Allison Pickens is the former COO of Gainsight and one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women. Throughout her time there, she scaled the SaaS company from $1M ARR to pre- IPO, along the way, creating the category of customer success software, and paving the way for Gainsight’s $1.1B sale. Today, she advises and invests in companies on these topics and others.

Allison is an incredible builder of teams. She’s written extensively on the topic and co-authored a book The Customer Success Economy.

In addition to talking about the evolution of customer success, Allison and I will talk about the COO role. COOs have become more common in management teams as ways for founders & CEOs to build the management team to scale a business. In conversations with management teams, the concept of a COO remains murky.