Navigating M&A Like a Pro with Brian Fugere

Introduction to Product Management Journey

Rina Alexin | 00:05.688–00:53.887

Hi everyone and welcome to Productside Stories, the podcast where we reveal the very real and raw lessons learned from product leaders and thinkers all over the world. I’m your host, Rena Lexin, CEO of Productside. And today I have the pleasure to be speaking with Brian Fugere. Brian has over 30 years of product management experience spanning healthcare, media, software, and government sectors. Most recently, he served as a chief product officer

at Simpler, where he led corporate strategy, product management, AI initiatives, and even the UX function for the company, focused on streamlining healthcare operations. At Simpler, he also oversaw the acquisition and integration of, I don’t even know how many companies at this point, but many companies. And so I’m excited to talk to you today, Brian, about your extensive expertise.

Brian Fugere | 00:53.887–01:01.966

you

Rina Alexin | 01:01.966–01:10.633

But I always love to ask this question first because I never hear the same story twice. What got you into product management to begin with?

Brian Fugere | 01:10.633–02:15.606

Well, thanks for having me first and foremost. I’m looking forward to the conversation today. Like you said, I’ve been product for a long time. You know, I think it really started for me back in the day at AOL. So for those of you that remember AOL as a force on the internet, it was the internet for a while. I started there in the engineering organization, went into marketing for a few years and then found myself in product management and learning really from the best.

The gentleman that ran our group was a former Apple product leader. He helped build the Mac, the power Mac. So that was a long time ago, but it was a fantastic learning experience. And I was responsible for email, instant messenger, any kind of voice communications, anything that went in and out of the service. And it was a great learning environment to get into product and

I built a few things that lasted for 15 or 20 years and that kind of was the bug that bit me. And it’s, it’s neat as a product leader when you can build something that lasts longer than you’re in that job.

Rina Alexin | 02:15.606–02:31.998

Yeah, well, Brian, you’re giving me flashbacks right now. I remember my first lesson about the importance of end of life was actually with AOL and noticing that my, so my father, we’ve had AOL from, you know, the CD-ROM days of like dialing.

Brian Fugere | 02:31.998–02:36.302

yeah, I sent you thousands of those when I was in marketing.

Rina Alexin | 02:36.302–02:40.468

And he was, he, that’s how he got on the internet was through that desktop. And when they, you know, obviously they had to end of life it at some point, he was just, he was quite upset, but that’s a story for another time. So I wanted to talk to you today because again, M &A is, it’s prevalent, it’s everywhere. Lots of product leaders have to go through it and

Brian Fugere | 02:40.468–03:04.92

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rina Alexin | 03:04.92–03:19.935

Gosh, there are just so many horror stories out there about poor decisions. Why did we even do this? It’s just so much work on the backend. So I’d love to ask you first and foremost, why do companies do this? Like, why?

Brian Fugere | 03:19.935–04:46.542

You know, there’s a few reasons from a strategic perspective. One is the easy button for growth and, you know, company is going to grow organically. The unicorns are growing 50 to 100 % or more. Most normal companies are growing high single digits, maybe 15 or 20%. That’s great. But if you really want sort of the big chunky growth, then acquisition is one of the ways to go do that.

So that’s part of the reason. Another reason might be competitive market pressure. Hey, my competitor, my chief competitor just acquired this thing to bolster their portfolio. I need to have that same thing in my portfolio or something similar. And then finally, you know, one of the classic reasons is to buy a bunch of customers. And so I’ll buy a competitor. The competitor is going to bring a number of customers. I shut down the competitor software. Everybody ports and moves over to, migrates to our software.

And all of a sudden I’ve doubled my customer base. so those are just sort of three reasons that you see all the time in the private equity world. It really is about driving growth primarily in, into helping that company, whatever the company happens to be scale. At Simpler when I joined, it was about 120 million. And when I left, it was a hundred, was 550 plus million. And yes, we had organic growth along the way, but the large driver of that was through many acquisitions.

Understanding M&A: Why Companies Acquire

Rina Alexin | 04:46.542–04:57.087

So then talk to me about the role of the product leader in early stages, maybe during the due diligence process. So what should a product leader be prepared to do?

