Donna Johnson, VP at Cradlepoint - Reliable Enterprise Networks Over Cellular

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:05) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Donna, the VP of Product and Solution Marketing at Cradlepoint. And we discuss how Cradlepoint provides reliable enterprise network connectivity over cellular, the importance of constantly reevaluating your goals, and why it's important to be comfortable trying new things and making mistakes. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Donna at 00:00:33) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Donna at 00:00:46) Well, I had an electrical engineering degree from college. I went to Texas A&M, so I've really been in technology my whole career. I started on the engineering side in computer science, gradually went into product management when I realized that I enjoyed talking to people and discussing the technology and guiding the technology more than I enjoyed actually creating the technology. And then bounced around between product management and engineering management, a lot of them in networking companies. So working for companies doing network management, multi-vendor network management, and then gradually moved into more of a marketing role and product marketing. So currently I'm Vice President of Product Marketing at Cradlepoint. But I really vacillated between different technology roles.

(Donna at 00:01:30) I feel like I've seen all the different parts of the product teams, from engineering, product management, to product marketing, to marketing. And that's been really great because it really gives you a perspective on the entirety of the product and all of the issues that are faced by the different teams that you work with. And I think it makes me a much better person in any role than I'm in to understand that big picture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Yeah, absolutely. I feel like having that tech background when you're marketing a tech-heavy product absolutely helps and probably earns you a bit more respect from the engineering team as well, because they're like, "Oh, she knows what we're doing."

(Donna at 00:02:08) I'm not sure they would go quite that far, but I feel that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) Well, that's awesome. So how did you meet the team at Cradlepoint and get involved there?

(Donna at 00:02:19) Well, I've been doing actually SD-WAN for most of the last decade. I worked with a startup called Talari Networks that eventually was bought by Oracle, and then went on to work for Citrix in their networking division. And in both cases, I was head of product and product marketing for their SD-WAN products. And SD-WAN, you know, for those of you on the call that might know, is really a relatively new technology in the networking space, all around innovation in the wide area network. And it was great. It was so fun to start a new market category, to go through the ups and downs of that. It's taken off now. I feel a little bit of pride in that, like it's my child. You know, it's launched. But at the same time, it was still relatively, in some ways, around making an old technology better. It was around making wired technology better. And when I had an opportunity to meet with Cradlepoint and learned what they were doing, it was so exciting because it was a new technology in a way. It was taking SD-WAN in a new direction. It's taking networking in a new direction. And to me, what gets me out of bed in the morning is working on new things, being able to build new categories, driving change. It's not always the easiest career path, but to me it's really satisfying. And Cradlepoint, at least for the last three or four years, has really scratched that itch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) That's awesome. So can you give me the overview of what Cradlepoint does? What's so different about their approach?

(Donna at 00:03:44) Well, Cradlepoint is a networking company but largely focused around cellular connectivity, 4G or 5G, which I'm sure most people have heard of at this point. And we really focus on bringing the power of the cellular networks into the enterprise edge. So we don't sell to consumers. We sell to businesses or public sector or public safety, nonprofits that need connectivity, that need reliable connectivity, high-quality connectivity, connectivity that supports their business needs as their businesses become more agile and more dynamic. And so Cradlepoint really focuses on those edge solutions and using cellular for that. Now I mentioned that we do SD-WAN, which we do, but we do it with a cellular component, incorporating cellular intelligence into everything that we do. And so, again, I think it's a combination of a new technology that's about a decade old, which is SD-WAN, upcoming technologies such as SASE, which is secure access, secure edge technology, zero trust networking, combining all of those things but doing it with a cellular component to it. And again, I think combining cellular with some of those other exciting new and changing technologies is really where we've been able to make a difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) So are you like a cellular provider similar to AT&T or T-Mobile but like for an office network? Or do you provide offices access to those existing networks and layer your technology on top of that? How does it work?

(Donna at 00:05:16) Definitely the latter. So no, we are not a cellular carrier or provider. We do work very, very closely with them, hand in hand, in the US as well as around the world. But no, we're not trying to provide the network itself. It's the same network in some ways that you use on your phone today. What we're trying to do is connect those locations, those vehicles, those kiosks, security cameras, anything else you might have to that network, but in a way that is secure. So much more secure than, say, just using your phone as a hotspot or something. We want to do it with quality. So with devices, hardware, and solutions that are optimized for that cellular connection. And we want to do it in a way that's manageable. So everyone here has an IT team. You all know the challenges the IT team goes through. And it's very important to us that it becomes something that your IT team can manage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) Okay, I think I'm starting to wrap my head around it. So is it more for like IoT devices, or do you set up an office with a network that just happens to be provided by cellular and everyone in the office is on normal computers doing that? Or is it for both of those use cases?

