Leading From The C-Suite: Jake Miller of The Engineered Innovation Group on Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive

An Interview with Doug Noll

Stop and listen. Listen to your team members. Learn what is working and what isn’t working. Ask your team how they’d solve the problems. Listening will arm you with the information you need to create the environment your team needs to be a high-performing team.

As part of our series called “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive,” we had the pleasure of interviewing Jake Miller.

Jake Miller is a seasoned product and technology leader with extensive experience in enterprise-grade SaaS products and platforms. He began his career by co-founding the legal SaaS product, OovisoI, followed by contributing to innovative projects at Allison Transmission and Indiana University Health.

Jake’s journey in SaaS continued as he joined ExactTarget, which was later acquired by Salesforce for a remarkable $2.5 billion. There, he played a pivotal role in the development of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Marketing Automation suite, including the critically acclaimed Journey Builder platform, supporting major companies like Uber, Lyft, and BBVA.

In 2017, Jake co-founded MetaCX, where he served as CTO, pioneering the world’s first real-time event-driven CRM platform. MetaCX revolutionized value exchange and facilitated strategic initiatives requiring coordination among multiple organizations and stakeholders.

Recently, in 2021, Jake founded the Engineered Innovation Group. Building on his vast experience with High Alpha companies, he realized. the commonalities and repeatable foundations in building successful SaaS startups. And now he’s on a mission to revolutionize how software products and teams are built with an engineered approach to co-creation that accelerates ideas to insights to implementation.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

When I was a youngster, I was fascinated by the school bus system. My parents bought me a handful of mismatched toy school buses, and I’d line them up outside a makeshift school built of wooden blocks and Legos. I made a sound mimicking the school bell indicating the day had wrapped up and it was time for the pupils to orderly navigate to their assigned school bus, always in the same place, to be whisked home to their families in the surrounding area.

In hindsight, it was the scheduling, the coordination, the SYSTEM that fascinated me. When I attended university, I chose to study English — not to study literature but linguistics, what I like to call the science of language. Ontology, phenomenology, and cognitive aspects of linguistics were the penultimate problem to be solved — a SYSTEM to be understood, yet evasive and even mysterious to our understanding even today.

Ultimately, I self-studied in computer programming and computer science, writing code and small web applications shortly after the .com bust. Over the past two decades, I’ve worked for companies like Allison Transmission, IU Health, ExactTarget, and Salesforce. I left Corporate America to co-found a startup, now called MetaImpact, and served as CTO.

Most recently, in 2021, during the height of the pandemic like so many others, I did soul-searching about what I wanted to do, what I would build if I could draft any system in the world — the sky was the limit. That’s when I founded my current company, The Engineered Innovation Group. My fascination with building systems is at the core of my entrepreneurial spirit. I am a software engineer at heart, and that will never ever change.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Abundance mentality has been. Only when I started embracing the spirit of abundance did I realize the power in the mindset. I’m actually a pretty skeptical person — and my default mindset is scarcity — to work in fear — not being good enough, making wrong decisions, looking stupid, having competition — in reality it’s all hogwash. I mean, it is real in the sense that one experiences the emotions, but it is a completely false reality. When considering the facts these feelings are most often easily invalidated.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

The quote, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” is powerful and also misattributed to Einstein. Regardless of who said it, there is much wisdom packed into this sentence.

This is important to me because I believe most people have an inner genius, a hidden skill and often a misunderstood talent.

In high school and even college, I was a C student. Not because I am stupid, but because I learn very differently than the way conventional academics are taught. I’m an experiential learner. To take it a step further, while I am a technologist, I am also creative. I’m very good at constructing mental models and drawing relationships between various parts — I consider this a superpower.

There is a misconception that one is either left brained or right brained. In reality, the best engineers I know are computer scientists who harness their creative prowess to problem solve. After all, problem solving, at its roots, requires creative ability.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on your leadership style? Can you share a story or an example of that?

Keith Sawyer’s book “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration” tells us that great ideas often come from teamwork rather than just one person’s “eureka” moment. Instead of keeping teams and departments isolated, he suggests that mixing things up and getting everyone, even customers and competitors, involved can lead to some amazing innovations.

This is why diversity matters. When people from different backgrounds and experiences come together, they bring unique viewpoints to the table. This diversity can lead to more creative solutions. For example, a software engineer might approach a problem differently than a graphic designer, but when they collaborate, they can create a solution that’s both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Analogous learning is the process of taking knowledge or solutions from one context and applying them to another. It’s like using patterns or solutions from a different industry or domain to solve a problem on your own. For instance, the medical field might borrow ideas from aviation about checklists to reduce errors during surgeries. Or a business might look at how nature efficiently organizes systems (biomimicry) and then apply those principles to streamline their operations.

