Firstly, reduce or eliminate printing. Let’s just get this one out of the way. Paper is a pariah in your business. And furthermore, in this increasingly remote or distributed world it’s unrealistic, expensive and unsecure to manage paper in the physical domain. There are plenty of tools available to reduce paper and make the switch to electronic signing and storing documents in the PDF format. When the pandemic began and shelter in place orders were instated, Nitro customers globally saw aggregate printing reductions of greater than 50% while using our Nitro Pro software for PDF productivity. This reduced material and management costs, and it’s good for the planet.
As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Thorpe.
Sam Thorpe rejoined Nitro in 2020 as CPO, overseeing product innovation, security and user experience. Prior to Nitro, Sam served as CPO at Flow Kana, where he was responsible for formulating Flow Kana’s technology and data strategy to accelerate the responsiveness of all supply chain tiers. Earlier in his career, Sam built and led innovative, high-performance product organizations in start-up environments, including two different enterprise real estate systems that were acquired in succession by Fortune 500 companies.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Absolutely. I found the discipline of product management a bit serendipitously. I was a Psychology major in school and have always been fascinated with people and what motivates them. Initially, I was drawn to marketing and one of my first jobs was as a marketing manager at a music software company. It was during the early days of the internet and we quickly needed a website so, upon a cost-conscious challenge from the CEO, I taught myself to code and built the initial website. I found myself completely captivated by the creative intersection of writing, coding and graphic design decisions and was compelled to try and get a job in a pure technology role. I soon found a position as a front end (user interface) engineer at a real estate company. I was in enough key meetings and connecting enough dots when I began to discern there were several strategy and execution issues plaguing the current product. I developed a vision for how this product could be reimagined and somewhat audaciously convinced the CTO to rewrite it from scratch. I got the opportunity to lead that effort which was the moment I became a product manager. Mostly, I had just been following my interests and passions, which led me to the general field of technology and then ultimately to the discipline of product management.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
While I was busy following these new passions on my way to product management, I most definitely did not love public speaking…or more truthfully, I was terrified of it. Little did I know, the career path that I was moving into would involve what often felt exclusively like public speaking. So, while not ‘a mistake’ per say, I certainly didn’t foresee as someone who was terrified to present to small groups that I would soon need to do things like speak in front of a thousand people or pitch boards of directors at public companies. A huge miscalculation. Overtime, I learned just how much the success of a product requires the ability — and the need — to sell, share a vision, align teams, and be a catalyst for action. I had to become a good storyteller.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My father has, without a doubt, been the most pivotal person in my career. He was a career sales leader at companies like Hewlett Packard for many years and helped create and popularize the concept of value-added reselling during in his career. While he was in sales and I was in product management, he taught me many concepts around arbitrage, how to sell ideas, how ‘good enough can be the enemy of better’, and how a great product is not worth anything if you cannot get it to market. He taught me so much and I’m forever grateful. I would eventually have the privilege of growing and selling a start up with him. It will always be one of my most cherished memories.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I was thinking about this the other day, but the books or talks that have resonated with me the most have been ideas which impact how to live or exist in the world. One of my favorite operating concepts is from Shawn Achor who did a Ted Talk called “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance”, which you can find on YouTube. It’s a phenomenally delivered talk with energy and humor in which he discusses how happiness and understanding are natural catalysts for greater productivity, creativity and innovation. I have long felt this intuitively but hearing this backed by research was fascinating and exciting. It’s always been so important to me not only that we achieve our goals in business, but also how it feels to get there. I’ve worked in a number of small, happy and motivated teams that delivered a blistering amount of output and punched well above their weight. I would highly recommend Shawn Achor’s Ted Talk and it is absolutely worth 15 minutes of your time.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
There is no question this is true. Very similar conceptually to the ‘Happiness Advantage’, the greater degree of purpose a business can exhibit the more it naturally ensures that everyone is rowing in the same direction and driven by internal motivations, and not entirely by financial incentives. Nitro’s purpose has always been to make people and companies more productive through ensuring everyone had access to the document productivity tools they needed, as well as to digitize paper processes for speed, lower costs, be an amazing partner, and to be kinder to the planet. Additionally, Nitro fosters a culture of being and doing good which both guides how we support our employees and how we do business with customers. Our purpose and culture continue to allow us to retain and hire great people.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
Definitely. So many companies are dealing with endless amounts of documents in every corner of their business which require collaboration. Documents aren’t just documents, they’re really a process unto themselves from their creation and management on their way to their final destination or utilization, and, zooming out, they’re basically an atomic unit of business value. How fast and efficiently documents move matters. Most companies don’t have a complete set of applications that are specifically designed to manage and move these critical documents. At Nitro we are building The Nitro Productivity Platform which will enable us to deliver significant value to customers through an expanding set of document productivity, workflow, analytics and API/SDK products. Our goal is to help digitally transform their business and the way that they move the most critical documents in their organizations. We’re really excited about this!
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?
The concept of digital transformation has changed with the global pandemic. While digital transformation has long been viewed as a series of long-term, highly complex projects spanning decades, the shift to remote work has changed the concept of transformation from a nice to have to a must have. On a practical level, it means ensuring your people have the tools and training needed to be effective, and that you’ve transcended the barriers and friction induced by paper-based workflow processes. Digital Transformation is no longer a platitude on a PowerPoint slide. For leadership it’s now absolute capitulation.
Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?