Brian Fugere | 04:57.087–06:40.982

So when you think about an acquisition, it’s generally driven by the strategy. I was fortunate enough to be both the strategy leader and the product leader. But in the event where that’s not the case, partnering with the strategy leader is key to understand what acquisitions are they looking at, why would they want to do an acquisition, and how can you help motivate that acquisition to happen. You as the product leader oftentimes are the ones that

coming up with the shopping list. These are the types of things that I would like to have in my portfolio to strengthen my portfolio from a feature function perspective, or I wanna expand my total addressable market. And so I’m looking at adjacencies that I can go acquire my way into rather than having to go build something from scratch and try to compete my way up. And so the product leader serves as the key.

partner in that whole process saying and driving the strategy of what we’re looking for from an &A perspective. Once some target gets selected and you actually enter into that diligence process, then the product leader has to be involved. You have to know what you’re buying so that you know what you’re going to live with on the other side of the acquisition. diligence is something that is a learned skill. It’s a learned art.

And you have to go through several of them sometimes before you really understand what you’re looking for to suss out, what am I going to live with? How do I position my organization to help this succeed? What kind of resources am I going to need on the other side to make it successful? Because if you don’t know those things, you might buy a company and not have the resources necessary to help it grow.

Rina Alexin | 06:40.982–06:56.16

To that point, given that you have had a lot of experience with due diligence for companies, have there been any situations where there have been challenges or surprises that you actually uncovered during the diligence process versus finding out afterwards?

Brian Fugere | 06:56.16–08:37.902

Whenever we entered into any kind of &A situation and got to the diligence phase, we always had a hypothesis of how we thought it was going to go. Is this the potential platform where we can consolidate some of our existing customers onto it, or is it something that we’re going to eventually shut down? There was one acquisition where we had a hypothesis that we thought that…

that particular technology and that tech stack and that product was going to be the future and that we could take our product, which was a direct competitor, and shut ours down and move everybody over to this one that we were acquiring. And as we went through the diligence process, we found that the story that we were being told was essentially a vaporware story. And that when we got into the acquisition and really got into the diligence, we discovered that the software was maybe 40 % done.

there were no customers on it. And that they where they really had their customers was on a tech stack that was exactly the same as ours. And ours was more fully featured and it would be easier to just keep everybody on ours. And so the entire hypothesis around the technology of the acquisition went out the window during the diligence process. And we had to re kind of rejigger our whole approach based upon what we

what we did undercover and learn. And that was a bit of a shock in the long run. It worked out okay, because we weren’t doing it for, we weren’t doing the acquisition for a technology reason. We were doing it to get the customers in this case. But if it had been one for the technology, I would have walked away.

The Role of Product Leaders in Due Diligence

Rina Alexin | 08:37.902–08:43.155

So let me get this straight though. You were acquiring basically a customer list at that point. Were you acquiring any kind of brand reputation or anything? Like there are all these other intangibles that come with an acquisition because it is, you know, it’s a company. more than just, it’s a people as well, right? So we’re going to talk about integration of people, but.

Brian Fugere | 08:43.155–08:53.021

That’s what it turned into, yeah.

Brian Fugere | 08:53.021–09:03.5

Sure.

Rina Alexin | 09:03.5–09:10.781

Because I did hear you say that on this technology or on the software you were expecting to buy, there were no customers. So how were you acquiring the customer list?

Brian Fugere | 09:10.781–09:13.464

Yeah, so they had an existing technology and they had this new platform that they were building. The way it had been initially presented to us was that the new platform was done and they were moving all their customers over to it. Turned out that it wasn’t the case. And so, yeah, there was some reputational gain that we got. But the reality is we ended up with just the customers at that point. That was okay.

Rina Alexin | 09:13.464–09:24.462

follow us on

Rina Alexin | 09:24.462–09:33.154

Understood.

Rina Alexin | 09:33.154–09:52.457

Yeah, that’s really interesting though. You know, again, it goes to the very, very big importance of doing appropriate due diligence. Sometimes we see in the news, all these stories of you acquire something and there weren’t actually customers where they were reporting customers. You know, even I think the most publicly known one was Twitter when Elon Musk started acquiring it and found all the bots, right?

Brian Fugere | 09:52.457–09:54.742

Right.

Rina Alexin | 09:54.742–10:17.533

So just really important to do due diligence. Let’s say that you’re in a situation where the product leader is not involved in due diligence, because I’m sure that happens too. Maybe they’re just not in the room. Is there anything that you would recommend for the product leader to do to make sure that they get involved in due diligence? Because they have to then deal with the consequences, right? They’re going to be holding the bag at the end of the day.

