Whether or not you’ve heard of IAM, you almost certainly depend on it in more ways than you know.

(If you follow the tech M&A news, then you may have seen that Auth0 has just been acquired for the tidy sum of $6.5B—that’s what can happen when you’re experiencing hypergrowth as a leader in an increasingly important space.)

Cassio and I have been on a few adventures together, so I figured why not reach out to him, pick his brain, and share what comes out—that way we can all benefit from the insights and experiences tucked away inside.

After we worked together for years in KW, you joined Digital Ocean (DO). From there, you were recruited to join Apple as part of their platform infrastructure engineering (PIE) team. And then about a year ago you reunited with some of the DO crew at Auth0. That’s quite an impressive run, so let me start by asking you what has stood out most about each experience?

DigitalOcean was a very neat experience as somehow I went back into the world of Infrastructure-aaS after a decade-long hiatus from my early days running engineering for a website hosting operation. The most incredible aspect of DigitalOcean was to have access to a customer base of tens of thousands customers that wanted to speak to us and help us to continue building the product.

No less importantly, it was also my first experience working on a B2B tech product where the user experience was a huge part of the value proposition. User experience is obviously a big feature of the Ubers and Facebooks of this world but it was fascinating to be part of one of the companies delivering the “consumerization of IT” through cloud computing.

Apple is a formidable company from any way you look at it and the sheer size of all things within the company is mind blowing. Only a handful of companies in the world share the same size characteristics—and the opportunity to participate in the mechanics of such a Goliath was quite remarkable.

Auth0 in many ways has several attributes similar to DigitalOcean. We also have tons of customers that love to talk to us and delivering a good user experience is a big part of our success. Auth0’s products sit at an interesting point on the stack of modern SaaS applications (it is technically not IaaS or PaaS).

It is an integral building block of the user experience and security posture of what are the most valuable assets of the biggest companies in the world: the mobile apps, e-commerce, mobile banking and other applications that have served the world particularly well during the last year under COVID-19 restrictions.

Can you explain a bit more about what Auth0 does and what you do as Vice President, Product?

Auth0 builds identity as a service that some recognize as cloud-based IAM (identity and access management). In more concrete terms think of Auth0 as the technology that powers everything that happens when customers login or manage their account preferences on websites like The Economist, Subaru and hundreds of other global brands. A lot happens behind the scenes, following a myriad of standards and best practices to ensure customer identities are secured while creating a seamless experience to users.

The scope of the Product team at Auth0 includes product management, product and visual design, research, pricing, documentation and competitive intelligence.

The product team works closely with our customer teams and developer relations to advance our understanding of customer needs through relentless research and learning from our thousands of customers’ applications and integrations

The intersection of IAM, developer tools and cloud computing shapes the type of talent we hire as subject matter expertise is important to succeed in the space. The product team works closely with our customer teams and developer relations to advance our understanding of customer needs through relentless research and learning from our thousands of customers’ applications and integrations.

Leveraging domain experience on this data-centric culture, the team experiments with different design and architectural choices in close collaboration with engineering teams, shipping customer value very frequently.

Auth0 is experiencing what we in tech like to call “hypergrowth,” much like Digital Ocean while you were there. Can you share a few insights into what goes into fuelling such remarkable growth?

I believe a combination of things (buzzword overload warning)—firing from all cylinders, bias to action, continuous improvement, strong opinions loosely held and hiring for the future—are essential to drive this level of growth.

Sustaining high levels of growth does not necessarily require a company to operate like a philharmonic orchestra in perfect tune (which is an unrealistic expectation in the real world even though a third of the books that litter the shelves of business literature will say otherwise).

While not a perfectly orchestrated machine, companies that grow at high sustained rates are constantly evolving all aspects of the business

While not a perfectly orchestrated machine, companies that grow at high sustained rates are constantly evolving all aspects of the business (marketing, sales, developer relations, product, engineering, finance, everything, community).

You need to generate more and better PQLs—product-qualified leads—than yesterday, you need to ship more and better features, you need more developers serving as ambassadors, you need to close bigger deals faster, you need to grow community engagement both in depth and breadth, and so on. And by making continuous improvements across all these areas, always looking for opportunities to do things differently and act decisively (in the absence of perfect data, because it will never come), adjusting these decisions as new and better information comes…and repeat.

And last by not least, I believe in hiring for where you plan to be in 6-12 months versus today. Most fast-growing companies are constantly behind on hiring. Designing your hiring philosophy to constantly bring top-notch talent to help you tackle the problems of tomorrow will feed into the loop described above.

Defining a goal-setting process where the whole company is voraciously looking for opportunities to improve and tackling these areas consistently across the business. Call it OKRs, KRs or whatever, picking a system that helps foster this type of culture makes a world of difference.

While being part of a hypergrowth company is a goal for many tech workers, I’m sure creating, sustaining, and—to some extent—even coping with that rapid scaling has its challenges. Can you shine a bit of light on the dark side of growing so fast?

