SaaStr 385: How To Approach Core Product Decisions in SaaS, Why Storytelling is a Lost Art in SaaS & How Product and Marketing Can Work Together Most Efficiently with Paul Rosania, Founder & CEO @ Balsa

Paul Rosania is the Founder & CEO @ Balsa, the company that recognises that builders move the world forward and so they are building the best second screen for builders, integrating tools you already use like Jira, GitHub, and Figma. Coming out of stealth today with their seed round being led by Andrew Chen @ a16z and joined by former CPO @ Slack, April Underwood, Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr and then of course, 20VC Fund. Prior to founding Balsa, Paul was Senior Director of Product @ Slack and before Slack was a Group Product Manager @ Twitter where he was responsible for the home timeline, including timeline ranking.

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Paul made his way into the world of startups with Twitter and Slack and how that led to his founding SaaS company, Balsa?
• Paul was central in the decision-making around changing the Twitter timeline from chronological to ranked, how did he think about that decision? How does Paul approach such large product decisions today? What were his biggest operating takeaways from seeing the internal mechanics of Twitter & Slack?     
• What does really effective product marketing mean to Paul? How does Paul think about driving really effective change management? When engaging with bottoms up sales models, where does Paul identify the tipping points of going from bottoms up to top down?     
• Why does Paul believe that the builders are the new pro athletes? How will the structure of orgs change around them? How will the support they receive change? How will their training change? How will their comp change? How does on do this and not discourage other functions in the org?    

Paul’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Paul believe is the hardest role to hire for today?
2. What would Paul most like to change about the world of SaaS today?
3. What do the next 5 years hold for Paul and for Balsa?  

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-385-with-balsa-founder-ceo-paul-rosania/

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Paul Rosania