Strong Feedback Loops with Rebecca Lynch, VP, Product at Allstream

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Rebecca, Vice President of Product at Allstream. And we discuss how to keep a tight feedback loop with your employees to keep them happy and avoid burnout, how Allstream is helping their clients seamlessly transition away from older telecom infrastructure, and how to create a fantastic customer experience. So tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into technology and find your way to telecommunications?

(Rebecca at 00:00:50) So in the mid-nineties, I had just graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. My first job out of college, I ended up at a startup, and it was a telecommunications startup. At the time, it was a very interesting time in the industry. So there were a couple of things happening. One, the 1996 Telecommunications Act where it enabled competitors to come into that industry.

(Rebecca at 00:01:15) If you think about the nineties, computers were just becoming more mainstream. So it was very early adopters that were starting to have more computers, and Internet was just starting to evolve into more mainstream as well. So there were several various items from a marketplace that were quite interesting. I ended up at this company by accident in their finance department. Finance and mathematics are very different fields, so it was a really interesting introduction to business.

(Rebecca at 00:01:48) I ended up hanging out in that group for about a year, and then I ended up in a product group at that company. And that was very lucky for me because that really put me on a path. I found my passion when I joined that product group. So I ended up being a product manager in that telecommunications company and really, really enjoyed it. Did some job jumping.

(Rebecca at 00:02:13) So at that point, you know, late nineties, a lot of emerging startups were hopping in the telecommunications industry. So I jumped around a bit to some different companies, took a bit of time off, and went and got my MBA. And then I started at this company called Integra Telecom in 2004 and ended up working at that company for seven years, ran their product group, which involved product management and product development until about 2011. Decided to go off on my own and do consulting. So thought I would do it for a couple years. I ended up doing it for almost ten years.

(Rebecca at 00:02:56) So I ended up consulting for a number of years. Every year I'd look at it and reassess and decide I was still having a lot of fun and would do it for another year. In the time that I was consulting, it was a lot of fun. A lot of the projects I was doing were evolving around products, so product marketing, product management, product development for various different industries. So I had some manufacturing.

(Rebecca at 00:03:21) I had some telecom, had some technology. I even had a lighting company. So I worked with all various types of clients. One of my clients was also a company named Allstream, and the company that I worked at, you know, from 2004 till 2011 is an earlier version of Allstream. So came back, knew quite a few people who were still there, and started to do some projects for them and had the opportunity to take over a new centralized product group and really build that.

(Rebecca at 00:03:58) So I jumped at the opportunity about a year and a half ago, and I'm really enjoying it. So now I'm running the product group at Allstream.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) That's awesome. So you got reengaged with Allstream as a consultant, and then they had an open position that you were able to come on full time?

(Rebecca at 00:04:16) Yes. Exactly. I was really excited to come back. The company had evolved quite a bit from when I had been there almost ten years prior. It's now Allstream.

(Rebecca at 00:04:27) It's a Canada and US company. We provide voice, collaboration, connectivity services for business customers. But the thing that really excited me about Allstream was, you know, several things. One, I love the people. The company is filled with professionals.

(Rebecca at 00:04:47) We have experts. There's people that I worked with back before I left that were still at the business, but there's also all sorts of new people because, you know, we had evolved and grown since then and become also a Canadian company. The part two is we have telecom switches. We have data infrastructure. We are a true telecommunications service, and we have the expertise, but we also have a lot of heart.

(Rebecca at 00:05:16) We care about our employees. We care about our customers. We're not just a reseller. We're a true telecommunications provider, and it was really a fun challenge to come back to this new company with some familiar faces and really be able to contribute and run that product team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) That's awesome. A couple months ago, I got to interview Allstream's COO, Steven Fisher, and we talked a lot about fiber technology and benefits in the future of increased bandwidth and whatnot. And you're saying you're a full telecommunications provider. Does that mean putting up towers, laying fiber, like infrastructure stuff, or software platforms? Fill me in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:02) What are the actual offerings? What are you working on?

