Effective Performance Tracking, Analytics as a Strategic Partner, and Managing Globally Distributed Teams at ZoomInfo: An Interview with Michael Perlis

For this week’s episode of Designing Data Organizations, we spoke with Michael Perlis, Director of Business Intelligence at ZoomInfo, who has been with the organization since 2023.

Designing Data Organizations is brought to you by Holistics, where we delve into the intricate process of creating and optimizing data teams within organizations. In this article series, we sit down with seasoned data leaders from various industries to uncover their strategies, challenges, and success stories in designing effective data teams.

ZoomInfo is a leading cloud-based market intelligence platform headquartered in Vancouver, Washington. It specializes in offering detailed insights on organizations and professionals for sales and marketing teams. Its 2020 IPO was among the year's most notable, and in 2023, the company reported a significant revenue of USD $1.24 billion, marking a 13% year-over-year increase. The company continues to expand its offerings and improve its platform through technological advancements.

Product Analytics at ZoomInfo

Gabriel Zhang: I feel like ZoomInfo is simultaneously well-known yet mysterious. Because while it’s common to see ZoomInfo pages in Google Search results, we rarely hear about the company in tech news, even though it’s a large and successful tech organization.

In other words, I’m excited to peel back the curtains on ZoomInfo. Can you give me an overview of the analytics function at ZoomInfo?

Michael Perlis: Sure thing! I’d say that the analytics function at ZoomInfo follows a hub and spoke model, in that we have a central analytics team that sits within engineering, called Enterprise Data and Analytics, which oversees areas such as data infrastructure, data governance, data engineering and centralized data products.

Outside of this, there are analytics teams embedded within different departments; marketing, go-to-market, finance, etc. all have their own analysts. My organization - product analytics - is the largest amongst these.

Currently, we’ve got 12 people split into two sub-teams, with each sub-team led by managers.

How are the sub-teams differentiated?

So, ZoomInfo has a suite of products, and our product analytics teams are structured to correspond to them. The first sub-team is dedicated to ZoomInfo Sales, our flagship product and largest offering.

The second sub-team oversees a few smaller but no less important products: 1) ZoomInfo Marketing, our marketing product, 2) Workflows, which automates the jobs and processes that sellers would need to do within our platform, and 3) ZoomInfo Lite, which is our freemium version of ZoomInfo Sales, mainly used by small businesses. This sub-team also looks at product-led growth metrics.

“Whereas if we sat under the CTO, I think we’d have felt more disconnected to the details of our product strategy.”

One thing that wasn't clear to me is which function product analytics falls under. Also, does it ultimately report to the CTO or to someone else?

We sit within product, and we ultimately report to the Chief Product Officer.

Ah, that’s interesting. Most of the analytics orgs I’ve seen ultimately report to the CTO or the CFO. Do you think it matters which executive oversees an analytics organization?

That’s a good question. I’ll take a step back and start by saying that I think it depends on the size of the company. In a really large corporation, I think it’d make sense to have the analytics function sit under the CTO, because a federated network of analytics orgs can easily get siloed and fragmented.

Obviously, size is relative, but because I’ve worked in companies as big as Deloitte (200,000 people), ZoomInfo (3,000 people) feels contextually small to me. But I feel that it’s a really good thing for us to report directly to the CPO.

Historically, we had a different environment that was very much anchored by a feature-first mentality, where we tried to ship features out of the door as soon as possible to get adoption and demonstrate that our product was great.

But at the size that the company has grown, we need to take a more data-driven approach with our product launches and shift our mindset to an outcome-first approach. What are the experiences that we want for our customers, and what product changes do we need to make to realize them?

With our current setup, I’m part of the product staff meetings, and I’m very much involved in product strategy conversations. This proximity is important, as it informs how I steer the product analytics teams, and how I translate strategy into product metrics.

Whereas if we sat under the CTO, I think we’d have felt more disconnected from the details of our product strategy.

Analytics as a Strategic Partner

Among the traditional analytics orgs, product analytics is the one that probably has the most interaction with other orgs.