(Donna at 00:06:31) It's really all of the above. I mean, one of the biggest changes that we've seen over the last several years, but really accelerating during COVID, is that your network is not any one thing anymore. A network is not just an office. It used to be—I'm old enough to remember when we all went into the office, we connected to the network there, then we went home and that was it. But the network itself has expanded dramatically. People, even before COVID but certainly after, you know, people aren't working in offices. So it's not that your network is anymore just your office. Your network might be your home. Your network might be your car. Maybe there's not people involved in your network. Maybe it's strictly a kiosk. Maybe it's some automated solution, or maybe it's a security camera. All of those things need to be connected even if there's no people or computers on the other side of it. We see vehicles themselves have become not just mobile offices for at-home workers, but mobile offices for entire sectors of the industry. So if you think of a police car, for example, a police car is an office with all the complexity of that. They've got data terminals. They've got video. They've got all kinds of tech in there to do license plate reading, lookups. It's basically a full office, full of IoT as well. And all of that has to be connected. And it has to be connected just as securely with the ability to manage it as your office would. So we think that there is no clear distinction anymore between an office network or a home network or an IoT network. It's all part of that business. It's all part of that business's edge, and it all needs to connect. It all needs to connect securely. It all needs 100% reliability. There's very few things, as you probably know, that you can do today in the business world that doesn't require some form of internet connectivity or access to SaaS or other types of applications. So it's one of the ways that we've really, I think, differed from old-school networking companies and expanded the definition of SD-WAN, is really taking it into that age where the network is no longer treated as distinct pieces where you could treat your office network differently from your IoT network, from your home network, from your vehicle network, but rather you think about that entire network as the entirety of the edge and look at solutions that can support that whole thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) That reminds me of just recently we had on a company called AppNeta. We had their CTO, Mike Hessler, on, and they do network monitoring for companies. And so they'll evaluate the basically the health of your company network and provide it in a easy-to-understand way for the IT team at the company to be able to act on that information and actively manage the network. So that was like, that's their main source of business. And when everyone started working from home, they started having to monitor all these home networks so that the IT teams at companies could improve those home networks if they needed to. But I'm curious. So when you're providing networking solutions, it sounds like you would probably dip your toes in that aspect a little bit of like the monitoring as well when you are providing network connectivity to all these companies and IoT devices. What do you do when you notice something is wrong with the network? Do you fix it yourself?

(Donna at 00:10:09) We don't provide that as a service. However, many of our partners do that. Both service provider partners as well as some of our other MSP partners, they might do exactly that. So they might be monitoring that network on behalf of their customers, actively getting involved in correcting the problem potentially. Or some networks are going to be managed by the end enterprise, and then their IT staff would do that. It's interesting though you bring that up, because SD-WAN, which I referred to earlier, was one of the technologies that was really built to prevent the IT staff from having to get involved every time there was a network problem. In fact, using SD-WAN, you can basically allow the network to correct itself. So it can detect anomalies, problems, failures, automatically correct, make sure that your applications continue to operate, that your employees can continue to function. So that's one of the benefits of SD-WAN. And as I mentioned, we bring that into kind of the cellular age and do that with one, maybe two cellular connections, or cellular and your traditional wired connections. Also, I thought it was interesting what you mentioned about AppNeta and home networks, because so many people were forced to go home, obviously, during COVID. And they all depended on their home networks, which could be a great network, could be a terrible network. You never really know. But businesses were now at the mercy of their employees' home networks to get things done and also to make sure it was done securely. So there's a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and work being done across these networks that no one's really managing, and that are offered by all different kinds of providers with other people at home doing things on the network. So one of the ways that we sort of took that technology in a different direction is allowed employees, our employees, but also our customers' employees, to use cellular. Because then you've only got one provider, maybe two, one of your larger cellular providers. And then it's an IT-managed network. It's the IT team working with Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile to provide that network. So now the IT team does have visibility into it. They can ensure certain SLAs or certain levels of performance they require from that network. And now they're not dependent on the home network, the home ISP. So that's an example of where you take a networking technology that's been around for a while, which is the home Wi-Fi network, and you sort of bring it into a newer age and adapt to the way that we're working today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) Yeah, I liked how you mentioned that a lot of companies are kind of at the mercy of their employees' home networks. And I think that's a very apt and just funny way of putting that, especially when we've been doing this podcast throughout the whole pandemic and we're interviewing people at the C-suite and their video freezes up, and then they're like, "Oh, sorry, my son's playing video games." And like, that could happen. I mean, obviously this isn't a super high-stakes thing we're doing here. It's just a conversation. But I mean, that's a C-level executive that their home network is throttling them on a meeting. And like, it could have been a more critical meeting, you know? But I also wanted to touch on how cool it is that you're able to provide home networks with cellular and with one provider. The IT department is able to actually manage that. That's very smart. And I didn't think of it in that way before as like, that's a sort of solution to the problem of companies being at the mercy of their employees' home networks.

