In this article
I’ll start with the basics:
- It’s a team (and job title) at Doss.
- It’s unconventional – I haven’t seen anything quite like it before.
- It’s cross-functional. It touches: pre-sale solutions, post-sale implementation, customer success, support, and core product building.
PMO is a popular acronym that stands for Program Management Office and we’ve co-opted it for this role because I couldn’t think of anything better to call this team.
Also, it is pronounced p-moes.
Don't let the unconventional and vague title fool you, this role is mission critical for the company and extremely well defined. Let me explain.
What does a PMO do?
- 25% Pre-Sale: work with prospects and our Account Executives to perform solutions engineering.
- 50% Post-Sale: execute customer onboarding, change management, sustaining support functions.
- 25% Product: Identify holes in product surface area and synthesize the durable primitives that we need to build into DossARP.
Why do we need this job?
Our company has 3 distinct parts. GTM (Go-to-Market), PMO (Program Management Office), and EPD (Engineering, Product, Design).
As far as directives go, they are quite simple:
GTM = generate demand, sell the vision.
PMO = help our customers win.
EPD = build the product and the platform.
PMO exists because we had to build a bridge between the vision we sell and the platform we’ve built. It’s about selling reform. The PMO “process” is about putting a mirror in front of our customers–so they can see themselves as they truly are. The magic is that our platform allows us to model software around their actual business process, right in front of them, in real-time.
It forces people to consider an alternate reality: maybe ERPs don’t need to take years to implement. Maybe there’s a better way for me to run parts of my business – and I can do it today.
Role Comps
If this is still feeling really vague, I find it helpful to compare to the closest “normal job” counterparts.
Management Consulting Associate
Similar to Big 3 Consulting regarding solution design, “selling work”, managing engagements, driving change management. Dissimilar in that your final work product isn’t slide decks, you are actually in the weeds. I like to say, “we don’t do White Glove onboarding — we wear Work Gloves.”
Investment Banking / Private Equity Associate
Similar to IB/PE in that we go spelunking in business data and reverse engineer their company, its processes, synthesize it, and create a strategic composite of “what matters”. Dissimilar in that you’re not executing a transaction – this is a long-term partnership where we embed in their business and help them use technology to win in the market. Some Private Equity shops might say that this is similar to their operating model — sometimes that’s true! On numerous occasions we’ve actually partnered with PE firms to roll-out DossARP in their portfolio.
Traditional BigTech “Product Manager”
I don’t know how to put this diplomatically so I’ll just say it plainly: PMOs are the only people at Doss who have earned the right to work on our product. They are the tip-of-the-spear and the blacksmith simultaneously. They internalize customer pain, solve during install, and then turn around and work with EPD and say “Hey, XYZ the product needs to be better, we’re going to do ABC to fix it.”
This prevents the cardinal sin of BigTech PMs: a lack of conviction driving arm-chair philosophizing, navel-gazing “What if we did XYZ?” and then A/B testing in the dark to a final result.
Forward Deployed Engineer
Similar in many, many ways: go-and-see attitude, deeply technical w.r.t internal platforms/tooling, interface with customers in their arena. Palantir, the company that pioneered the FDE model, has cranked out many entrepreneurs over the years because this extreme-ownership modality of problem solving is highly aligned with being a startup founder. I think the biggest delta between Doss PMOs and Palantir FDEs is that we have less people collaborating on a single customer install because of our contract sizes (Palatir’s smallest customers are bigger than our biggest customers). This means that a Doss PMO will cover 5-12 installs simultaneously, whereas a Palantir will have 1-10 FDEs per install. I’m sure someone who works there will message me with corrections.
Pushback
I’ve been told by a handful of very smart people things like “this isn’t scalable!” and “this won’t last past Series A!” and other not-specific bordering-on-useless points of feedback.
I actually think quite the opposite. As a customer, being on the receiving end of the “tried-and-true” approach feels fundamentally broken. Getting passed around account managers, fighting for escalation of some simple bug fix until you can actually talk to the PM who owns the roadmap, AEs just responding to everything with “I’m sure, I’ll have to ask our team”. This is an artifact of the organization’s structure – you’d normally encounter:
- Account Executive. Closes the deal and you never see them again.
- (Pre-sales) Sales Engineer. Answers all of the hard questions about your setup that AE doesn’t understand.
- (Post-sales) Solution Architect. Has no idea what was sold to you and just trying to get this project finished.
- Customer Success Manager. Has no idea what was implemented for you, just trying to keep your account from churning.
- Account Manager (QBRs, Renewal, Up-Sell). Knows exactly what was sold to know, what was implemented, and how to split the difference to get you to buy more stuff that won’t likely won’t be setup correctly.
- Technical Customer Support. Genuinely helpful but usually limited in ability to solve hard problems.
- Product Manager. Either knows the product cold or has literally no clue what’s happening, YMMV.
