A Q&A with TaskRay’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Tetlow:
Collaboration is an integral part of TaskRay’s dedication to customer success in the onboarding process. In this latest edition of our multi-part blog series on the important people behind TaskRay’s strategy, we are focusing on our executive leadership. Learn how our Chief Technology Officer, Mike Tetlow, leads by example, embodying the socially collaborative principles that make us a first-class company.
At TaskRay, I get to do something that’s unique and interesting in the world of software development. Our product is a holistic solution for customer onboarding. We’ve made it so that there are a lot of Legos that can be assembled that are unique to our customer use cases.
I think of a Lego like a unique chunk of software that people can configure and run in a way that’s similar across many different implementations, but different enough that a lot of people would not necessarily connect them. It’s actually kind of how we stumbled into the customer onboarding industry. We made a project management app in Salesforce with TaskRay and along the way we noticed that almost everyone was using our project management app to deliver the thing they sold in Salesforce. We build largely similar tools, or Legos, to accomplish our goals. That’s what makes me excited.
I strongly believe in leading by example and leading by doing. That’s something that is so very important to me as a leader. Along the way I work to remove any roadblocks from in front of other team members – I’d say that’s pretty much always my number one priority.
I also greatly enjoy having meaningful conversations where I’m able to ascertain as many facts as I can about an issue and then work with the team to come up with the best solution for a customer. It’s important to me to go deep into issues and work collaboratively to solve them.
I think with the economy becoming more subscription-based, customer onboarding will become more and more critical. I imagine that because onboarding is a crucial part of getting up and running with any service you subscribe to, if onboarding doesn’t go well then the service will just hang out in some half-implemented state. That half-implemented state is certainly not as valuable, and I imagine we’ll see more companies putting extra focus on onboarding subscriptions.
I try to stay really plugged into the many communities that I’ve found throughout my career, like Salesforce-focused online chat communities. I also like to participate as much as I possibly can in the local Denver Salesforce User Groups, specifically the Developer User Group. It’s always good to stay engaged with my local community and it’s surprising how often that winds up being truly beneficial. Not only am I building relationships, but I’m learning new and interesting things from what people are doing in the technology ecosystem.
I enjoy talking shop with the developer User Group, and certainly value networking with people, especially when you’re able to really quickly lay out some challenges you might be facing and get a completely fresh take on possible resolutions. I think it’s really healthy for everyone to step out of their day to day environment and try to apply their skills to a broader context. We learn from thinking through someone else’s set of problems, rather than just staying focused on our narrow technical landscape.
