CTO Spotlight: Interview With Jamie Thingelstad, CTO of SPS Commerce

Hello. Good to talk to you today.

Absolutely. So I've been lucky enough to be CTO for SPS Commerce now for just over seven years, leading a technology team that spans the globe at around just under 500 people. Just for background, SPS Commerce runs the retail network that connects more than 990,000 companies in retail together and allows them to work more efficiently across all of their trading partner connections. We're a publicly traded company. We just celebrated our 78th quarter of consecutive growth, which is an amazing milestone that is really unparalleled. My personal background: I've been a CTO now for over 20 years, and I've done that both in early-stage companies as small as a handful of folks building a product and starting a company up, as well as large companies like SPS Commerce, Dow Jones, and CBS MarketWatch back in the day. My background is in media as well as financial services, social, and retail. So I've been building large-scale technology solutions for those industries for my entire career, and it's been just awesome.

Yeah, well, what I'd say is that my background has always been in growth companies. So one of the things that unifies my entire history has been being in a company that's growing into a market. In a growth company, you always have to constantly revisit everything around you because as you grow, things evolve and change. So the one constant there is change, whether that's the company and its products changing to meet the market, the needs of the team changing as you evolve and hit that market, or even as a leader you have to change and evolve as the company's needs change. So that's always been a big push. When you apply a public lens to that, it really just increases the scrutiny on all of that because you have the public markets weighing in on how fast you're doing that, are you doing it fast enough. You have the additional scrutiny on your financials, making sure that you hit your quarterly results is incredibly important, and every investor in the world is looking at those. So there's a tremendously higher level of scrutiny, and the stakes are higher in all regards when it comes to a public company. It's a high bar to become a public company; very few companies ever get there, and to stay there and continue to grow is difficult and requires you to constantly be pushing forward as fast as you possibly can. In a private organization, you have a bit more control over the message; it's your investors you have to focus on, your customers you have to focus on. You have a much larger audience to serve as a public company. The other thing I would say is that most public companies are larger, so in a public company you have to lead at scale and operate at scale. When you get to having thousands or tens of thousands of employees, it's a very different thing than having tens or hundreds, and having thousands of customers as opposed to hundreds of customers. So there's a scale aspect to it that is a big part of being a public company.

Yeah, so in the time that I've been at SPS, in those seven years, the size of the company as a whole has nearly doubled, as has the size of the team that I oversee. And it is a global team. We have people in Eastern Europe, we have a large presence in Kyiv, Ukraine, we have a large number of team members in India, we have team members in multiple locations in North America including Toronto, Little Falls, New Jersey, and then our main headquarters here in Minneapolis, and we have a technology presence in Melbourne, Australia as well. Leading a team globally means that you have to figure out how to connect across all those different regions and create a vision of what the problems are that we're trying to solve and how we're doing that, which has to span all those various areas. So you have to make sure that you have good alignment across all of your teams and all your locations. You have to keep the message pretty simple; it's hard to convey complex approaches across a global team and across all those various time zones. But if you can make sure that everybody's aligned and focused on solving the same problems, you have a simple message, you can be incredibly effective and get a tremendous amount done. Over the years we've learned that we've had to reinvent those processes multiple times as we've scaled, just to accommodate that growth in the size of the team. But it's awesome to see what you can do when you have that scale all pointed at the right thing.

Yeah, well for us, we've actually had the benefit of starting off with an acquisition. So when we look at those locations that we have, many of them came as a result of us acquiring a company that was in our space and then building off of the talent that they had established already. In the case of Ukraine, it's been really awesome because what we found is a group of developers that have a lot in common with our teams globally. They're very aggressive adopters of technology, they love to experiment and try things, they like to push the envelope. So it works very well across our various locations. The main areas that we're focusing on building out more talent are in our Ukrainian office, our Toronto office, and our Minneapolis office. Those are the focus areas for us for additional talent as we continue to build out our team.

