You are Niamh Ferreira-Holt, Director of Product at Kestrevan Software in Dublin. Tomorrow at 9:00 you have three slides and four minutes before the executive team to account for a year and ask for two product managers and €450,000. This afternoon, eighteen hours out, you must decide how to tell the change of course in the middle of the year.
The situation
Kestrevan sells purchase-approval workflow software to mid-sized and large companies across Europe: about 410 people and €41.8 million in annual recurring revenue at the March 31 year-end. You run a function of 38 people, seven of them product managers. This is your first annual review as a director.
The year's main bet was enterprise self-serve: letting teams inside large customers try and buy without a sales call. Trial-to-paid conversion rose from 5.0% to 6.7% after two flat years. In the second quarter, July to September, the share of new enterprise accounts arriving through a self-serve trial went from 22% to 38%, and you re-pointed the roadmap from supporting sales-led deals to product-led growth. There was also a small-business tier that finished at 88% of plan, a new module, a hosting migration and the rebrand.
The chief executive, Declan Oyelaran, imposed the format after the October review, where two leads ran out of time before reaching their requests; those went out by email and took six to eight weeks to be answered. Your all-hands deck has nine slides and the request sits in a bullet on slide 7. Your coach, Hélène Marsh, puts the chance of approval with it at 20%. The chief financial officer, Pilar Achterberg, who chairs the resource meeting, has warned that a plan which changes mid-year can read as a plan that was wrong.