While customers in our top verticals tend to be “document factories”, such as professional services, financial services, banking and engineering, the pandemic has made it essential that all companies adapt and digitize or risk becoming obsolete or out muscled. We’re seeing a shift in CIOs and technology leaders’ thinking where digital transformation is no longer simply about cost reduction and efficiency, but now much more about modernization, speed, and — most importantly — competitive advantage.
We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
I’ve had experience with digital transformation in supporting Nitro’s customers via software products and also through directly implementing digital transformation through the building of technology and compliance systems to serve supply chains.
As is true for most businesses, in the world of supply chain the benefits of digital transformation are seemingly limitless. There’s an attractive and obvious pull to accelerate your company’s journey along a maturity curve from paper to digital, then to more deeply integrated systems, and finally into greater degrees of process automation, machine learning, and IoT optics. The faster and more predictable is your supply chain the more it translates into competitive advantage and margin/cost efficiencies.
This supply chain example is not removed from most processes inside any type of organization. Take for example, a contract process. The work to establish a contract, define its approval process, and post-signature management is a chain of processes. Establishing tools to manage, define, automate and bring visibility legal processes that are at the heart of how business gets done can be truly transformative. And that’s just one example.
Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?
In many regards it has. Pre-pandemic there wasn’t the same forcing function that the rapid move to remote work has represented, so companies had the luxury of careful planning, prioritization and execution. Maybe these introduced a certain level of malaise or lack of intensity. Following the shift to remote operations, it has been amazing to see how quickly companies can move and how much latent potential has existed in available technologies.
Some of how Nitro has helped resolve these challenges is in offering our customers a number of transformative, yet easy-to-implement solutions that provide immediate wins, along with an amazing customer success team to help manage the ROI evaluation, change and train end users.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
Sure thing. Here are a few examples that are top of mind.
Firstly, reduce or eliminate printing.
Let’s just get this one out of the way. Paper is a pariah in your business. And furthermore, in this increasingly remote or distributed world it’s unrealistic, expensive and unsecure to manage paper in the physical domain. There are plenty of tools available to reduce paper and make the switch to electronic signing and storing documents in the PDF format. When the pandemic began and shelter in place orders were instated, Nitro customers globally saw aggregate printing reductions of greater than 50% while using our Nitro Pro software for PDF productivity. This reduced material and management costs, and it’s good for the planet.
2. Get employees the tools and training they need.
We recently conducted a Future of Work report which showed that 96% of employees still say there’s room for improvement in how their company handles documents. It may seem counterintuitive that employees don’t always have access to the software tools they need to do their job, as well as to keep document workflow processes digital, but our research shows that it’s often the case. In addition to better and/or more tools to enable remote work, we found employees are also hungry for more automated processes and workflows, increased standardization of document processes and, once they are equipped with the right tools, better training.
3. Automate signature processes.
eSigning has now become an example an easy-to-implement, high value digital transformation project. Electronic and digital signatures have broad legal support globally and consumer comfort has markedly increased. eSigning provides an enhanced consumer experience and can dramatically reduce contract or form filling error rates. Enabling multiple departments from legal and sales to people operations and procurement can accelerate all aspects of your business and standardize key approval processes. As the pandemic augured in our Nitro Sign customers saw a 43% reduction in document signature process turnaround times. Really phenomenal.
4. Automate processes to improve security and compliance.
Workflow process automation can, at times, represent relatively complex projects and are probably most often the poster child examples of digital transformation. When I worked in supply chain, we ran managed inventory that had to meet significant compliance requirements that required all inventory and movement of inventory to be tagged, tracked and tested in lots via both our proprietary ERP system and then a completely duplicated inventory view with different inventory aggregation principles created in a California statewide system. This duplicative but differing inventory process was so costly and error prone that we were inspired to create software that helped automate the logging, categorization, and calculation of inventory lot weights, then link them to compliance tag stickers through scanners, and finally sync these records between our proprietary ERP and the statewide track and trace programs. The result delivered an incredible time savings and dramatically reduced human error, as well as standardized inventory processes and decision making across all distribution locations. This delivered competitive advantage as it accelerated our overall supply chain and especially deliveries to customers!
5. Get Everyone Involved in Digital Transformation.
In very large organizations, digital transformation might be centralized and owned by the CIO or IT. In other organizations of smaller sizes or for other reasons, transformation initiatives might be initiated and led by a line of business. In some cases, digital transformation may be happening everywhere and in parallel inside an organization. Because different lines of business within an organization may be uniquely motivated to acquire new tools or create new processes, decentralizing elements of implementation to specific lines of business where transformation might yield the biggest impact can allow organizations to move quickly. If this can be done while still making CIOs or IT aware, it then allows organizations to share ideas and the results of transformative projects via a Center of Excellence approach. This is a great way to get a number of initiatives moving in parallel, learn rapidly and execute a test and iterate approach.
In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?
Much of the innovation I’ve witnessed or helped generate has been a function of getting close to customers and giving the organization permission to take risks. While it’s important to create innovation processes, teams and laboratories, ultimately most cultures of innovation are also intensely customer-first cultures. I have had a number of ideas crystallize for me or my team while we’re meeting with key customers, power users or in chance conversations and there’s a spark of inspiration or a triangulation of concepts that felt like it would not have been possible without that moment, that vantage point or a specific confluence of events. So, never underestimate the simple but magical potential of getting out with customers, being vigilant, and letting some serendipity happen.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” — Eckhart Tolle.
I am a fan of Eckhart Tolle and his book “The Power of Now.” The concepts of being present and surrendering to what is as paths to inner peace are simple and profound. This book singularly helped me get through some very difficult times in my personal life, helped get through professional blockage, and continues to center me anytime I need it!
