Can you tell me of a time when you participated in the area of a cross-functional team?

Original prepared answer

I have actually started up twice.

Though on both occasions, I was the tech co-founder, I participated very heavily in other functions like the product, business development, and marketing.

I always had another co-founder who would lead the product or sales or marketing.

In the first startup. It was in the Indian markets.

We were in the space of brand consultancy.

• Here I along with my co-founder was heavily involved in creating marketing materials

• Perform secondary research to identify potential customers

• Look for connections in these companies

• And sending them proposals or just shooting cold emails where there were no connections

• I participated in all sales meetings and presented demos of our product

• I have acted as client liaison to many

In the second startup, it was in the US markets. And it was in the space of commercial real estates. I was doinf this startup from Chicago and Newyork. During the product busilding stage, I was working very closely with one of our client Natixis bank of France.

• I used to sit with one of their analyst and one of their property broker to gather inputs on the problems and

• Also gather feedback when somethings were ready from my side.

• Here I had to completely inderstand the user persona and

• then had to identify the potential problems and get them verified with our clients

• build features to solve them and then get feedback and then iterate

• In this startup, we had a co-founder who was well known in the CRE space. So we did not have many problems in getting a meeting with a potential client.

• But in the meetings, I along with my product cofounder used to lead in terms of

• choreographing the demo

• emphasizing the USPs

• Show competitive advantages of our product

• Focusing on hooked elements

• In this startup, we used a lot of external party financial data. To get this data we had to integrate with vendor APIs. here I have negotiated with all the vendors that we were evaluation

• Features discussions

• Pricing negotiations

• Deal details

I loved doing it. I loved going into client meetings all suited up, at Time square, Rokefella building at the heart of NewYork.

The current company is a decently sized startup that has dedicated functions and running at scale, hence there is less opportunity to face these aspects head-on.

But I have stayed on the sidecar quite frequently. I have attended client meetings and brokered vendor negotiations.

• I have had multiple discussions with Uber's engineering team which works from the Netherlands. It was a call to explain one of our newly built API that they were supposed to integrate. Though we had extensive documentation but the call was necessary as they wanted to understand the internal workings of the API and the metrics and alerting that we had around it

• I have led negotiations with Confluent and Hevo data while we were building our data-pipeline

• I have done numerous interactions with the sales team to explain various feature propositions. And even currently I am actively working with our sales team and directly working with the client to enable SAML integration between our apps and their authentication system

• But my high participation is with product

• Since I have been with Joveo for 3.5 years, I am familiar with most of the nuances of our business and product.

• Whereas our current product team is very new and lacks knowledge of the business

• I participate a lot in the product life cycle. Starting from problem identification to solution creation and impact analysis.