The first thing I'd say is that all great technology teams are fundamentally learning organizations. So at the very core, in technology, you have to be a lifelong learner. Most of the tools, techniques, and capabilities that we build with today, most people didn't know about a few years ago. So that never-ending passion to learn and adopt new things is key. I think also that doesn't just end with the technology. Very important is understanding the customer problem you're trying to solve, which by the way could be an end user, a customer of your product, or it could be somebody in your company that's trying to do their job better. Really being able to understand what that problem is so that you can bring the right mix of technology and the right understanding of what I call the art of the possible is absolutely key. So we look for that. I also look for how do we bring in more diversity into the team, how do we bring in different perspectives. One of the things that we have found is that bringing in folks from boot camps or through our internship program has been incredibly important because they often bring very innovative thinking with them. One observation I would share is that innovation isn't only the domain of highly experienced technologists; it can come from anywhere. Some of the most interesting things that we've seen are when we've brought in talent even from other parts of the organization that may not have 10 years of coding experience but they understand that problem domain and they can bring a different perspective to solving that problem.

That's actually part of our core strength. We have the capabilities in our core products. I'll just use our fulfillment product as an example. Our fulfillment product allows retailers and suppliers, as well as other members of the retail ecosystem, to work together more seamlessly and efficiently. However, in order for that to work, we have to connect to thousands of retailers and accommodate all of the unique business cases that they need to run their businesses. Then we bring that know-how, which by the way is not just tech. One of the things that we often say is that for SPS Commerce, our products are the people, the processes, and the technology. So we bundle that all together to really be the solution for our suppliers and retailers to be able to work together. That means that we allow for a lot of product extension, that means that we productize as much as we possibly can to get the leverage and benefit to thousands of customers, but we leave hooks open so that our teams as well as our customers can extend that solution into those specific niches that they may have, or we build that directly into our network so that we can accommodate that for them. So it is this kind of customization at scale to make that work.

Obviously when the pandemic really hit, we immediately had all of our teams begin working from home like many companies did. I was very happy to see that all the preparation we had put into having that capability at hand worked extremely well. I was incredibly proud of how the team adapted, and not just technologists. All of a sudden this is salespeople, customer support people, implementation analysts, financial analysts, HR people—everybody now in this distributed environment. We were able to make that pivot with absolutely minimal disruption in our operations, so it was extraordinarily smooth. We've continued to do that remote work, and like many companies we've now relied heavily on a lot of the online collaboration platforms, doing a lot with Zoom, doing a lot with Slack, doing a lot with the Atlassian suite, the Salesforce suite, etc. So that's all worked very well. One of the interesting things though is that for a global team, it's resulted in some unexpected benefits. For our global team members, they now are connected into our team in a way where they feel like they are absolutely equal with everybody else. The comment that I was sharing with somebody was: when you're on Zoom and everybody's a box on the screen, I don't know if you're a mile away or 3,000 miles away. I might tell by if it's light or dark in your windows, but other than that, you have the same access to information, the collaboration. So we've actually seen a very strong positive reaction from our global team members that they feel more connected into their teams than they ever have before. It really tells us that it's hard to operate in a hybrid environment where some people are physical and some people are remote, and I think that we will absolutely take many of these practices that we've adopted and extend them well beyond the timeline of this pandemic. I forget the second part—I think you had a second part: how has it changed business for you guys? So, we look at what we've seen with the pandemic: it's accelerated the future. The retail landscape has moved years in months in a very quick timeline. As consumers, all of a sudden I can go to a retailer and I can sit in my car and they bring it out to my car—curbside pickup. All of a sudden, having product information on your website and being able to facilitate an order for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, that was kind of a nice-to-have and all of a sudden it became absolutely critical. The interesting part is that that applies to every retailer at every level. Sure, the big retailers were in a good position, but just as important, the corner retailer down the street from you all of a sudden needed to have an online presence. So what we've seen is that this has accelerated retail evolution tremendously, and along with that, it's provided us an ability to help retailers and suppliers do that pivot. Using our solutions, we are able to connect with you. If you're a retailer and all of a sudden you're out of a product and you need more suppliers to get it from, SPS is a path to doing that via our retail network. So it's been clearly some parts of retail have been actually very positively impacted by the pandemic, others have been negatively impacted. We work with all retail in every industry, and we've been able to be there to help them make those pivots and move faster as they've had to adapt to this environment.