Brian Fugere | 10:17.533–11:41.208

Right. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s pretty important for the product leader in the situation where you might find yourself on the outside of an &A process is to really stress to your corp dev team or whoever happens to be leading the process to say, look, I’m the one who has to live with this afterwards. These are the things I need to know on the way coming into and through diligence. So if you can find them out for me and give me a feedback that at least will give me a sense of what I’m looking for.

And then I would make a hedge. I’d have a conversation with the CFO to get some sort of financial hedge put in place where you have some lever of resources that you can use afterwards to go deal with the fallout of whatever it is that they just acquired for you. Because if, if it, if, if you’re handled this basket of goods and you don’t have any resources to be able to address whatever it is that, that you just got handed, you could be in a little bit of a world of hurt. And so,

You know in the long run Hopefully that only happens to you once and that they realize that you really do need to be involved in the whole process to make sure that you understand what it is that’s being acquired so that I mean ultimately they want it to grow and If you don’t know how to if you don’t know what you’re getting and you end up with a gift that keeps on giving Not in a good way Then then getting it to grow is going to be a challenge

Rina Alexin | 11:41.208–11:58.623

So I definitely want to continue the conversation around what happens once you’ve made the acquisition. But before we do, let’s lead with some optimism. Have you experienced easy acquisitions? We hear about all the challenges. What about what makes for a good and easy acquisition?

Brian Fugere | 11:58.623–13:01.71

For us, what we found, we had a couple acquisitions over the years that we did where we were acquiring a carve out from a parent company that really wasn’t a software company. Might’ve been a consulting company, might’ve been a BPO type company. And they realized that whatever this particular software asset was, it wasn’t core to their go-forward business model. And so they carved it out and sold it off and we happened to be the winner in the acquisition process. When that happens, the people

generally are so excited to be going to a company that actually understands how to build software that all they want to do is work with you to make it successful. And that cultural integration, which we’ll get to, is so easy at that point because they’re so happy to be free from an environment where they’re just an orphan and they’re in a place where people are investing them from a personal basis, process, product.

and they are very excited to be part of your new organization.

Challenges in M&A: Surprises and Lessons Learned

Rina Alexin | 13:01.71–13:04.957

I love it, they get bought in because they feel welcome. Like, oh, I’m doing my tribe right now. So it’s a good thing. Okay, so now let’s talk the corollary and that is challenging. So what makes for a not so smooth transition?

Brian Fugere | 13:04.957–13:18.131

Right. Right.

Brian Fugere | 13:18.131–15:31.598

There are two big things that I was thinking about this question in advance. There are two big things that really making acquisitions difficult. One is about people and one’s about technology. From a people perspective, we’ve acquired a number of companies who are significantly smaller. And there are people who really enjoy being in a small company environment, 70 to a hundred people maybe at the most. It’s very family oriented. They’re all working in an office together.

when they go into a larger environment, oftentimes they feel very uncomfortable and it’s just not their fit. That’s okay. It’s not for everybody. But what happens then is if you start losing some of those key people immediately after the acquisition, it is a massive brain drain. And if you lose your key product management people, you think about how long it takes you to recover that knowledge. It’s at least a year.

And so you lose so much time when the key people walk out the door, it makes the integration very difficult and it makes the ability to return to growth just stretch even longer than what you had originally anticipated. So that’s problem number one or challenge number one. Challenge number two on the technology side is sometimes you end up acquiring products through these acquisitions that were hobbies for people where they…

decide, hey, I want to try writing this product in some obscure language that nobody’s ever done before. And we’re going to try to productize it, which is fine until you have to go support that for the long run. And you can’t find engineers who actually know that language. We happen to acquire a product that was written in closure. None of us had ever heard of closure. We didn’t even know what it was. It turns out it’s a Java derivative and finding closure engineers in the U S is unbelievably expensive.

And so we ended up having to grow our own closure engineers, which took a long time to get them up to speed. And so, when you’re doing diligence, one of the key questions to ask around the tech stack is whether or not it fits within your, your existing technology point roadmap. And, and do you have the engineers to support it? Because if you don’t, you might want to think twice or make sure you understand how you’re going to support it going forward. Cause it’s not, it’s not trivial.

Rina Alexin | 15:31.598–15:44.223

Wow, that calls to mind, you know, the, I guess the sometimes missed maintenance costs of building something. And that’s interesting because once you acquire it, those are your problems now.

