Permutive
I joined Permutive pre-pandemic, when it was an office-based company with 28 staff across two locations (London and NY), and a cultural divide between the just-forming US GTM team and the UK product & engineering team. We grew the headcount 3x through that period, raised a Series B of £18.5m, improved unit economics and grew ARR to £6m.
2020 was an extremely demanding time to be a People professional: suddenly as well as a full-time leadership role, we were faced with a global pandemic, which meant handling a sudden move to distributed working; holding a company together (both emotionally and through policy changes) in the face of an upsurge of bereavements, grief and loss in the employee population; shifting workplace cultural norms and working patterns to accommodate early-career employees with no private workspace and parents with no childcare or support; pivoting the business model following the decimation of a core target market; and supporting a New York based population through two other highly emotionally charged shifts in the US sociopolitical climate (namely the outcome of the 2020 election and the George Floyd protests bringing the Black Lives Matter movement to the fore).
Core responsibilities:
Scaled company from 28 to 90 people across two main locations (London, NY)
Designed and implemented all people and talent processes across the employee lifecycle: structured hiring inc interview training; new employee onboarding, promotion / first manager role onboarding; feedback culture; performance reviews; talent mapping; compensation reviews; exit process; disciplinary and grievance processes; benefits; etc.
Eliminated use of agency recruiters for all roles outside the executive leadership team.
Led COVID-19 pandemic response:
all communications
abrupt global shift to remote working
introducing and embedding mental health support benefit
policy changes around sick leave, working hours and work locations
Ran an international, 22-person redundancy round (circa 30% of the organisation). No voluntary leavers during the subsequent 9 months.
Introduced belonging, equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives, including acting as executive sponsor for Permutive Talks, an empathy-building external speaker series.
Developed global mobility policy, including mapping employment law, local social security requirements, visas and right to work, data protection concerns.
Vocal member of the executive team providing support, challenge and insight, both in group settings and through 1:1 coaching.
Other contributions:
Established leadership team operating principles to increase the company’s ability to operate at speed: resulted in articulating a clear business mission, setting and achieving quarterly goals, and launching in new territories.
Developed and implemented a product management playbook and coached two associate PMs while hiring a Head of Product.
Worked with CEO, VP Sales and VP Customer Success to pivot strategy to mitigate the overall business impact of the pandemic decimating a core customer segment (the small and medium publisher segment that focussed on in-person events, e.g. league football and horse racing, were expected to see significant revenue loss at best).
Line-managed and restructured the Customer Success and Support teams while hiring a VP Customer Success.
Supported CTO & VP Engineering with improving the technology team’s delivery velocity, resulting in a serious uptick in new features.
Developed and iterated sales & customer team incentive structures, resulting in 20% uplift in qualified prospect first meetings.
Executive sponsor of the Permutive people of colour employee network.