At Screencast-O-Matic, we have been working remote from the beginning. While we can understand how someone would think that the most benefits come from working in-person, we have found that it isn’t necessarily the case. With physical co-location, traditional thinking is that better team communications, creativity and knowledge sharing had resulted. Companies have traditionally believed sharing the same physical space helped build relationships and develop a common culture. Having a team physically together has some perceived benefits. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a team physically together? This provides great opportunity but it can also create unique challenges. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. Many teams have started working remotely. One of them, of course, is how we work and how we communicate in our work. The pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave.
Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Some of the most insightful business and life lessons that I have applied to my success have been learned from small business owners and entrepreneurs. I tend to be more focused on “what people do” more than “what people say” and try to emulate the best actions. There are so many that I have learned from including colleagues that were leaders, peers, and those whom I have led, but also my friends and family. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that? None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Trusting smart people to make good decisions has always been a winning formula. To me this means providing an environment for your team to excel, getting out of the way and empowering decision making at the individual or micro-team level. I have a strong belief in the servant-leader approach. I’m not sure I have a specific quote but I’ll share my approach to leadership. It was great to see the entire team rally around this effort and be able to support customers in need, especially educators.Ĭan you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
During this time, we also had to rapidly respond to any issues with our Beta and release new versions or hotfixes in record time. This included adding support resources including more direct support, increasing our customer communications and content, providing some services for free, and bypassing limits on plans for customers so their service would not be interrupted. We are a small team and to respond we pivoted our entire team over to support operations and, in parallel, rapidly address any issues experienced in the Beta. Customers were very stressed and looking for some extra help to get going.
Then the pandemic hit! We were inundated with existing and new customers globally who needed our tools immediately, especially schools and universities.
This new service was a completely new architecture, platform, and code and we were in the process of migrating our existing customer base over to the new app as well as offering this experience to all new customers. Shortly before the pandemic started we had launched a Beta of our new video and image hosting services.
There are so many but one that stands out is a recent experience that happened during the pandemic. Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career? Matt has deep experience defining strategy and vision, business planning, building and leading teams, developing business processes, and securing company financing, With leadership experience in both startup and large scale organizations, Matt has the ability to understand emerging technologies and apply sound business and technical discipline to corporate objectives. Matt Champagne, CEO of Screencast-O-Matic is a seasoned technology executive with broad background. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Champagne. In this interview series, we are interviewing business leaders who share the strategies, tools and techniques they use to effectively and efficiently communicate with their team who may be spread out across the world. What strategies, tools and techniques work to be a highly effective communicator, even if you are not in the same space? How can teams effectively communicate if they are never together? Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but they don’t replicate all the advantages of being together. We are living in a new world in which offices are becoming obsolete.