Brian Fugere | 15:44.223–15:58.776

It’s very much yours right away, day one. Yeah. And in that particular product, it also had a database that wasn’t something that we normally used. So we were immediately looking at how do we replace it with something that we use all

Rina Alexin | 15:58.776–16:11.209

Yeah, well, and that makes sense. So going back to your point, I think both of them, the two around people, in some cases, the people are looking for your culture and others are actually really not, they’re not. So is there any way, and I know this is a tricky question because it’s hard, but is there any way to mitigate the risk of rain drain in that case?

Brian Fugere | 16:11.209–16:24.265

Right.

Brian Fugere | 16:24.265–17:00.94

You know, we started asking, after we got burned a couple of times with some smaller acquisitions, we started asking in the diligence process for identification of key personnel and a justification of why they think that they’re the key people, especially around DevOps, CloudOps for cloud systems, product management people, and any leadership that they needed.

And so that way we could then try to retain them with some retention bonuses or some other incentives to keep them around for at least a little while so that we could get some sort of continuity in place.

Rina Alexin | 17:00.94–18:03.679

Yeah, I think you cannot just underestimate how much tribal knowledge is, especially in product, given how fast everything moves. We talk about Productside a lot about the importance of documentation, but the reality is, is you can’t document 100 % of everything everybody knows. yeah, I think that makes sense. I have heard definitely incentives, vesting.

But you give people bonuses and then they vest after a certain amount of time and that definitely motivates people to stay. But the truth is if they’re not loving the culture, not gonna be 100 % there. So it is definitely a risk. All right, Brian. So we’ve done the acquisition. The CFO has figured it out. Now you have another company. This is day one.

You’re the product leader. You’re about to inherit additional team, different resources. There’s all this integration that still needs to happen. How do you make that successful? What does day one look like?

Brian Fugere | 18:03.679–20:24.391

What I tried to do on day one was to actually meet with every single product person that I could. Usually a 20 to 30 minute conversation just to say hello, introduce myself, have them introduce themselves to me, tell me a little bit about yourself, you as a person. What kind of work do you do for the company? I know what your position is, but what do you really do? And then what do you want to do is the next question, because oftentimes they find themselves in roles historically within the company that they just don’t want to do anymore.

And maybe we have an opportunity to move them into a different spot over time where we can leverage their desires and skills and set them up for success. And they stick around and stay in the company. We did have one acquisition of a tiny little company that had five people in it. We have one left, but we’ve been able to retain her because we’ve given her plenty of challenges and things that she really enjoys doing. And she likes what she’s doing. And so.

By me reaching out and saying hello to everybody on that first day, it establishes a little bit of a personal connection and it gives them an opportunity to say, hey, I’m really excited or I’m not so excited or whatever the case may be about joining you. So that’s the people part of it. Then we want to understand how do they do what they do? What are your processes? What is your technology? Now we get all of that through diligence. Hey, they’re running Jira, we run AHA, you know, that kind of a thing. Okay, well, we now need to start thinking about.

How are we going to convert your stuff out of JIRA, put it into our AHA system so it works with everything else that we’ve built in the company? And so there’s a little team that gets formed to go do that. And then, so if you think about all of those little integration things that have to happen from a process perspective, it really comes down to laying it out and working collaboratively with them and with us to put all that together. And so then it becomes a we thing rather than us and them.

And then the last part, the last thing that I always say is that I want to find the best of. I want the best solution. I want the best talent. I want the best process, whatever the case may be, whether it’s coming from the acquisition or it’s something that we do already, whatever the best is, is what we’re going to adopt going forward because we don’t have a monopoly on the best ideas. Sometimes we acquire companies that have, that do things far better than what we do them.

Day One Post-Acquisition: Integration Strategies

Brian Fugere | 20:24.391–20:31.896

And I want to take what they do really well and I want to bring it to the rest of the company so that we can improve how we do what we do.

Rina Alexin | 20:31.896–21:09.375

So we see it a lot with acquisitions. You talked about process, and I want to of dive into this, that sometimes in a single enterprise, when you speak to different product managers from different teams, they do product differently.

And that problem gets completely exacerbated sometimes with all the acquisitions that sometimes happen with enterprise, where there isn’t this conversation of what is the best of, and how do we then all work in the same way. So how have you managed to, let’s say, avoid having a dozen different product processes?