(Rebecca at 00:06:06) So Allstream is a full solution provider. So we offer voice services. We provide cloud service, so we offer managed voice services. So if the customer wants us to just provide calling in and out of their network, we can do that. If Allstream would like for us to manage a phone service for them and provide them with telephones in their offices, we can provide that.

(Rebecca at 00:06:30) We can provide them with connectivity to the Internet. We can provide various managed IT services. We have our own switches. We have our own data infrastructure, and we're a full service provider. We can provide all the different solutions that a company would need for their business telecommunication and connectivity needs.

(Rebecca at 00:06:52) So we do not lay fiber. We purchase fiber from other providers, but we light that equipment. So we light the fiber that's in the ground and have that provided by Allstream. So we're not just reselling other providers' connectivity. So we're not a construction company.

(Rebecca at 00:07:12) We don't have to go in. We're not building the fiber in, but we are lighting the fiber, and we have the infrastructure. So it's our equipment that we put onto that infrastructure. So we have an integrated platform that ties all those pieces together. So if you think about being able to have Internet, voice, whether you want to have an unmanaged voice solution or you want Allstream to manage it, we can do all of that, and it's on this comprehensive platform that has been put together in a very professional manner, and we're able to provide this full solution of telecommunication services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) Okay. Cool. So are the switches the equipment required to light the fiber?

(Rebecca at 00:08:04) The switches are, you think about telephone switches. So they provide the voice services. So we have our own voice switches in our network, and we're providing voice services. If you're calling in and out of your telephone or in and out of your computer where you're calling a party outside of your company and you're going over the PSTN, Allstream has switches that connect into that and provide that service for customers. And then we also have data networking, so we do connectivity, Internet, you know, managed IT type services as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) Gotcha. So with the world changing drastically in the past two years, it sounds like you guys would have been at the center of that and going through a lot of change in work with everybody distributing.

(Rebecca at 00:09:00) Right. We definitely had even before the pandemic and customers were working from anywhere, we had solutions to help empower our customers to be able to work remotely. So we have cloud voice systems where the customer can work remotely and be able to interact and collaborate and call and message their employees in other locations. So we already had those solutions available prior to the pandemic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) Was it challenging scaling them up as everybody needed those solutions?

(Rebecca at 00:09:41) So we quickly changed how we talked to customers to make sure that it was clear that we had those solutions available to them, but we had been empowering customers to be able to work wherever they are prior to the pandemic. So we didn't have to change our business model when the pandemic happened. We changed where our employees worked. So prior to that, we did have remote workers, and then we also had multiple offices both in Canada and US, and we all went home. So it was a change in how we worked with each other, although we had been working across different countries and doing that collaboration already.

(Rebecca at 00:10:26) But we've done some initial enhancements that we quickly developed during the beginning of the pandemic to make sure that the customer had a full suite. But it wasn't a big shift from a business model standpoint for us because we had already been providing customers with solutions to allow them to work from anywhere, which is really where we're at today. So from an industry standpoint, it quickly evolved. Customers were already moving to the cloud. You know, the pandemic really accelerated that move.

(Rebecca at 00:11:00) Customers were already working if they were traveling. Sometimes if they needed flexibility, they might have workers working from anywhere, from home, or on the road, and we already had those solutions. But bringing those to the forefront, making sure our customers understood those applications and how they can apply them to their business and making sure that they really had the tools they need was something that we focused on, but we didn't have to quickly develop solutions to enable customers to be able to work in that manner.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) That's really cool. So on the topic of distributed work, I remember at the beginning of our conversation, you said one of your favorite parts of Allstream is the heart and the care of the company. And it's a hot topic right now, especially companies that have been traditionally in the office, how to keep their heart and culture strong when everybody is sent home. And I know you started back full time at Allstream after March 2020. So you've been experiencing, you've been having a positive experience with the heart and culture in distributed work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:09) So can you share with me some of the things that Allstream does to have that heart with a distributed work setting?

(Rebecca at 00:12:20) So we do have a lot of video calls. I think it's really important. All teams are expected to have team meetings. I'm interacting with people every single day on video. Some people I've never met in person, and I think it's just really important to turn that video on and interact with people, be able to see them, see their facial expressions.