For leaders, this means that encouraging teamwork and open communication can be the secret sauce to coming up with the next big thing. In simple terms, two heads (or more) are often better than one!

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

While we are an agency, we’re a software company. We are modeled after a healthy software company organization structure and skills spanning the entire software development spectrum from marketing to engineering, design, security, etc.

We borrow the best processes and best skills from companies like Salesforce and have built them into how we work with customers to establish their organizations and build products — enterprise-grade work for startup companies. This is quite unique.

We don’t just focus on product design or software development — we’re not building a repository to hand off. We help clients build organizations capable of innovating, have the right talent, balance of expertise, etc.

Also — we started focusing solely on Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development, but our long-term vision is to bring emerging technologies to everyday business.

You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Adaptability

Running a startup can be a lot of fun. One of my favorite parts of leading in a small organization is our ability to move fast. Lighting fast. We will frequently have epiphanies based on customer or prospect calls about acute challenges they are facing — problems they need to solve — that are applicable broadly. We capture those concepts, and quickly turn around marketing assets to help message how we can help. This is real-time adaptation to market needs, and I think it is under-appreciated. The same goes for successful business leaders, we must be able to continually evaluate our surroundings and our inner selves and make the adjustments needed to meet others where they are, and to achieve goals.

2. Strategic Agility

The ability to move quickly between high-level strategy and ground-level tactics, adapting to changing conditions and making rapid decisions based on both broad visions and immediate realities. An agile leader can shift focus between long-term goals and short-term actions smoothly.

We’ve been going through hypergrowth at my company. We’ve been focused heavily on operational efficiency and process improvement/standardization. It’s challenging to work with the team of leaders to ensure we have the right process and minimum process in place today to support our team operations, but also help the team understand how the foundations we’re laying today help us to build towards a broader vision of full-process automation over the next 2–3 years. The ability to create the space for a team to operate, while also aligning leadership to the end goal — ensuring everything we do is moving the needle is an important characteristic.

3. High EQ

My company drives sales almost exclusively through relationships — referrals and relationships developed over time. This is successful because rather than focus on a sale, or dollar amount, we focus on how we can solve the customer’s problem and make them the hero. The team and I get genuinely and deeply excited about our customers’ products and projects. This may seem like a no-brainer — but it isn’t. In reality, it takes a high EQ to be able to empathize with people, meet them where they are, and demonstrate that you truly understand their problems.

Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?

There was one point in our company evolution where we made the explicit decision to hire a Director of Design and to build out a product design team to supplement our development team. At first, I thought it’d be a straightforward decision — easy. Of course, we’d build a design team. Our customers needed the services. However, we do have design partners that do stellar work in product design, and we oftentimes are their build partners. There was a significant amount of tension with a member on my team at the time because their perspective was we should absolutely not build our own design team, rather leverage our partners. Both paths led to success, but one was the easier path, the other would be a longer and harder road. Ultimately, I decided we would build our own team and take the risk that our existing design partners would be upset about the decision. I fretted for WEEKS over this decision, but the fact is, the company vision could not be realized w/o doing it. It’s a decision in hindsight I know was absolutely correct, but at the time it was intense.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Most of our readers — in fact, most people — think they have a pretty good idea of what a C-Suite executive does. But in just a few words can you explain what a C-Level executive does that is different from the responsibilities of other leaders?

C-Suite executives must simultaneously hold opinions of the current landscape across several domains (sales, macroeconomics, team, and organizational alignment, etc.) and predictions for the future. It’s always a push and pull between what the organization needs now and what it needs to thrive in the next one, two, three, or more years.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a C-Suite executive? Can you explain what you mean?

Myth #1: Executives have all of the answers.

I had a manager several years ago say, “the higher in the organization you climb, the more comfortable you have to be working with less information.” For example, as a front-line manager, you likely have 80% of the contextual information to decide. When you’re further removed from hands-on tasks, flip that number on its head — you need to be comfortable deciding with 20% of the contextual information. The key is to know the right questions to ask to fill that 20% bucket — that’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Myth #2: It’s lonely at the top.

First, while hierarchies and reporting structures are essential to running a functional organization, I rarely consider myself at the top. I see myself side-by-side with our team. I don’t talk this talk; I walk this walk — by diving into problems with members across all levels of the organization. More importantly, if you’ve not built a leadership team or relationship with board members, that’s a ‘shame on you’ moment. Sure, it can be lonely if you’ve not put the effort into surrounding yourself with the right team.

Myth #3: Working around the clock.

Admittedly, this took me years to learn — but working in the C-Suite does not mean devoting 24/7 to the business. Personally, I aim for work-life integration. I take the time I need, when I need it, for family, friends, and even personal downtime to read, write, paint, or the occasional new tattoo. Do I work on the weekends? Sometimes, but it’s a balance. Are some weeks slanted more toward work than others? Sure. But being a CEO or business owner does not mean sacrificing your core to be successful.