Yeah, well, what we saw happen is when March, April when the pandemic hit and we saw the lockdowns and everything was kind of up in the air, we definitely—I mentioned earlier that change is a constant in a growing company—and we said okay, we need to re-evaluate where our product investments are going. We didn't look at it as a massive departure, but we said over the next 12 to 18 months, there are parts of our product portfolio that now we think are going to get a ton of attention and need to be adopted much more quickly, and some other areas where we could slow down where we felt like that's not going to be as hot or as important during these next 12 to 18 months. So we used a portfolio approach and we looked at the entire product portfolio and made a number of decisions about how we felt that we should shift those investments around. But by the way, that's not something that was special for the pandemic response. To your broader point, we do that on a quarterly basis, always looking at where we are making our additional investments, what are those investments, how are those going to turn into value in the marketplace, and then the enabling technologies that go along with that as well. So I tend to focus on making sure that we are always thinking about the value in the market, and then we associate the things that enable that, the longer-term investments, we associate that along with those. I will say that in a market where you have a high degree of unpredictability, which is what the pandemic has brought to everybody, we did reduce our horizon. When the market is steady and we can have a high degree of confidence in our predictions, we're going to invest two, three years down the road. Right now we said we're going to pull that back to be more like 12 to 18 months, and you shorten that horizon of investment so that we can be more nimble and dynamic as things change.

Well, I've chosen to make the Twin Cities my home, and I want to have a vibrant technology ecosystem here in the Twin Cities. I think that giving back to that and helping make that a reality has always been important to me. I give credit to Ben Edwards and Luke Francl and others connected to things like the very first MinneBar when that happened. I was one of the 200 or so folks that attended that, and it was amazing to just see this technology community coming together and sharing knowledge and best practices with everybody just freely and openly. I loved that so much. I've actually never missed a MinneBar, and it's just been kind of a bedrock for me. I think giving back to the community is important because if we're going to have a community of companies, we need a community of people in technology that are thriving that are going to help make those companies real. One of the reasons why Minnedot for years was where I put my attention—I saw that as being like a flywheel for the tech community because it wasn't just about starting new companies, it wasn't just about one particular component, it was just connecting people who are passionate about technology and catalyzing that activity. I always loved that mission and vision. I was lucky enough to be the founding chairperson for the board when the board did get founded, and was honored to serve out a full nine years as a board member there. I've now moved on to the Minnesota Technology Association, so I'm a board member now at MinTech and am looking to take that same kind of passion that we built around people in the technology community and make that happen as well for companies in the technology community. I think that there is the level of the individual, and then if we can get the companies in the technology ecosystem in the Twin Cities catalyzed as well, that can be incredibly powerful and a game changer for things like bringing in talent into the market, bringing more diverse talent into the market, bringing more companies into the market, all of which will continue to just make that flywheel go faster and faster.

On the broadest sense, I'd say any way possible. I tend to think making sure that you take the time. It doesn't matter if you're a CIO or CTO at a large company or a manager, director level, it doesn't matter. If you're passionate about technology, this community is the one you want to be part of. So going to an event, whether that's a Meetup, something like the annual Tech Connect event that MTA MinTech runs, or MinneBar which is coming up in the next few weeks, I think just getting involved and attending as a member is the first step. Second, then I think is engaging your organization and catalyzing your organization to be part of that. At SPS, we host community events, we sponsor community events, our team members attend and present at community events. I'd love to see all of the other technology organizations, large and small, doing the same. It will continue to help the community just grow and get better. By the way, I think the Twin Cities community has done a pretty good job of that. We have a very vibrant ecosystem. Beta.MN is doing great work, tech.mn—I love the work that tech.mn is doing. I think we're punching above our weight in that effort, and I think we just need to keep doing it. I think sometimes there's some impatience around why aren't more things happening faster. I just look at this as a community investment. I'm going to keep making that investment, and I'm going to trust that that will result in good positive outcomes.