(Rebecca at 00:12:44) It's not the same as meeting them in person, but I think a lot of the work that we do together, even though we're distributed and in different countries, we're able to build those relationships. Also, we do survey our employees, and we listen to feedback they have and make changes. We implemented a meeting-free Friday because people were getting a bit fatigued on being on meetings so much during the week. So give them a break to be able to do work that day and not just be in meetings. So, you know, over time it seems like we get more and more meetings on Fridays, but we try to also give employees breaks from that fatigue of being on video all the time.

(Rebecca at 00:13:30) But we're used to collaborating online using SharePoint type of resources where you can collaborate on materials. It's just a very collaborative company, and listening, people have voices. Senior leadership is listening to employees, reading through comments on surveys, making changes based on those, that input that employees are providing. And we really care about our employees. We listen to our employees, and we make actual items out of feedback that comes from employees.

(Rebecca at 00:14:07) And we do the same thing with customers. We listen to our customers. We read through comments that they provide to us, you know, both positive and negative, and we set up action to be able to address issues that come from our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) That's awesome. I like that you touched on having that close feedback loop because that's super important to make sure people feel heard when they need help and they need a change and make sure that they see the change in a timely manner. One thing that has been really helpful for me recently in terms of just working efficiently, and you touched on having a little bit of meeting fatigue, although also having meetings regularly is awesome and very stimulating. It's a hard balance.

(Rebecca at 00:14:55) Yeah. It's a balance where you need to be interacting with people. You can't work alone. I think working together in groups and the collaboration that happens is still important. And in the end, you create a better outcome with having multiple voices, but we also need some of that quiet time to be able to get that work done too.

(Rebecca at 00:15:14) So really having that nice balance of meetings, whether they're via video or in person, and also having that work time has been something that we've really been working through. And it's evolved over the last couple years that we've been, you know, in and out of working in the office. Some people are back in the office. A lot of people aren't. But we're also, we have a distributed workforce, so we wouldn't ever be all in the same office even if everybody returned to an office.

(Rebecca at 00:15:44) It wouldn't be one office. It would be many offices. So we're going to still have those video and that interaction remotely forever at this company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) It's funny. Someone mentioned to me recently that working in the office is becoming a perk as opposed to being able to work from home used to be the perk. I've been starting to experience some meeting fatigue myself because we're going through some growth. I've kind of been becoming a recruiter, just hiring a lot and training a lot. I started doing prerecorded training where I'm making tutorials because we recently had on a company called TechSmith on the podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) And their big thing is they make the product Snagit and Camtasia if you've ever used—

(Rebecca at 00:16:36) We use that. Yeah. We use those internally. We use them for product education. So we do internal videos on different topics that we do for both the sales organization and the ops groups in different groups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. It's really freed up a lot of my time to do training asynchronously. Then I can be more focused on what I actually have meetings for, which is cool. I want to come back to telecom, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:03) I love talking about ways to improve workflows. Yeah. I have in my notes to ask you about industry deregulation in telecom and how that's been affecting your industry. And I am excited to talk to you about this because I don't know anything about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) So what's going on there?

(Rebecca at 00:17:24) So what's happening is there are certain types of services that are being deregulated. What that means is that the costs are increasing. So the pricing is no longer going to be regulated, and the costs are going to go up. So this is on old legacy services such as T1s, which is an older technology. It's 1.5 meg.

(Rebecca at 00:17:49) And old phone lines. So if you think about old landlines to homes and businesses. So the underlying infrastructure that powers those legacy services are being deregulated, and the rates are going up. So we're going to be receiving cost increases from underlying providers that we end up passing through to customers.

(Rebecca at 00:18:16) It's a cost impact. The second thing that's happening from an industry standpoint is a lot of that old technology is end of manufacture, end of life. And so telecommunication providers are transforming networks away from that old technology. And so, you know, combining that with the deregulation really changes what kind of services the customers purchase and what they deploy at their own premises. It's hard to make changes.

(Rebecca at 00:18:50) So if you have really old technology at your premise, that's what you've always used. You're used to the way that works. You might feel nervous about moving to newer technology. But with that deregulation and the cost increasing as well as transforming our own network away from that technology, we're pushing customers into newer technologies such as Ethernet, VoIP, voice over IP. And so sometimes customers feel nervous.