Brian Fugere | 21:09.375–23:30.055

We had a dozen different, we actually probably had more than a dozen different product processes because you’re absolutely right. Each team was doing it their own way because they all came from different acquisitions. And I finally reached the point where I started asking some of my peers around the industry saying, how do I solve this problem? And they all pointed to the concept of product operations. And so we established a product ops group. I promoted from within a woman that was one of

came through an acquisition, she was the product leader in the acquisition, they were way ahead of us in many ways in their product processes. And she let us know like from day one of the acquisition that you guys are in the stone ages compared to how we were doing things. I said, well, fine, put your money where your mouth is, you’re in charge of it now. So how are you going to standardize across the entire portfolio? And she…

She thrived in that role and it has been so much fun working with her and watching her drive standardization across the entire portfolio of how we do what we do. And I think what we found was that the teams actually, while the change was hard and nobody likes going through change, they respected what we were trying to do. They understood what we were trying to do. And what they found in the long run was that it made their lives easier because it was

one way and they didn’t have to go back and do rework because typically what would happen is that I would ask for a roadmap, let’s say, please present your roadmap. I need it in this format. Well, then they would show up with whatever format is that they’ve been historically doing it in. And then I would go back to them and say, that’s not going to work. We need it in this format. So they would have rework. Well, you can avoid that simply by just doing it one way the first time.

And that’s one small example. And if you think about that and you extrapolate it across everything that product management does, so that it’s all consistent. Now you have a huge time savings and efficiency and productivity driver that really works across the whole portfolio. And when you have a lot of acquisitions that are all coming in, and like you said, everybody does something differently. That’s one way to root it out and to get it all to be the same. And I think the other advantage that people don’t really think about is the portability of talent.

Brian Fugere | 23:30.055–23:54.36

And so now I can promote a product person from one area in the portfolio to maybe lead a different area in the portfolio. And the process doesn’t change. All that changes is the domain knowledge that they have to go learn. And they don’t, you know, they don’t see that initially, but once a couple of promotions happen, then everybody starts to understand there’s another hidden benefit to it that really helps out.

Rina Alexin | 23:54.36–24:35.209

So Brian, I do want to echo, so we’ve seen this in organizations which have very disparate product processes. They can’t do that, what you’re talking about. They can’t take a product manager from team A and then transport them into team B because of exactly this. Suddenly everyone’s confused. But once they install and do that, I mean, it’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of change management. There’s also work with stakeholders who are used to also working with specific teams, but when they see a

roadmap from their perspective. Now it’s the same no matter who they talk to. So there’s just a lot of benefits. yeah, faster decision making, onboarding process, so much simpler. That’s a big one. And also just, man, the consistency of language. Everybody is just talking about the same things. now they’re not miscommunicating. That’s something else that happens quite a bit.

Brian Fugere | 24:35.209–24:46.012

Right?

Brian Fugere | 24:46.012–24:51.155

Right.

Brian Fugere | 24:51.155–24:58.638

That’s right. Yeah, you’re right. Those are other benefits too. That’s totally right. And I’m laughing because I’m like, yeah, that’s right. We did that too.

Rina Alexin | 24:58.638–25:12.67

Yeah, we also find that people with product process in their company actually perform better on skills as well, because they know what they’re supposed to do. So they score sometimes as much as like 20 to 30 % above their peers, which don’t have process. That’s why I’m so obsessed with product process. It’s just so valuable. And you saw some of the benefits and you’re laughing because you hear them.

Brian Fugere | 25:12.67–25:20.393

Wow.

Brian Fugere | 25:20.393–25:24.074

Yeah, you’re right. Absolutely right.

Rina Alexin | 25:24.074–25:39.519

OK, so I love that you invested in product operations. And by the way, when I talk to product leaders who usually do start out in product management, what I love is they always apply product management principles to the problem of product management. Is that the case for you?

Brian Fugere | 25:39.519–25:58.124

Yes, it was exactly how she did it. And she did it within the team, within product. And then she did it, like you said, with all the stakeholders, other ones within the company and customer stakeholders as well. And it really, really worked out well for us.

Rina Alexin | 25:58.124–26:05.449

Yeah, I say that because I also just want for our audience listening to know that this is possible to do. You already have the skill set in your company. You just have to find it, elevate it, and then commit to it. So it is quite possible.

Brian Fugere | 26:05.449–26:09.439

That’s right.

Brian Fugere | 26:09.439–26:19.288

That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And the woman that I promoted, she went from director to senior director to VP in under two years because she did such a great job.