(Donna at 00:13:51) We actually heard an interesting anecdote from one company where they were allowing their employees to expense their home internet connection because it was a business expense. So it was a multi-thousand-person company. So they said they processed 9,000 expense reports every month to pay for their employees' home internet. What's the cost of that? I mean, I'm not on the accounting side, but it's not negligible. And so by having a single company, not only do you control the network, but you control the cost. Now you can set up a relationship with that carrier that gives you a discount that works for your business, rather than simply repaying your employees to do that. So there's not 9,000 separate negotiations going on. There's just one by the company. So there's a lot of intangible benefits in using wireless. You know, we've been talking about at-home use as just one of them. They go beyond just the network technology itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) So what are some cool use cases you've seen for businesses using cellular for their network?

(Donna at 00:14:55) Well, I'll tell you one of my favorite ones lately, a newer kind of industry that we didn't see, I don't know of, even as recent as a year ago, something called dark kitchens, where restaurants pop up and they could pop up in unused warehouse space. I've heard of them being in trailers inside of parking lots that are unused. But they basically start a restaurant in a pop-up location with no seating. The only purpose of this restaurant is to serve delivery services. Whether you like that idea or not, it's a bit of an interesting idea. But those businesses cannot survive without a network because their entire business is taking orders over a network connection. They lose their network, there literally is no business left. But they're in temporary locations. The whole point of doing this is to be in low-cost locations. You know, you're not now on the main street of a business. You might be a ways out. And so you need a network, but you need it to be anywhere. You don't have time maybe to wait three months for MPLS or a broadband connection. You might move. You might move around depending on where your business takes you. So you need a connection that's dynamic, one that you can literally pull out of the air within a moment's notice, but one that gives you the quality that you need to serve your business. So that's such a great, to me, use case of cellular because it checks all the boxes. And I also think that enabling that business model is exciting because it's a business model, I would say, of the future. I don't think that that's going to go away. And we could take that example across almost every industry that we work with about how they're changing and how they're adapting and how they need that network to enable that adaptation.

(Donna at 00:16:39) And the network can't be the impediment to it. It can't hold them back. It has to be their whatever their business wants to do. Because I think one thing we all know is that businesses don't have the luxury of waiting, of trying, you know, of waiting three months to open or waiting six months to close or signing a three-year contract for Internet. Businesses need to move and adapt really quickly right now, and they need the network to support that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:07) That's really cool. I think I've probably seen some dark kitchens just like on, I'm looking for a place to eat without knowing it. Because I'll see a restaurant, it's like no dine-in, no takeout, like just a delivery-only restaurant. So I want to talk a little bit about leadership and your approach to leadership at the company. So let's just say, if you could design the perfect leadership training program for the leadership team at your company, what would the most important couple concepts be?

(Donna at 00:17:43) Well, first of all, the leadership at my company is perfect, excellent. Let's make sure we get that on record. So anything that I say has nothing to do with any faults in our leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) Right.

(Donna at 00:17:53) Right. You know, I think managing through change is one of the most important attributes of a leadership team. We all sit down. We all create a business plan. It's the most perfect business plan ever. It's going to work great. You know, we've got it. And it's probably never been true, but it's never been less true than ever now that you have to be able to rip up that business plan at any point in time and be open to change. Be open to learning, modifying. Don't get so enamored of your plans that you're going to charge forward with it no matter what.

(Donna at 00:18:31) I do think our leadership team has been very good at that. I think many, many businesses have been forced to confront that. I think COVID was the prime example of it, but change is occurring in all different ways. So I think that's one thing I would say from a leadership training perspective is, how do you constantly reevaluate your plans, your goals, your approach, your route to market? How do you constantly evaluate that, bring feedback in and then modify it?

(Donna at 00:18:59) In some ways, it's agile. I'm sure all of us have learned about agile development, but it's really agile business processes and constantly taking what you're doing and incorporating new information and new feedback. And maybe you just continue on, which is fine, but be open to change and understand that change is not a failure. It doesn't mean that you failed to see something coming because, you know, none of us are omniscient, but be open to accepting that change. So I think that's one big thing I would love to see incorporated.