Can you tell me a little about how product analytics at ZoomInfo collaborates with other teams?

It’s interesting that you brought this up, because one of the things we’ve been trying to improve on consciously over the past year, is consistency in terms of how we work with product. At the time I took up this role (in early 2023), the various product analytics teams had quite a bit of leeway in terms of how they interacted with their stakeholders.

We’ve since consolidated a standardized sprint plan, whereby everyone works in the same cadence. We now have the same process in which we take in requests from stakeholders, and meet with the relevant directors to discuss task prioritization, and all of these have to be completed by day X and Y respectively within a sprint.

And then, within a set period of time, we’ll return to them with proposed actions based on our interpretation of the deliverables.

Because we’re now planning our sprints in a much more structured way, we’re able to plan ahead. By the time the next quarter starts, we’d have known what’s on the product roadmap. And then my managers and I will make sure that we’ll build the data assets, analysis, and dashboards that will be needed in the next three to six months to support the product teams’ visions.

It also gives us time to sit down with data product managers to build out the necessary taxonomy, and sketch out the tracking events required for certain product metrics. The data product managers, in turn, will go to engineering to discuss the instrumentation of these events.

That said, I’m trying to reshape the product analytics organization so that it functions more like a strategic analytics partner to the business in the future, as opposed to its current mode, which is still mostly execution-focused.

“...having a dedicated or even half-time person who can spend 12-18 months performing really deep dives on a particular research topic - say, a rapidly-changing industry trend - could really inject an X-factor in terms of strategic direction.”

Do you mean like, an organization that is more proactive in shaping business decisions, as opposed to being a task taker?

Yes, you can say that. I want my team to do a lot more of, “Hey, we dug into the data and discovered that our customers are actually doing X because of Y. Here’s our list of recommended product changes in light of these findings, and why we think there’s a high probability that we’ll see a resulting change in Z behavior.”

In short, I think product analytics has the potential for a tremendous amount of value add to the business if we shift towards a more proactive approach.

Got it. And how do you think that it’d impact the current team structure - if any - if you added a strategic analytics focus to the organization?

Generally, the structure would be the same, but something I’ve been thinking about, is the creation of a small sub-team - let’s call it, tentatively, the performance management team.

It would focus on executive-level reporting. Let’s say that I’m the CEO or the CPO. What are the three key things I’d need to understand in the next 12 months to really steer the direction of the company?

Obviously, we already cover all of the basic questions, but having a dedicated or even half-time person who can perform analysis in a 12-18 month outlook, performing deep dives on a particular research topic - say, a rapidly-changing industry trend - could really inject an X-factor in terms of strategic direction.

I envision that such a team, or person, would function independently separate from the current two sub-teams, but it’d likely need to collaborate closely with them, as they have deep domain knowledge on specific product types.

Managing Globally Distributed Teams

We’ve spent quite a bit discussing how your org collaborates with external stakeholders. Would you share some insight on the intra-team dynamics as well?

Our organization is actually distributed, both geographically and across time zones. Within the US, we have people on both coasts. Then we have a few members in Israel, and we’re in the process of hiring someone in India as well.

As you can imagine, this presents challenges in terms of communication, and it’s something I’ve had to factor in while thinking about initiatives for fostering greater collaboration across the team.

One of these initiatives is a monthly team meeting, where everyone gathers to present their work and interesting findings and learn from each other. During these sessions, we provide feedback to each others’ work, stay up-to-date on team-wide initiatives, and practice our presentation skills.

We also are planning cross-team initiatives like Innovation Week, where we work on experimental projects, and we will have teams that comprise folks from Israel and from the US.

“I think teams do their best work when they come from different backgrounds, and they’re able to pool their creativity as a result of different life experiences.”

Ah, I had no idea that ZoomInfo had employees in Israel. Do you take culture, location, or time zone into account when structuring your teams?

The reason I’m asking this is that - I think - for some companies, there’d be a temptation to put all the people from the same culture or time zone into one function for sheer convenience.