I wouldn’t necessarily call it the “dark side” as anything growth is infinitely better than lack of growth (as you and I know well!). Sustaining growth levels as companies scale beyond the first tens of millions in ARR is the hard part.

Pick a hypothetical company growing 60% YoY for three years as a reference point—now do the mental math and think of what it means in practical terms: by Year Three the company needs to grow revenues by nearly the company’s entire Year-One size. It is the magic (and curse?) of compound growth that creates some dilemmas…

Very specifically from a product roadmap perspective, hypergrowth companies more than any others need to focus on the sustainability of the technology (tech debt or replatforming anyone?) while potentially hundreds of customers are being onboarded

Very specifically from a product roadmap perspective, hypergrowth companies more than any others need to focus on the sustainability of the technology (tech debt or replatforming anyone?) while potentially hundreds of customers are being onboarded.

But growth cannot come “at any cost” though, so the Rule of 40 (SaasHolic | ScaleVP) can be a handy tool to help assess if the growth of the company is coming at an acceptable cost and can be sustained.

The adjustment that a company inevitably goes through as the business expands and as delivering 50%+ growth gets harder is also complex.

Product-led growth typically requires a very steady stream of continuous roadmap improvement features worked in collaboration with hundreds of customers directly

Depending on funding needs if the adjustment does not happen in tandem with an improvement in profitability, the situation could lead to demand for more funding now with less stellar multiples—aka “down rounds: the nightmare of any tech company.

Product-led growth typically requires a very steady stream of continuous roadmap improvement features worked in collaboration with hundreds of customers directly; this approach is quite different from the more classic enterprise sales-led growth where a small number of customers may have a big sway over roadmap decisions.

And circling back a bit: you talked about hiring for tomorrow, rather than today, so I wanted to touch on that a little—specifically how companies can best understand tomorrow’s needs while dealing with today’s challenges, and find the right people to fill those needs.

When companies grow fast, it is nearly impossible to hire at the pace you need. The competition for talent may be a cliché but it is very real—particularly when targeting more senior and experienced individuals. And fast-growing companies change so rapidly that what was a great fit for a group of people at the beginning (“Series A and B talent”) may not be a great place as the organization grows into hundreds of individuals. This inevitably leads to some level churn.

A modest or overly cautious hiring strategy in this environment is a recipe for disaster as some roles take longer to fill—and failing to fill them creates a vicious downward spiral effect of having multiple crucial gaps in the organization even as new needs arise.

A modest or overly cautious hiring strategy in this environment is a recipe for disaster as some roles take longer to fill—and failing to fill them creates a vicious downward spiral effect of having multiple crucial gaps in the organization even as new needs arise.

The only way to deal with this is to plan to hire ahead of your needs—including deliberately creating a management and specialization “bench.”

I am not suggesting one should hire “two of each role” but instead to look forward and forecast what the company will look like in 12 months—which requires a combination of expertise, honesty, discipline and ambition.

One tactic is to ask some deceptively simple questions:

  • What types of product challenges you will be facing? Hire product managers who’ve solved those problems before.
  • What new customer problems do you need to learn and address? Hire product researchers and designers with that experience.
  • What additional pricing options and packaging might you need? Hire pricing analysts.

…and so on.

In KW there’s an undersupply of people in many product and marketing roles—particularly product marketing. It often takes 6-9 months to fill product marketing reqs, and companies often have to adjust their criteria to do so. This problem is being exacerbated now that WFH is encouraging companies to hire from anywhere. I personally know KW-based product marketers who’ve started at Auth0 (based in Bellevue) and Unbounce (Vancouver). What are your thoughts on product marketing in general, and what can KW companies do to attract and retain talent?

I believe first and foremost, product marketing managers need to be given the right scope of influence and execution across the company.

More often than not, product marketing is seen as the junior partner to product management, and this view inevitably leads to suboptimal outcomes. Empowering product marketing to have a broader role in the organization—helping to shape the product roadmap from early research and discovery to launch—is paramount.

I believe first and foremost, product marketing managers need to be given the right scope of influence and execution across the company—whatever the model, product marketing is an integral part of the team building the product

Plus, having this dynamic will help you attract the right talent—but “the catch” is that your success very much depends on finding top-notch, experienced product marketers.

And different companies operate differently so regardless of whether or not product marketing is part of the product or marketing organization, they must be embedded with their product management, product designer and engineering counterparts. Some companies have triads while others do four-in-a-box.

Whatever the model, product marketing is an integral part of the team building the product.

KW companies would benefit from hiring product marketers from successful SaaS companies south of the border

Lastly, KW companies would benefit from hiring product marketers from successful SaaS companies south of the border even if it means embracing some level of remote working (which I fully realize can be a paradigm shift for some organizations). I have spent nearly all my career in B2B so obviously this opinion is biased but the size and scope of B2B SaaS companies in the US is disproportionately larger than in any other market. KW companies could accelerate their growth by hiring a few product marketers with hypergrowth experience from household B2B SaaS names.

Thanks for taking the time to chat!

Want more Cassio wisdom?

Then check out this very special episode of the Crommunity Podcast.

Header image background: JJ Ying on Unsplash