(Donna at 00:19:33) And then the other thing is really rely on your employees. Trust your employees. We work very hard to hire good people. But once you've hired them, once they're on board, trust them. Listen to them. They are often the ones who have their ear to the ground, their feet on the street. They're the ones doing the work, and you have to listen to them. And that's part of that change methodology is listen to what they're saying, trust them, and then adapt to what they're saying. Incorporate their needs and their feedback into your business. I think, you know, COVID's an example of how employees can help, right, pretty much across the board.

(Donna at 00:20:11) And it forced a lot of businesses to learn to trust their employees because they couldn't see them anymore. You know, now they're just this face, maybe just a voice, maybe with an unstable Internet connection. So how do you know that they're doing a good job? How do you know that they're working? How do you know that they're productive? To some extent, you have to trust them. And then you have to measure, and you have to look at data, and you have to incorporate that data. So I think those are two big things that all leadership staffs, executive level, C-level, any level within a company really have to think about and incorporate. I think the other things, the technology, you know, all the other things that are the nuts and bolts of our jobs, you learn those over time. But the ability to adapt and the ability to trust are two things that I think are essential.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) That's really smart. So how do you at Cradlepoint, what are some processes you have for constantly reevaluating where you are and seeing if change is necessary?

(Donna at 00:21:11) So as I mentioned, we do have a very strong leadership team. They meet quite frequently. They take feedback in from, I think, all the different levels of the company. The leadership's very engaged and having conversations with people throughout the organization. So it's not a stratified organization where, you know, C-level talks to C-level, and you can only talk up one level of management.

(Donna at 00:21:35) I think many companies are doing that, but I don't think that we're unique in that. But I think that ability to talk across multiple levels and across departments is one of the most important things. And one of the things we've really focused on, I can't say before I came, but certainly I've seen this since I've come, is cross-functional meetings, cross-functional conversations. Don't be siloed in your conversations. Don't just engineering talk to engineering and then report up to the CEO. You know, marketing talk to marketing and report up. It's important to have that cross-functional communication at all levels so that no one's surprised. Everyone's hearing the feedback as it comes in in real time. Everyone's able to adapt, not just at a leadership level, but at every level within the company. And I think that's one of the ways you really do build a more agile organization as a whole.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) Yeah. And I think that cross-functional communication is like a cultural piece to the company of people being just really willing to share openly, possibly with people they aren't working super closely with all the time. But I think that it's important in order to achieve that, all your employees need to feel safe sharing and comfortable speaking freely to the other parts of the organization. So I guess, what would you attribute your success in that area to where it, you say your different departments are speaking well together? So that means they do feel safe, you know? So how did you do it?

(Donna at 00:23:10) Yeah. I think it starts at the top, 100%. I think that you can publish all the value statements you want. Every company has value statements. But if they're just on a piece of paper, then they're not really worth the paper they're printed on. And so it starts at the top. Our CEO, George Mulhern, is very focused on corporate values, the values that you said of trust, of communication. One, our chief value statement is stay humble and hungry.

(Donna at 00:23:37) And I really feel like we as an organization live that. So there's not a lot of arrogance. There's not a lot of ego. I mean, of course, we all have our egos, but we try not to bring it into our jobs. And, you know, stay respectful of other people, but at the same time, be hungry. I mean, we are an ambitious growing company. We have grand visions. We're part of Ericsson now. We're really excited to work with them to expand the scope of our business. So being humble doesn't necessarily mean being quiet.

(Donna at 00:24:08) It just means being, you know, respectful and understanding that you have expertise, but everyone else in the organization has expertise. You have something to say, but everyone else in the organization has something to say. So let's make sure that that's all supported. I think those are some of the attributes. I think our CEO really does live those attributes, and I think that propagates through the entire company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:32) So earlier in the in our conversation, you mentioned that you moved into management roles fairly early in your career. What is a piece of advice that you learned early on about moving from individual contributor to management?

(Donna at 00:24:48) I did do it early. Actually, it's funny looking back. I had my first management role when I was when I was 24, and I was a vice president in engineering by the time I was 30. And some of it's because I worked with startups very early on. And in startups, you get lots of opportunities to move up quickly, which was fun.

(Donna at 00:25:07) Sometimes I think that the way I moved into management and the way I moved into most of my roles, which were almost always with startups, I often lacked a person who had already had that role. So I, you know, moved into a role generally that was empty at the time I moved into it. So I didn't really have anyone to show me what they had done, which was fun, scary. Sometimes I think I, you know, I did things my own way. Maybe I didn't always do things the best way because I didn't have someone else to draw from.

