Setting up Rain for Hyper-Growth

Rain’s senior leadership team worked with Nick when they wanted to:

• Scale their team and add 100s of new engineers
• Take their US-based product global
• Give senior leadership space to focus on the big picture, getting them out of the weeds

We now have an empowered product team, which allows leaders to spend more time on the big picture

Frederic Choquette, Rain COO

Nick guided Rain through hyper-growth

The Rain team was going through a period of hyper-growth, adding 100s of new engineers and product managers. They needed to release new product features, launch in new markets, and keep their fast-paced startup culture ticking.

We wanted to drive more focus and accountability all the while operating in a more decentralized model

Frederic Choquette, COO

Working with Nick unleashed Rain’s ambitions

When they started working with Nick, the Rain team were experiencing these key problems…

• Leadership struggling to communicate their vision and roadmap to a global team
• Senior leaders were spending too much time in the weeds
• Product managers and engineering leads were not empowered to make decisions
• The slowing pace of development within product teams.

How Nick unlocked Rain’s growth

Finding the north star

Nick worked with the Rain team to identify their north star metric. Rain COO, Fred, told us, “after a few sessions we had clarity on our north star and our product metrics. This let the team focus in on the features that really mattered and stopped leadership from spending time in the weeds” .

The secrets to a good north star:

• It’s your one, high-level, indicator of customer love
• It tells you how your users would behave if they loved your product
• It’s a behavioural metric and never a financial one

With their north star identified, the Rain team were able to re-organise their engineering teams, increase their velocity and increase customer delight.

Organising teams behind a single metric

Rain needed to accelerate its pace of development whilst bringing onboard 100s of new team members. COO, Fred, told us ‘We needed to go from a scrappy early stage to a truly global company’.

Nick coached them through implementing an organational structure that aligned different groups behind a single engagement metric.

The secrets to scalable org structures:

• All teams work towards the north star
• Teams are focused on one behavioural metric (either growth, activation or retention)
• Each team has the expertise they need to succeed inside the team

Implementing this structure allows hyper-focus.

For Rain, the results were:

1. A North Star metric that gave the growing company a common focal point
2. Ability to add staff and get them productive quickly
3. Empowered product teams able to execute with minimal dependencies

Founder coaching to embedd learning

“Every startup leader needs an advisor like Nick”

During the transformation period, Nick met weekly with Rain’s co-founder and COO. Frequent coaching sessions give leaders a confidential space to voice questions and concerns that are uncomfortable to raise with peers or with their reports.

Should we work together?

I work with a small number of ambitious founders who want to build a product-first company in the B2B space and are somewhere along the scaling journey from 25-150 people.

If you’re one of these founders and you’d like help, please get in touch.