Previously, the sub-teams were distinctly differentiated along time zones/countries. So we had one team comprising folks based in Israel, who reported to an Israel-based manager, and another team comprising folks based in the US, who reported to  US-based managers.

We’ve since shifted people around so that both teams now have a fairly equal distribution of people based in Israel and in the US. And even though this definitely increases the complexity in terms of communication, I think it’s much better this way.

In the previous setup, both teams naturally gravitated towards doing their own thing, and there wasn’t great collaboration between the two teams. Now, we have people in both offices sharing the same sprint planning meetings and standups, and that naturally results in more knowledge sharing.

At least to date, I’d say we’ve spent more of our energy thinking not about the location of people within our org, but the location of our stakeholders.

Nevertheless, we try our very best to make things work. For example, we have an analyst based in Israel who’s serving a product team based on the West Coast in the US, and her manager can take their questions whenever she’s offline, and vice versa.

All this is to say, I’m definitely mindful of the challenges of managing a geographically distributed team. I’m aware, for example, that I have more frequent organic catch-ups with the US team since we see each other in the office. As a result, I have to be proactive in creating interactions with the team in Israel, and make sure that I’m up-to-date with their concerns and what they’ve been working on.

I appreciate that you took deliberate action in restructuring the org from having de facto US-based and Israel-based teams, into teams with a mix of people from both countries.

I once worked in a company that had all-Russian data engineering. I’m sure that it was advantageous in some ways, such as having a natural camaraderie within the team, but they were also socially disconnected from everyone else. And I wish we had a manager like you who’d have done something about it.

Thank you, but I want to take a step back from organizational design to the topic of hiring practices in general, which obviously also contributes to what you can do in terms of designing your team.

I think teams do their best work when they come from different backgrounds, and they’re able to pool their creativity as a result of different life experiences. I learned this while working at Deloitte; it being a mega-corporation where we had people from the entire globe and as many industries as you could imagine working together.

I strongly believe that the most diverse teams are also the most innovative ones, and I value a company that reflects this across all levels of the organization.

Effective Performance Tracking

You’re looking after a dozen people, which is a fair amount.

How do you keep tabs on team performance without micromanaging, especially when they’re serving multiple stakeholders and across different time zones? How do you know if they’re meeting expectations?

Firstly, one of the things I created when I began my role at ZoomInfo, was a universal performance-tracking framework that can be used by any employee on our team.

It contains a clear explanation of the general standards of excellence that we expect as a company, as well as the specific benchmarks that we use to grade employees at different levels. For example, we’d expect people above a certain level to be able to demonstrate certain leadership principles.

It didn’t exist before, but now that it does, I hope it provides a standardized and consistent methodology for performance tracking.

Secondly, I count on my managers to keep me up to date on the day-to-day workings of their respective teams. For example, if there are performance issues with a specific individual, I’d expect them to escalate to me as soon as possible.

Last but not least, I now meet with everyone in my organization at least once a month no matter their level. Even if I don’t have complete knowledge of what everyone is working on, I can still get a sense of who’s going above and beyond, and who’s merely going with the flow by paying close attention to things like how well-prepared someone is when they show up for our 1-on-1s.

These simultaneous conversations also help me triangulate observations within the team. It allows me to ask questions, like, “Hey, I’ve spoken with X and Y, and they’ve both commented that they’ve been facing Z challenge. Has this been your experience as well?”

“It’s my job as a leader to make sure that you as an individual are getting to where you want to go. But it’s also on you to make sure that you have a clear view of what you really want, career-wise.”  

Nevertheless, I ultimately expect everyone to be responsible for their own journey within the organization, and within the company.

Say, someone is interested in going into data engineering. I’d of course prefer if they stay in my team, but at the same time, I’d do whatever I can to support their transition.

I’d even extend that to individuals who want to move on from ZoomInfo entirely. It’s my job as a leader to make sure that you as an individual are getting to where you want to go. But it’s also on you to make sure that you have a clear view of what you really want, career-wise.

Michael, I appreciate the candidness with which you’ve shared your insights in this conversation.

You’re welcomed, it was a pleasure!