Rina Alexin | 26:19.288–26:36.979

love that. That’s a changes. I love it. It’s like career progression, but you’re talking about somebody who’s really changed her life in a good way and then ripple effects across the organization. So well done.

Okay, so going back to, so this is a really important piece around making acquisitions work. So you talked a little bit about technology. Is there anything else in terms of maybe challenges or surprises outside of, say the code is just written in a language nobody can support that a product leader should be aware of when they are doing an integration?

Brian Fugere | 26:36.979–26:57.417

Mm-hmm.

Cultural Integration: Building a Unified Team

Brian Fugere | 26:57.417–28:09.582

I think that the, the only other piece that I, that I tended to focus on was just do the fundamental question of, they have enough people to support whatever it is that they’re doing? And that’s a very subjective because you don’t know all their process and how they do what they do. but you know, if you, if you look at their product mix and you look at your own product mix and you can try to create some equivalency of.

Okay, if we had this, how would we do it? How would we staff it? And then are they, how do they compare to that from a staffing perspective? Are they fat or are they thin or are they right on? It gives you some indication of the stress level that the people are under and what you’re going to inherit when they come over. Oftentimes to prep for an acquisition, companies will start reducing staff to make their EBITDA line look a little bit better.

And typically you’re going to find a product team that’s under some stress because they’re short people. And it’s important to try to find out as quickly as possible. Is it painfully short or can you live with it level of short? And, what are you going to do about it? Once you get your hands on.

Rina Alexin | 28:09.582–29:53.983

That is such a good point, Brian. I’m glad you brought it up. It is so true. So for our audience who maybe don’t know how acquisitions happen, lot of the valuation of the companies, I mean, it depends. Some of them are valued on the revenue basis, but there are occasions where they’re valued on an EBITDA earnings before interest tax depreciation organization level. Basically, they’re not operating profit. And in that case,

You know, the highest cost for most companies are their people and their technology investments. And so the easiest one sometimes to

Unfortunately, to boost the EBITDA is to let go of people who, you you can make an argument are redundant when they are actually doing a lot of work. So when that happens, your net operating profit obviously goes up, you don’t have the salaries to fix costs, but then your teams are strained. And so it’s not sustainable. And that’s what you’re talking about here. So

That’s a really, really important point. Okay, so my last question here about acquisitions, and maybe this is somewhat solved by the product process, but let’s talk about culture. Because you’re adding a lot of people, some, I’ve heard, example, I’ve heard a story where there was a company acquired, let’s just call them like Blue Company was acquired.

by Green Company and 20 years later they’re still calling themselves like blue company employees. That happens where an acquisition happened, yeah, but we’re still blue. That’s who we are. So how do you actually now bring the team together, your one team, one culture? What are some of those soft elements of an acquisition that you can maybe share a few stories on?

Brian Fugere | 29:53.983–31:53.644

I think language, the language that you’re talking about is key. Um, I, I never tolerated any kind of us and them or simpler and simpler does this and we don’t do it that way. I’m like, no, no, no, no, this is all us. We’re all doing it together. We’re all going to find that one way together. We are simpler. It’s the simpler way. And we’re going to go figure it out together. Um, I know this sounds silly, but, um, sending them t-shirts and hoodies and other kinds of swag.

is one of the quickest ways to get that identity changed so that people recognize that, I’m part of this new company. We had a tradition, it wasn’t written down anywhere, but Fridays were wear your swag day. And so, you get on a call and everybody’s got some sort of simpler jersey on, whether it’s their new hire orientation t-shirt, or it’s something that they got over the years that they were with the company. And it was always a…

wow, where did you get that one kind of a question at times? And it just forces people to start to feel part of that community. And then I think one of the big things around the culture is to make them feel like they have an opportunity to provide input into how they’re going to be integrated into your organization. And the whole question of best of, it really isn’t something that I just say to make people feel good.

I truly want to understand how are you doing what you do and is there something that you’re doing that’s better than how we do it and we can adopt it. And in those cases, they often feel really good when there’s something that they bring to the table that we are adopting portfolio wide because they did it and it’s better than how Simplr did it. And so they feel some ownership of it and they feel really energized to help teach everybody else.

Here’s how we did it. Here’s how it can fit within your, you know, within the broader portfolio. And those small little things give everybody a sense of belonging that they maybe would feel a little antsy about on their way in.

