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Ciaran Dynes, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Matillion

What has been your path to power?

 

I’ve spent all of my career in middleware and integration software. I started out with IONA technologies, a Dublin based software company that IPOd in 1993. The founders had lectured at Trinity College Dublin, where I studied under them.

 

IONA allowed me to work in lots of different roles, from a PS consultant to an engineer, to SVP of product. I lived in China for 2.5 years building a development team from scratch, which was massively influential on me in terms of understanding different cultures and international commerce. When I returned home I asked to move into product management, which I ended up running for the company over the following years. I then moved to Talend to run both product management and product marketing. We IPOd Talend in 2016 and I became an exec running product in 2018. I moved to Matillion in 2020 and have the role of chief product officer.

What impact has the pandemic had on demand from your clients?

 

The amount of customer data going through Matillion products has tripled since the start of the pandemic, which isn’t surprising. Nearly 70% of businesses said that COVID-19 accelerated their cloud migration plans. Enterprises across industries, from life sciences to logistics, needed useful data to respond quickly to radical changes. One retailer tracked customer buying habits as they shifted from in-store to online and then back again. A service company was able to right-size their truck fleet and staffing to keep up with restaurant closures. The insight afforded by the right data at the right time helped our customers survive and even thrive during crazy times. One of our key customers needed to shift their commercial waste management business to residential because everyone was working from home. Peets Coffee needed to shift their business away from sit down to pickup, but at the same time retain their customer base.

 

Of course there has been a greater impact on the way our customers work due to Covid. A lot of projects during the pandemic related to analytics around employee data, from both hiring and time spent in video conferencing.

Do you get a seat at your clientsstrategic discussions? If not, what will it take to get you there?

 

Ultimately it’s our solution and the success of our customers with Matillion that allows us to help set our customers’ strategic direction. However so much of that is to do with brand awareness as we continue to grow the company. Most enterprises use industry analysts to create a vendor selection list, so we invest a lot of time with Gartner and other analytics to make sure they understand the unique benefits of our solution and our customer base. As an integration company we also invest very heavily in our strategic partnerships, especially Snowflake, AWS, Azure, Databricks and Google. Matillion was named Snowflake’s partner of the year for data integration in 2021 and innovation partner of the year with Databricks. 

 

What are your key areas of focus for the business in 2022?

 

We have an internal goal to grow to 100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year and be ready operationally for 250M in subsequent years. This will be achieved through a combination of new logo acquisition and expansion of existing accounts. We have a major push this year with GSI (global system integrators) to rollout client-specific programmes including cloud migration and legacy ETL offloading.

 

Given the ARR growth, we invested heavily in talent acquisition teams in 2021, including onboarding products with a particular focus on hiring and enabling sales and GTM market teams.

As mentioned above we also are focusing on brand building and thought leadership with a focus on enterprise accounts.

 

We have big plans on the product side this year. This will see Matillion move to becoming a platform sell, with multiple products in the portfolio. So delivering the product with Engineering is a major goal, as is the new value prop/positioning / messaging for Sales.

 

How do you apply your leadership skills a) within your own business and b) on behalf of your clients?

 

One of my skills is to create empathy across the company for the most important things that we have to go do. I find that everyone can remember a good story if I can connect them with the real end user or client behind the customer logo. The stories always have a human aspect and a business metric aspect.

 

At Matillion we work with the Table Group, who are the authors of books including the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team and the Advantage, Ideal Team Player. We are big into having high culture and high performance. In terms of measuring success, we have employed the 4DX (four disciplines of execution). Both of these frameworks help us align the whole company to the most important things we do during the year. It’s hard to commit to something and not to others. As a leader, I think it is one of the most important things that I can do for my team. Make choices.

What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?

 

I have been lucky to work with some great execs down through the years that have massively simplified things for me by passing on some of their wisdom. I have used this to help me to accelerate my career and build my team. Hiring stage commensurate staff is something I always try to do. I try to look beyond the current need and think what could each candidate bring that’s not specifically on the job spec but could be if/when the company grows to the next level.We also try to recognise when someone in-role isn’t right for the team and take steps to address it.

 

Every year I look to fund professional coaching for all director-level and above in my team. I find that directors are at that critical stage in their careers. They may have spent a number of years with us and may have things holding them back in their career. Getting them to accept professional development is an important part of their development towards becoming a VP/VSP/exec. If it works, we have potential a new leader on our hands coming from within the company.

 

How did you develop and continue to develop these skills or attributes?

 

I spend a lot of time talking with other CPOs. I have a CPO peer group that I meet every 6 weeks. A problem shared is a problem halved. The idea of the peer group is something that my CEO advised me on setting up. The 10XCEO group recommends creating your own peer group and discussions topics and concerns related to your role as an exec. The topics range from anything from “how to establish PMF (product market fit)”, category creation, product quality, pricing strategy and even sales compensation. The peer group is a mix of CPOs in early, late stage and existing IPO companies.

How do you ensure that your proposition keeps pace with your clientsgoals and 

requirements so that you are leading rather than lagging behind their demands?

 

We have a number of internal and customer/partner ceremonies that we regularly run (customer advisory board; product advisory board, executive sponsor programme of strategic partnerships meeting once per month with Snowflake, AWS, Databricks, etc.).

 

Matillion has an ever-growing user community that we launched in late 2020. We have a team who manages the forums and idea portal. Every month we publish an update on what community-voted features have been added to the product roadmap and what features have been delivered. Community users are awarded prizes if their idea gets included in the product. We feel that this very transparent process helps build user engagement. Our users are also key indicators of what features we need to be addressing in terms of customer need and competitive threat. The upvoting, that is available to all community members, gives an indication of the relative importance of something. It is one of the factors that we use to score a feature.

 

Product delivery has adopted what is called “feature flagging”. This allows us to deliver a feature to a subset of interested customers before we offer it to all customers. Cloud allows us to easily do this. In more traditional approaches, customers would wait months and multiple versions before a feature is made available to them. Cloud allows us to do things much more incrementally and faster. This faster turnaround allows customers to give feedback to our engineering teams before the feature is finalised and also can lessen the possibility of our customer looking for alternative solutions due to a product gap.

 

Matillion has a deep technical competitive intelligence team. We employee people that used to use our type of product in industry to survey the competitive landscape. 

 

Ciaran Dynes
has been included in:
  • 100 Enablers 2022 (EMEA)

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