It’s worth noting that because I am my company’s founder, I have more of my identity tied to it than others may. That is okay and exactly how I want it. I’m living my core values daily and, given my role, have the influence (more importantly, stewardship) to do it.

What are the most common leadership mistakes you have seen C-Suite leaders make when they start leading a new team? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Mistake #1: Not listening enough.

This holds for any role but is especially important for leaders. Stop and listen. Listen to your team members. Learn what is working and what isn’t working. Ask your team how they’d solve the problems. Listening will arm you with the information you need to create the environment your team needs to be a high-performing team. It’s 2023. Folks don’t want a boss; they want a leader.

Create a ‘listening plan’ with the intention to hear from a meaningful sample set of team members. Meet with these folks, be curious, ask questions, and withhold judgment. This not only provides you with invaluable feedback it also creates room for psychological safety.

Mistake #2: Making Changes Too Soon

Not listening enough is also accompanied by making changes too soon. Rather than listening and building a mental inventory of the challenges and opportunities, ineffective leaders will start to make changes. The changes are well-intended — no one wants to wreak havoc — but solutions that worked in one role or one company aren’t necessarily translatable to a different team or company. And, as probabilistic mathematicians will tell us, the past doesn’t dictate the future.

Instead of making immediate changes, leverage the feedback from your team members, peers, and board to craft a strategic plan. Given my background at Salesforce, I have an affinity for the V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles & Measures) strategic planning framework. First, create a vision that ensures your leadership team aligns with it, then work through the methods and metrics for how you will achieve and measure the goals. Putting the plan to paper, garnering feedback, and buy-in from your team will provide the time needed to plan changes to enact thoughtfully.

In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

Growth is a blessing or curse for companies and its leaders. There is no such thing as the “right amount” of growth — it is an art, not a science. Hypergrowth for most is a dream come true. The fact of the matter is that even hypergrowth presents its own, and frequently seemingly insurmountable challenges. There are many things to balance: costs of goods sold, margin, competitive salaries, benefits, employee engagement and retention, cash-flow, customer experience and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), not to mention consideration to serve the business now, but what systems or people need to be put in place now to accommodate the new customers you’re forecasting to onboard.

Do not underestimate the challenges that come with hypergrowth. One challenge at EIG has been that we continue to raise the bar for talent. We started with incredibly talented junior engineers, and as we’ve proven our ability to take on and deliver more sophisticated projects, we’ve had to attract much more senior talent to balance our customer expectations with our ability to deliver. This is no small feat and not as simple as it sounds. Attracting senior talent means higher salaries, which impacts overall benefit expenses like 401k matches. Junior talent craves the tutelage of their more experienced peers — which can tip the balance of productivity in your favor, or not. We invested heavily in senior, principal, and architect level engineers in the past 6 months to ensure there is a healthy (and diverse) balance of experience.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1 . Trust

Trust is our number one value. Yes, this was stolen from my time at Salesforce because it is absolutely the most important to our overall success. Trust encompasses open, honest communication, health relationship building, including setting boundaries, and respectful communication. It also includes building secure and compliant products and delivering projects on time and on budget.

Let’s face it. Not everything goes as planned. We’ve worked with clients that we thought would need particular domain experts like data science, but once we were down in the weeds realized that they really needed a more foundational plan that required product management instead. We have built relationships with customers that make it very easy to have these conversations, and we are able to be flexible, too. After all, shared success is the ultimate goal.

2 . Abundance

We’ve all experienced that feeling of cortisol welling up in our core. That sneaky cortisol pumping through our veins whispering reactionary moves in our ear. These are the times warning bells should be going off in our heads — we’re working from a place of fear — of scarcity. Our lizard-brain amygdala has taken control even if for a moment. Those with well developed EQs know that is the time to take a breath, center oneself, and then develop a response plan.

This is where abundance comes in. When we work from a place of abundance, we’re working from a grounded space. We’re operating with curiosity and are most capable of thinking creatively outside the box, This is when we are our best selves. Problems are merely puzzles to be solved, not bombshells that bury us.

3 . Insatiable Curiosity

Fostering a culture of curiosity creates room for out-of-the-box thinking. Divergent thinking, stupid ideas, incomplete thoughts. All welcomed.

In 2022, when I was a solopreneur just getting EIG off the ground, I focused my work heavily in blockchain technology — something everyone was trying to wrap their heads around. Much of this was driven by my own sheer curiosity. I hosted a webinar called Hello Blockchain to share the learnings and even developed the smart contracts and artwork (in collaboration with an illustrator) for an NFT project I planned to launch. Ultimately, the NFT project was never deployed because the work I had sourced was keeping me busy. I attribute those first several customers to my own insatiable curiosity.