Rina Alexin | 31:53.644–32:27.369

love that that kind of gives not just ownership, but also creates bonds and experiences between the different employees. And so it really does solidify that they’re one team. That’s a really good point. Okay, Brian, I had this question, I just had this, I wanted to ask you maybe, maybe there is no answer here. But do you have an acquisition that just you’re just so proud of that exceeded far exceeded your expectations? And maybe

why, you what was true about that acquisition that it worked out so well.

Brian Fugere | 32:27.369–34:20.224

We did an acquisition probably three, it’s three years ago now, February three years ago. So we’re coming up on the third anniversary where it was a carve out from a company that didn’t really invest in the software and hadn’t invested in it in like 10 years. And I remember competing against this particular company before they even went through their own acquisition process to get to where they were. It was the cream of the crop in the industry.

It was one of those that, my God, I’m competing against this particular company. I’m never going to win. And most of the time I would lose. After all those intervening years and they were turned into this orphan, you the software really, really suffered and the customer experience suffered. And when we acquired them, we were promptly informed by the largest health system in the country that they were going to leave. And the CEO, our CEO and I went and paid them a visit and said, look,

Here’s the situation. Here’s what they were experiencing over the last 10 years while they were part of this other company. Here’s how we operate. Just give us a chance. Give us six months, 12 months. Let’s see how it goes. And we were able to turn it around. And not only for this customer, then they stuck with us and they’re still a customer today. But all the other customers who were in the same situation, who were frustrated by the lack of investment and the lack of progress in the software, we were able to…

really move things along. We got a new release out right away. We drove quality into the product. We just improved the overall experience. And as a result, these customers stuck around and we started winning deals again. And that kind of an experience is what you’re hoping for when you acquire something, especially a struggling asset. And if you can turn it around pretty quickly and get growth to come back, that’s a good experience.

Success Stories: Celebrating Effective Acquisitions

Rina Alexin | 34:20.224–34:27.034

I love that too. You have such great stories, Brian. They’re not all rainbows and butterflies, but it sounds like you did a lot of the good work, installing product operations, figuring out those hard problems that really, I think, put Roblox in making acquisitions work. So given your wealth of experience, I

Brian Fugere | 34:27.034–34:41.582

no.

Rina Alexin | 34:41.582–34:51.807

If you were to talk to a product leader today who might be facing a potential acquisition in 2025 or 2026, what advice would you share with them?

Brian Fugere | 34:51.807–36:09.208

So I would start with within your own company, make sure you partner exceptionally tightly with the CFO, your head of CorpDev or strategy or both if depending upon how you’re organized and your CTO. That group of four really has to be the core that does the diligence to really understand what is it about this asset that we’re acquiring and how are we going to handle it going forward. And then as you get through the diligence process and you get really towards day one,

Spend some time thinking about how do you want to bring these people into your organization so that they feel comfortable and they are bought in so that you don’t have any resulting brain drain or you can minimize it as much as possible. And then you move on to process and technology. But the people are the most important because they’re the ones who built the product. All of that institutional knowledge is locked away in their head. No matter how much they think they’ve written something down, it’s not going to be there and they’ll probably lose it as part of the transition.

And so you really want the people and their brains and you want them to stick around. And so how are you going to engage them? If you can do those two things, if you can do your diligence really well and you can keep the people from the acquisition, you’re setting yourself up for a higher chance of success than you wouldn’t if you focused elsewhere.

Advice for Future Product Leaders in M&A

Rina Alexin | 36:09.208–36:20.479

That is great advice, Brian. Well, thank you so much for joining me on Productside Stories. How can our listeners connect with you or learn more about your work?

Brian Fugere | 36:20.479–36:33.666

You can find me on LinkedIn, Brian Fugere, F-U-G-E-R-E, and hit me through there. That’s the easiest way. Seems to be the answer now, right? Just go to LinkedIn.

Rina Alexin | 36:33.666–36:36.02

Pretty much. Yeah, go to LinkedIn and find me. That’s a good one. Well, thank you so much, Brian. And thank you all for tuning into another episode of Productside Stories. If you found our conversation valuable today, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with a friend and make sure to subscribe to Productside Stories on your favorite platform so you don’t miss an episode. Visit us at Productside.com for more free resources, including webinars, templates, and other product wisdom repackaged for you.

Brian Fugere | 36:36.02–37:03.882

Yeah.

Rina Alexin | 37:03.882–37:03.882

I’m Rena Lexin, until next time, keep innovating, keep leading, and keep creating stories worth sharing.