Organizational Effectiveness
The best organizational interventions start with an honest diagnosis. Before we build or implement any program, we need a clear assessment of what's happening here and why.
My applied anthropology background gives me an unusual foundation for this work. I was trained to surface the unwritten rules, systemic patterns, and cultural dynamics that formal org charts don't capture, and to design solutions that work.
Below are three case studies from that practice.
ThoughtSpot
When the Product Changes and the Culture Hasn't Caught Up
2018-2020
Context
When I joined ThoughtSpot in 2018, the company had just closed its Series D and was navigating one of the most complex organizational moments a high-growth startup can face: four simultaneous shifts, each of which would have been challenging on its own.
ThoughtSpot was transitioning from selling on-premises hardware to virtual machine deployment, and was late to the game. By 2018, almost no one in enterprise analytics was still pushing boxes. But ThoughtSpot's core differentiation, speed of analytics at massive scale, had made their primary customers Fortune 100 companies who were themselves slow to adopt VMs. The market was moving; ThoughtSpot needed to move with it, and the sales organization had to be rebuilt around a fundamentally different product motion.
At the same time, new sales leadership had come in. The original sales team were technically deep, data-oriented, lone-wolf sellers who knew the product intimately, but they began to depart when they were passed over for promotion. The incoming CRO brought a completely different profile: business-oriented, disciplined, operating like an organized army rather than a collection of individual hunters.
The cultural gap between those two worlds was real and immediate.
Layered on top: hyper-growth hiring and a formal methodology shift to Value Selling that the legacy team had little patience for.
Diagnosis
Through conversations with reps and sales leaders across both cohorts, I identified that the primary blocker to commercial adoption of the VM motion wasn't what it appeared to be on the surface. It wasn't a knowledge gap. It wasn't a methodology gap. It was a deeply held belief among the technically sophisticated legacy sellers that VM deployment would eliminate ThoughtSpot's core differentiator: speed of analytics at scale.
These weren't uninformed skeptics. They were the people who understood the product most deeply, which made them the most influential voices in the building, and the hardest to move with a training program.
The concern was legitimate enough that I took it upstream rather than building enablement around it and hoping the worry would fade. I got into the technical weeds with product and sales leadership to understand whether the belief was accurate. It was. However, hardware wasn’t being eliminated and VMs added deployment flexibility. For customers moving away from managing on-premises hardware, that flexibility was a competitive advantage that would become table stakes within 2 years.
The reframe from "we lost something" to "we gained something" became the foundation of the new commercial narrative.
Intervention
I built the enablement around that reframe, with product features as secondary training. We led with deployment flexibility as a customer benefit: what it meant for a Fortune 100 IT team already moving toward cloud infrastructure, what it unlocked in terms of faster time-to-value, and how it actually strengthened the speed-at-scale story rather than undermining it.
I also built specific enablement to bridge the culture gap between the legacy technical sellers and the incoming business-oriented team: creating shared language, shared frameworks, and shared proof points that allowed both cohorts to operate from the same commercial narrative even if their selling styles remained different.
Outcomes
By year-end, approximately 80% of net new business was closing on VM deployment. Hardware remained relevant mainly for expansions and cross-sells with existing customers with legacy infrastructure. The new business motion had fully shifted.
The reps who had been the most vocal skeptics became the strongest advocates because their concerns were taken seriously, investigated, and credibly resolved.
ThoughtSpot had been late to market with VMs. By the end of the year, that was no longer a liability.
The OE Lessons
The most important move in this engagement came before any program was built: taking the resistance seriously enough to diagnose it rather than override it.
The most skeptical reps were also the most technically informed. Their concern was completely valid, and they needed to hear from the leadership that their concerns were understood and incorporated into the go-to-market strategy.
Sumo Logic
When the System Confirms the Wrong Behavior
2015-2018
Context
By 2017, Sumo Logic was deep in hyper-growth and facing intensifying competitive pressure. A new competitor had entered the market and was poaching customers at a rate that was difficult to ignore. The company was more than a year away from an IPO, operating in a mode where every dollar of ARR mattered, and churn carried outsized strategic weight.
A Customer Accounts (CAM) Leader came to me with a problem: customers were churning at renewal, and the pattern was consistent enough to be systemic, not situational. Leadership, including my SVP of Sales Operations, believed this was a behavior problem. Reps weren't properly warming up the handoff. CAMs weren't consistently picking up accounts. The proposed solution was training.
Diagnosis
I came in as a diagnostic and design partner and started where any good diagnosis starts: with the people closest to the problem. Through conversations with sales reps, customer account managers, and the CAM leader who had flagged the issue, I identified something the training-first framing had missed entirely.
Yes, there were behavioral gaps. But underneath the behavior was a systemic problem that no amount of training would fix: Salesforce had never been configured to support the post-sales journey. Functionally, the closed/won stage was the end of the system's line. No defined opportunity stages existed for deployment, implementation handoff, or the transition to ongoing account management. Without those stages, there was no automated trigger for a CAM to pick up a new account.