(Rebecca at 00:19:26) Oh, is it going to work as well? You know, I have to make these upgrades to my own location in order to use these services. But there's this evolution that's happening in the industry that is pushing customers to really accelerate and accept this newer technology because they're not really able to get this older technology at a reasonable price anymore. So we're getting rid of that old technology out of our own networks, and the cost for maintaining that are high as well. So it's this combination of costs and technology evolution that's causing customers to move to newer technology and not have old T1 technology or old analog lines.

(Rebecca at 00:20:15) They have to move to newer, faster, and a lot of times better technology. And you think about older Windows, you know, eventually older Windows programs, they're not supported anymore, or old wireless technologies on your cell phone. You have to move to the newer model or move to the newer technologies. So the same thing's happening with the telecommunications industry where we're not supporting those old analog lines, and we're pushing customers to evolve to the cloud, evolve to Ethernet, evolve to higher speed internet. We still have some dial-up customers if you can believe that.

(Rebecca at 00:20:56) So there's some really old technology. It just, it is, sometimes it takes time to make those changes at a customer. You know, sometimes they need to be brought along on the journey and educated and learn what other options there are today and how that can help with their customer needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) So is that what, what are they deregulating that's increasing the costs?

(Rebecca at 00:21:20) It's the older lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:22) Okay.

(Rebecca at 00:21:23) So if you think back to what happened in the mid-nineties when they began opening up competition, there were legacy providers who had infrastructure that was built into different businesses. And what ended up happening was they leased those lines to competitive providers that enabled them to get into those businesses without having to build and dig up the streets because they were able to get in and use those lines into that business and then put their service over those lines. What's starting to happen now is that, you know, all these years later, there's no longer price protection into using that line to get into that business. The other thing that's happening is that the infrastructure isn't supporting that old technology anymore because it's just so outdated. A lot of the telephone switches that use that infrastructure, that older infrastructure, they're end of life.

(Rebecca at 00:22:30) They're not being manufactured anymore because the industry has really moved on. So that cost is going up. They're not going away right away, so there's still legacy services that customers can use, but the costs are increasing for the providers that are using those lines to get into those customers, and then we're having to pass that cost on to the end customer because our costs are increasing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59) Okay, cool. Thank you. I think I have a clearer picture of the whole landscape now. So as customers aren't even being able to afford the older technology anymore, they're adopting newer technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:13) I know increasing prices isn't a fun thing, but are you excited about the increased adoption of the newer technology?

(Rebecca at 00:23:22) Oh, most certainly. I really believe that customers are hanging on to old technology. They really should evolve their business. They have so many more options, higher speeds. What we're providing to customers today is not necessarily brand new.

(Rebecca at 00:23:42) I mean, we've had Ethernet services. We've had higher bandwidth options, fiber connectivity for a number of years. There's just some customers that haven't adopted newer technology and taken advantage of those newer technologies. So I absolutely want customers to have the best technology for their business, and that helps them achieve their business goals. And moving to newer technology is so much better for their business because, you know, they'll have faster speeds to the internet.

(Rebecca at 00:24:18) They'll have the latest voice services. They'll have better collaboration apps. I mean, all of that ties into this, and I want the customers to have better technology that helps them meet their own business objectives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) So when transitioning from the older technology to the newer technology, you mentioned earlier that a lot of customers are hesitant to switch from the systems they've been using for years. And obviously, communication is something that you can't really have a lapse on. So how do you make that experience for the customers of transitioning to the newer technology as seamless as possible?

(Rebecca at 00:24:59) Well, first of all, you really need to understand what the customer needs and what the customer's goals are and how they're using the technology, what's important to their business. So we really look at customers from a solution standpoint and determine what their business needs, how can we serve that with newer technology, help the customer understand different options. There's not just one solution necessarily. They usually will have a couple different ways that they could go. But really helping them with the experts that we have at Allstream to understand what type of options will help them best meet the needs that they have that are unique to them.