Yeah, I've been a CTO now for two decades plus, which still kind of makes me a little confused how time is flying. I would say that my biggest learning over those years has been how important core leadership is in technology teams for a CTO. What I mean by that is I think a lot of times, particularly for CTOs, there's this intense focus on the tech and not enough focus on what are the business problems that you're trying to solve and how are you enabling and connecting with the people that are solving those problems. So when I think of where I've really invested my time as I've continued to grow my career, it's on making sure that you connect with people, that you really understand the importance that that plays in delivering the kind of solutions and capabilities that you want to have. I think too often, particularly as a CTO, people get very focused on what's the framework of the day, what's the technology solution of the day. Those are important, don't get me wrong, you need that, but it's necessary but not sufficient. You need to go beyond that to really understand the customer problem, what's the business value, and what are the core motivators of the team that you're building and how are you enabling them to deliver an amazing solution.

What I would say is that you get more comfortable with the fact that you don't have to have the answer for everything. I have tremendous technologists in my team that know so much more than I ever could have known about the types of solutions that we're building and how we're building them, and really focusing on how they can deliver that value and be as great as they can be in those roles and capacities. I think always making sure that you—one very tactical thing that I've done over the years is on a regular basis I do a stop list and a start list. So I look and say, okay, what are the things that I'm doing now that I need to stop doing? Maybe those should be delegated, or maybe they just don't need to happen anymore. And what are the things that you should start doing? Where are you not active where you need to be? I think that applies to the problems that you're solving in your company and even the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis. By the way, the faster your company is growing, the more often you need to do that. If you were in a really fast-growing company, you might need to do that every quarter. So constantly re-evaluating and retuning your objectives and what you're working on helps everybody around you also grow. I think also being a little vulnerable and sharing those stories with people, telling people hey, I'm still learning too, and this is how I'm engaging in that learning process and how I'm working to improve in what I do, that creates a space where people are encouraged to do the same. So those are just some of the handful of ways.

I still have multiple people that I think of as mentors. Some of them would know that, and some I think of as a mentor but they may not know that. I learn a tremendous amount from those around me. One of the things that I always think about is even on a day-to-day basis, when you're operating inside of an organization, what can you learn, borrow, steal from others that are operating around you that you see working, and then bring that into your own toolbox to be more effective. I've had the pleasure of being able to work with hundreds of very capable executives, and I've learned from as many of them as I possibly can. I think continuing to do that is important. You're never done with being mentored and coached yourself. The second you think you're done with that, I think that's when you're going to stop growing. So always focusing on that has been kind of key to me in my own development. Jack mentioned the newsletter that I do. That's actually a way for me to show here's what I'm learning, here's what I'm educating myself on, here's what I'm focusing on, and if others want to follow along in that path they can and kind of see what wisdom they take out of that journey as well.

Yeah, I have been for a long time now very passionate about privacy online. I'm a huge proponent of technology, I'm a huge proponent of the web, I love the ecosystem that we've built and that surrounds us, but I worry a lot about our privacy and how what I refer to as the constant surveillance affects us as people and as individuals. So I am really excited about the fact that we're seeing some really good technology being developed to help people with that. I think that stuff starts with things like what people would often think of as ad blockers, but has built into some of the browser technology that is coming out that will really help defend individuals and protect their privacy. So I'm enthusiastic about what I see happening in the space of managing your own privacy and protecting from surveillance. I think that's just going to be absolutely critical. With the pandemic, we've all shifted so much of our life online even more than was there before, and making sure that we have privacy as we do that is critical.

You can find me on my personal website, jamiethingelstad.com. And if you want to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, that's at weekly.jamiethingelstad.com.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.