We all have this capacity.

4 . Diversity

Every leader needs to sit down and write down what diversity means to them, and how they can affect the change needed to build a team of folks from different backgrounds. Diversity in the workplace includes people of different races, genders, ages, religions, disabilities, and sexual orientations, as well as varying cultural, geographic, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds.

Not only does science reveal that the crux of creativity is in having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices, but it is also the right thing to do. We need to talk less and do more to move the needle on this front.

I was recently part of a speaking panel, and someone commented that the issue, especially as a startup, is that hiring diverse talent is challenging because when they need to hire, they need to do it fast — resulting in a fairly bland team composition.

We have to be deliberate about creating a broader candidate pool before the immediate hiring needs become an emergency. We’re constantly working on recruiting efforts — even if we don’t have the role open today, we’re connecting and supporting future would-be employees.

5 . Measured Creativity

Measured creativity as a leadership trait is crucial because it balances innovative thinking with practicality and discernment. This ensures that while us leaders are open to new ideas and approaches, we also evaluate and implement them in ways that are feasible and beneficial for the organization. Such a balance can drive growth, adaptability, and resilience in a rapidly evolving business landscape, allowing organizations to remain competitive and responsive to emerging challenges and opportunities.

In our line of work, emerging technologies, it’s incredibly important that we stay up with technology trends before they become industry-wide trends. For example, we were experimenting with interactive AI (enhanced by generative AI) before it hit the mainstream with Meta’s (formerly Facebook’s) recent announcement.

Interactive AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that engage in real-time interactions with users or other systems. These interactions can be through various modalities, such as text, voice, images, or gestures. Some familiar yet primitive examples include chatbots that can converse with users, voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, and interactive games that adapt to a player’s actions. The primary goal of interactive AI is to understand user inputs, respond appropriately, and ideally, learn and adapt from each interaction to improve subsequent interactions. This form of AI offers more personalized and dynamic experiences for users, as the system actively engages and responds to user behavior and feedback.

It would be easy to get caught up in the shininess of new technologies, but in reality, we wouldn’t be in business if we weren’t measured in how we apply resources to these projects.

In your opinion, what are a few ways that executives can help to create a fantastic work culture? Can you share a story or an example?

First, embrace and find ways to support the causes that are most important to your team. For example, I know that diversity is important to every single one of my employees. I know because that’s part of our rubric when hiring — it’s company cultural alignment. We don’t just hire diverse people, we have a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging employee resource group that drives our DEIB initiatives like celebrating holidays from every traditional background, advocating for employee well-being initiatives like educational sessions from third-party organizations during mental health awareness month, pride month, and black history month (just to name a few.) People want to work somewhere they are heard and seen; not where they feel heard and seen but are heard and seen. There is a marked difference.

Embrace hybrid and remote working. Like it or not, the days of 9–5, in the office work are over. They’re not coming back. The cat is out of the bag. Executives must find a way to foster awesome workplace cultures over a new medium — the internet. It starts with defining core values that your organization lives and breathes. If they’re written down and distributed your core values on a bookmark at the quarterly all-hands meeting, you’re doing it wrong. (I’ve actually experienced that).

My team will often hear me say things like “I’m working from a place of scarcity when I said X about Y, and I’ve shifted my perspective to a place of abundance. Now let’s have the conversation about Y” or “coming from a place of trust”. And guess what? Our team members exhibit this behavior now too. We must lead by example, not by paper.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Here are some statistics:

-As of 2021, about 53% of the global population, or approximately 4.1 billion people, were using the internet. This means nearly half of the world’s population was still offline.

-Globally, the proportion of women using the internet is 12% lower than the proportion of men. In some regions, like South Asia and Africa, this gap is even wider.

-The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) has noted that in many low and middle-income countries, 1GB of mobile data can cost over 5% of average monthly income.

-In the U.S., Low-income households, particularly those earning less than $30,000 annually, are less likely to have broadband internet at home compared to higher-income households. The costs associated with service and device acquisition can be prohibitive for these families.

-The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted disparities in access to devices and high-speed internet for remote learning among K-12 students. Many students in low-income households struggled with inadequate devices or shared devices among multiple family members, while others lacked reliable internet access altogether.

Now imagine a world where the digital divide does not exist. How many more people would have access to the information and tools to learn, create, solve problems, and make an impact on our shared human condition?

I’m currently working to establish the Engineered Innovation Foundation (EIF) which aims to provide grants and services to students of underrepresented or minority groups in technology with the goal to close the digital divide. Every human on the planet should have access to the most powerful technologies of our time.

If you’re interested in this mission, let’s connect!

How can our readers further follow you online?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakemillerindy/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.