(Rebecca at 00:25:41) And we have a very, very strong and professional sales engineering organization that works with our customers along with our salespeople to be able to really understand what the customer is trying to achieve and what their goals are. And we have other customers that are a bit more sophisticated and they know what they need. They let us know what they want to be implementing, and we're able to do that for them as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) So when you're managing the customer experience and customer journey, who actually are your customers that you're talking to regularly?

(Rebecca at 00:26:16) So we have midsize customers. Our customers are midsize enterprises. You know, our sweet spot, we do have some really large customers and some smaller customers. But Allstream's target customer are that midsize enterprise, and we're across a variety of different industries. We have professional service customers.

(Rebecca at 00:26:36) We have hospitals. We have hospitality. We're across various, various different industries. So it's more about what the customer's using the technology for. So we're not focused on just specific industries or verticals.

(Rebecca at 00:26:53) Allstream has business services for companies of all different industries. We do have some larger customers, but our sweet spot is really that midsize segment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:07) So I have a note here that looks like a really bold statement that I would love to ask you about. The end of an era for traditional telecoms. Can you fill me in on what that is referring to?

(Rebecca at 00:27:22) So Allstream has evolved along with our customers. We aren't just a telco that has old legacy lines and providing low speed internet. So we provide cloud solutions. We provide managed communications. We provide UCaaS services.

(Rebecca at 00:27:42) We provide high speed internet. We provide a large variety of really useful technologies to the customer. We're not just an old telco that does legacy phone lines to a customer. So if you think about how you evolve as a provider, you really become this partner with the customer where you're supporting their journey of what they need in order to be able to connect and communicate with their employees and their customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:18) Awesome. So looking forward to the future, what's the thing that you're most excited about moving forward in your industry?

(Rebecca at 00:28:27) I am so focused on the customer experience. I believe that the customer really evolved in their expectation of how they interact with companies, especially the last number of years through the pandemic. So if you think about online shopping, you think about how people are interacting online, I'm really excited about providing tools to the customer that makes it so easy for them to be able to communicate with their own employees and their customers and providing them with this integrated experience where they have this really simple, easy platform to be able to interact with the people they need to to do their business and making that easy and modern and amazing for them. To me, the customer experience is top of mind with everything that we do in product, and I'm most excited about enhancing that customer experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) Awesome. So how do you keep the product people as close as possible to the customers? I guess I want to get a clear picture of what the team structure of your feedback loop actually looks like, if that makes sense.

(Rebecca at 00:29:45) Yeah, yeah. So the product managers are working with salespeople daily. So they are interacting with our sales organization, which is also a conduit into the customer, and they also do talk to customers directly. So there's different ways that the product managers are getting that feedback from customers.

(Rebecca at 00:30:08) So sometimes it's directly, sometimes it's through the sales organization, and sometimes it's also through deals that we didn't win and why. So really, I say those are the three main ways that the product team gains feedback. And they're also getting market intelligence, looking at what are other companies doing, do we have gaps in our product offering. So they're, you know, they're always looking at that as well. So they have various ways that they're getting that feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) Nice. That makes sense. So before we wrap up, I want to ask you one question I love asking. If you could go back and give yourself one solid piece of advice when you were first moving from the finance side of things to product, what would that be?

(Rebecca at 00:30:54) So in general, I think that being curious, asking questions, it's okay if you don't know the answer as long as you're willing to figure out the answer and figure out the solution. I think really making sure that you always keep the customer experience top of mind, being authentic and transparent. Really, when you go into product, if the customer isn't going to purchase your service if it's not relevant to their business. So making sure that you really are always keeping what those customer needs are and why they want your service top of mind and making sure that you have a competitive offering. We need to be able to provide a service to the customer that the customer needs, but we also need to build it in a way that internal departments can support it. So sometimes we get so wrapped into our own knowledge and why we should do things, but we always have to remember the customer because we don't have a service that the customer needs if we don't make sure that we're evolving with them and we're keeping their needs and their experience top of mind at all times.

(Rebecca at 00:32:10) So I would say the customer focus would be something that I would have made sure that my early self was always keeping top of mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:20) 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.