Call me crazy, but I think the idea of dividing up context between 5+ distinct people across narrowly-verticalized teams isn’t scalable. It’s pretty obvious that it’s much better to interact with less people who have more context, as opposed to the other way around. Elon Musk has a similar framing with his “idiot index”, which touts that “the best part is no part”. The same applies to organizations.
What’s the solution here? I think we can exploit natural boundary conditions to keep the team minimally consolidated – but this only works if you hire extremely competent people!
- Account Executives cover all down-funnel selling, renewal/up-sell, QBR, escalation of the account.
- PMOs cover pre-sales solutions, post-sales implementation/maintenance, folds insights back into the product.
- Technical Support covers tactical “How do I do XYZ? ABC isn’t working!”
Algorithmically, we just keep this as atomically small as possible and only “split” functions, i.e. we’ll likely spin-off a dedicated Product organization outside of PMO at some point. Same with pre-sales Solutions Engineers.
The most interesting artifact of this current organization structure is that PMOs stand directly between the customer and the product. As I said earlier, this means they’re the only people who have “earned the right” to design the product itself. In particular, the decision around how we introduce new “building blocks” that make up our solutions.
At traditional software companies this work is usually owned by a Product Manager. Instead, we task that to PMOs: they discover customer pain, synthesize it, construct solutions, and iterate, along the way internalizing every facet of the product that needs to change. It only makes sense that we should give them the leverage to do something with these insights.
Now you’re probably saying – this sounds like a fine operating model and all, but what about me? Where does this lead? What’s in it for the PMO?
Exit Ops / Career Building
Right – why should you, let alone anyone, consider being a PMO?
Fundamentally we think there are only two kinds of valuable jobs: you are building stuff or you are selling stuff. Very valuable jobs require that you do both.
We've designed the PMO role to sharpen both of these skills and speed-run individuals through a wide-range of business cases where they get to discover what they truly love.
A few examples of what our PMOs have worked on:
- Building out a comprehensive warehouse management system for a large building materials manufacturer
- Automating the retails and fulfillment workflows for a growing protein bar brand
- Migrating the operations of a multi-entity international distribution business and training dozens of their employees as they are preparing the business for acquisition
It’s a rotational program where you build down-funnel sales chops, establish product foundations, and weave a composite understanding of customer pain.
After doing this for a few cycles you're armed to:
- Go fully into selling to our biggest and hardest customers (“Enterprise Sales!”)
- Go work on the product itself (“Product Manager!”)
- Scale the PMO function (manage jr. PMOs!)
We see this as a perfect instantiation of a "hands-on" rotational program. Maybe you’re a new-grad not sure what you want to do in your career. Or maybe you’re a post-MBA that wants to put all those case studies to the test.
Honestly this job is for really anyone who’s sick of doing unfulfilling work and they just want SOMETHING REAL!
Hear from our PMOs
There's really no other role [like PMO] that thrusts you front and center with the totality of a business. From day one you get to work with ops leaders on building the digital backbone connecting the goods they sell and the value they deliver to their customers.
- Peter, former Management Consultant
I learned more in 1 year as a PMO than I would have in a decade at a larger company.
It’s quite magical, early in your career, to be in a role that allows you to touch on every aspect of a business: sales, customer success, product development. On top of this, Doss PMOs are often working with 10+ customers simultaneously, attempting to deeply understand the ins and outs of their business. The work is about transforming the most complex systems into easy, digestible bites.
The role is certainly a tall task, but undeniably the best career growth opportunity for anyone interested in learning through experimentation, driving their own tempo, and accelerating time-to-value for real-world businesses.
- Jaylen, former Actuarial Consultant
Our pre-sale story got us to Series A but the post-sales story that will accelerate the growth of the company to Series B and beyond – and PMOs are defining this. We’re currently breaking the “laws of physics of software implementation”, and the caliber we’re looking for is proving hard to find.
The experience you get as a PMO trumps everything that’s out there.
The cycle for folding iteration back into the product is almost real-time. When you realize we are missing a necessary piece of the puzzle, you don’t have to create a giant PRD and hold countless meetings to ‘align stakeholders’. Instead, you literally turn your chair, explain to Arnav (Doss CTO) why we need something and the use case, get on a whiteboard to map out the idea, and it’s live the next day.
- Shaan, former Product Manager
As a PMO you’re working with founders / senior leadership at Doss and our customers every day, all the time. The pace of decision making, the connections you’re making, the problems you’re exposed to – all of this makes for a steep growth trajectory. We’re accelerating careers by 10x, not 10%.
I have no doubt that every one of our current PMOs will go on to start their own companies one day. This program is going to be a factory for high-agency, brilliant, curious people to sharpen themselves on one another before they go out into the world and build their own life’s work.
- Wiley, former PMO
If you’re interested in being a PMO, please send me (wiley@doss.com) a note directly. I’d love to hear about what you want to do over the next few years.