(Donna at 00:25:40) So I don't know if it's explicit advice that I received, but certainly, you know, feel free to make mistakes. Feel free to try things. Don't go in with a rigid idea of what the role is, what your position is, what your title means, and just stay there. Always be looking to try new things. Always be looking to expand into new areas. You'll always be looking to learn new areas. It's only through doing that that you personally can grow, that you can grow within the company. But also, I think that's the way that you really help the company. So I think that's probably something that I've learned personally in the different roles that I've had. And then, you know, really yeah.

(Donna at 00:26:20) I talked about trusting your employees, but that's really a big part. You know, as a manager, you are only as good as your team. I think a lot of times people forget that. I'm sure I forget that at times. You know, your team largely is going to carry out much of the day-to-day work. And so you need to be able to trust them. You need to be able to set priorities, set a vision, set an ethos, and then get out of the way and let that happen. And if you don't do that, if you've always feel like you're the smartest person or you're the one who should be able to do everything, you know, then you keep your team down and you don't let them become who they could potentially be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:58) I'm really glad I asked that question because I feel like now I was just able to draw a connection from you said early in your career, you learned a lot from trying things and failing sometimes and learning as you go. And just a couple of minutes ago, when you're talking about how important it is to trust your employees, like that's you directly implementing, like they also need to try things and fail and learn that way. Which I totally agree with. I'm in the same I'm in that spot in my career right now where, several months ago, I was sort of put in charge of the podcast and they're like, hey. You know how to run this, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40) Because we're a startup and there wasn't a person that had done that here before. So I just kind of figured it out, and it's been trial and error. And now we have a really great system running that I don't think I would have as in-depth of an understanding of how everything works, all those processes that we have for our production and sales and everything, if I didn't learn them myself, like if I was just taught them. You know what I mean?

(Donna at 00:28:12) You internalize it by trying things and learning things. Yeah. That doesn't mean you shouldn't rely on, you know, people who've been there and mentors and things like that. You absolutely should. You know, we've been hiring a lot. We've been able to grow quite rapidly over the last couple years, which is great. And I just met with a new employee last week that we brought on. And one of the things I said to her was, you know, we have a way of doing things. We have processes we've developed. But we hired you in part because you came from another company that also has ways of doing things and processes.

(Donna at 00:28:41) And I want every one of our new employees to bring those ideas in. Let's incorporate them. Let's take the best of the companies that we're hiring from. It's easy to become static. And, you know, we were talking before about being free to change. It's free to change your product strategy, your company strategy, but be free to change your processes. And learn from people who come in, because they may have, through hard work and their own experience and their own mentorships, learned how to do things better. And just because we're doing things right at this point in time, doesn't mean those processes that we have are going to work for us six months from now or twelve months from now. I feel like a common theme in what we've talked about is agility and the ability to adapt to change. And I talked about how I think networks need to adapt and how they can enable you.

(Donna at 00:29:24) We talked about how, you know, you may need to adapt at an executive level. You probably need to adapt at every level. You need to constantly reevaluate your processes. And I think that's a theme that works across all organizations right now that need to be agile in everything that you're doing is just so important. And, I mean, I've been in business for a while.

(Donna at 00:29:46) I've always seen change, but I don't think the pace of change has ever been faster than what we see today. And the businesses that survive are the ones that can adapt to change, but they can come through it thriving and not just surviving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:05) Man, that was a really awesome summary. Good...

(Donna at 00:30:10) I was going to say soapbox, but I'll go summary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Good soapbox. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess before we wrap up here, is there anything else that we didn't get out that we want to get out? You just mentioned you're hiring a lot right now. Where can people go, the best engineers in the world that are listening to this podcast go to, to check out what roles you're hiring for?

(Donna at 00:30:35) Well, you can always go to cradlepoint.com. Check us out on LinkedIn, our website. We would love that. We are hiring really around the world. We have benefited greatly from the move to at-home work. Our ability to pull talent now from different places has been such a boon to us. We are, I should say, we are headquartered in Boise, Idaho. For those of you that don't know that, maybe you've never been to Boise or Idaho. I personally had never been until I started with Cradlepoint. We have an amazing talent pool here.

(Donna at 00:31:09) But like many businesses, the way that we need to continue to grow is to pull not just from our local market and local region, but around the world. So it's been so great being able to bring in new people from all different kinds of backgrounds, from all different kinds of companies, from all different kinds of industries even, and, you know, and bring them in and help us adapt, help us change, help us continue to build those best practices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.