Some customers were simply falling through the gap between teams. They never received the deployment support they needed, never achieved their expected ROI, and churned at renewal. Not because the product failed them, but because no one had been systematically responsible for immediately setting them up for success after the contract was signed.
In a SaaS business at Sumo Logic's scale, even a 5% churn rate represented millions in lost ARR and significant customer acquisition cost to replace each departed account. My SVP had thought it was all behavioral. It was behavioral and systemic. Fixing only the behavior without fixing the system would have produced training that faded within months.
Intervention
Working cross-functionally with the CAM leadership, I redesigned the end-to-end customer journey from closed/won through deployment through ongoing account management: defining clear ownership, accountability, and transition criteria at each stage.
Critically, the new process was embedded directly into Salesforce as defined opportunity stages. Making the right behavior the default — rather than something that depended on individual initiative or institutional memory — was what turned a process redesign into a durable organizational change.
The CAM now received an automated trigger when an account was ready for handoff. The gap that customers had been falling through was closed at the systemic level, not patched at the behavioral level.
Getting leadership buy-in was fairly straightforward when we connected the fix directly to ARR retention; it was a revenue protection initiative. With that framing, the CRO made it a mandatory certification, and we monitored adoption closely.
Outcomes
The new process was adopted across both organizations. Customers entering the post-sales journey had a defined, system-enforced path to deployment support and account ownership. The churn pattern previously attributed to rep behavior was addressed at its root cause. As a result, churn reduced significantly in the following year.
The OE Lessons
The SVP thought it was a behavior problem. It was a behavior problem sitting on top of a system that made the wrong behavior the path of least resistance.
Training the behavior without changing the system would have been an expensive, temporary, and ultimately demoralizing fix. When you change the system so that doing the right thing is easier than doing the wrong thing, behavior follows. That principle has shaped how I approach every process design engagement since.
Onit Women's Network
When Engagement Is High, But the Structure Isn't There to Sustain It
2023
Context
Onit, a legal technology company, had something many organizations only aspire to: a Women's ERG with genuine momentum. OWN had grown from 60 to 202 members; a signal of real organizational appetite for change. But appetite and architecture are different things. OWN had the community. What it lacked was a structured program with enough coherence and expert facilitation to translate that energy into lasting cultural impact.
The issues Onit's women had raised were specific and honest: the abrasiveness trap, double standards, bias vs. useful feedback, imposter syndrome, women of color roadblocks to leadership, and the challenge of maintaining authenticity while pursuing advancement in a male-dominated industry. These weren't vague complaints. They were a diagnostic.
The program also faced a constrained budget in a difficult market, and no internal expertise to deliver the content the community most needed.
Diagnosis
The topic list itself was the diagnostic artifact. Rather than a generic professional development calendar, OWN had surfaced a remarkably specific picture of what their women were experiencing. That specificity was the starting point.
Working with OWN's leader, we mapped the topics into a coherent narrative arc — a 12-chapter developmental journey organized around a clear through-line: from identity and self-awareness, through systemic barriers and leadership capability, to goal-setting and sustained growth.
I provided the Onit leader with industry research and data to build the business case. Organizations with gender-diverse leadership teams are 19% more likely to outperform on revenue (BCG), 87% better at decision-making (People Management), and 35% more likely to outperform competitors (McKinsey). This was a performance initiative that would have a solid impact on the company's revenue.
Intervention
I joined the engagement as both strategic advisor and lead facilitator, providing two hours of monthly advisory: helping scope, sequence, and adapt the program as community needs evolved. And provided quarterly facilitation of key sessions.
I designed and delivered the foundational session: Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Self-Awareness. This session was intentionally placed first in the curriculum because everything that follows — honest conversations about bias, double standards, and systemic barriers — requires psychological safety that has to be built before it can be used. The session achieved the highest attendance of any OWN programming.
The broader curriculum included expert speakers, interactive activities, ELT engagement (Ask the ELT sessions), and community-building programming designed to sustain engagement between formal sessions.
Outcomes
In the months the engagement ran, qualitative feedback was strongly positive, and community engagement continued to grow. The 12-chapter curriculum gave OWN a program with enough coherence and documentation to outlast any single leadership transition.
The engagement ended earlier than planned when both the OWN program leader and the executive sponsor departed the company within months of each other. Despite sustained attempts to transfer the relationship to other stakeholders, no one stepped forward to own the program during the transition period.
The OE Lessons
The program architecture was sound. The community engagement was real. What was missing was a stakeholder network deep enough to survive a leadership transition.A single champion, however committed, is a single point of failure. Building relationships with the broader circle of people who have a stake in the outcome is now something I do from the first meeting, not as an afterthought. The goal is that if any one person leaves, the work continues because more than one person believes in it..
