Mapping Mindtickle’s Engineering Excellence: Ex-Google Techie Appointed Principal Engineer

Introduction

Headquartered in California, Mindtickle is a Series E revenue productivity platform. Used by more than 2,000 enterprise customers, Mindtickle’s products help revenue leaders grow revenue by increasing knowledge, understanding ideal sales behaviors, and adapting to change.

Driven by a vision to be a leader in providing holistic solution to revenue productivity encompassing Sales Enablement, (Learning and Coaching Solution), CMS (Content Management Solution), Conversational AI and Revenue Intelligence & Operations; Mindtickle is ranked by G2 as the #2 enterprise software product and the #7 sales products.

Problem Statement

Being a multi-product compound organization, Mindtickle faced significant tech challenges due to the varied timelines and tech stacks of its products. Each product, developed at different points, created a fragmented technological landscape. Additionally, their recent acquisition further complicated integration efforts. Despite sitting on a rich dataset with immense potential to generate actionable insights, the company struggled to harness this data effectively.

To address these issues and build a strong presence in India, they required a Principal Engineer with 15-17 years of experience, the senior-most individual contributor, reporting directly to the Global SVP of Engineering. The tech roadmap for the Principal Engineer centers on launching a groundbreaking product line focused on Revenue Intelligence and Operations. A key objective is to construct the largest sales data warehouse, providing critical insights for all roles within the sales organization.

Despite it being an IC role, the leader will guide a team of 300+ engineers to adopt best practices and build scalable solutions. Additionally, he will oversee the UI redesign of legacy products, ensuring a modern and cohesive user experience. Close collaboration with the Center of Excellence for Machine Learning (CoE ML) will be essential to integrating the latest GenAI technologies into the platform and maintaining our competitive edge in the industry.

Execution & Solution

The client sought a leader with a background at the Google L7 level. Although Mindtickle was in its pre-IPO phase at Series E, they needed someone who could upscale their operations, build products for the sales team, leverage AI, and drive engineering excellence. They were open to candidates with either B2B or B2C experience.

Purple Quarter presented 8-9 candidates, and they selected Gururaj Rao, a senior IC leader from Google. With his extensive experience at Google, Walmart, Amazon, and PayPal, along with his hands-on expertise and problem-solving skills, Gururaj was found to be the ideal fit for Mindtickle.

Despite lacking pre-IPO experience, the opportunity to drive the company with full ownership and authority excited Gururaj. He was eager to contribute to a growing ecosystem with mature leadership and a global presence. Mindtickle, a mid-size startup with enterprise product development potential, was a perfect match. We also provided Gururaj with consultation on ESOP and his growth trajectory at Mindtickle. We successfully closed the role within two months.

Way Forward

At Mindtickle, Gururaj is responsible for building a robust platform that enables seamless cross-product journeys, along implementing a uniform architecture to unify disparate products built over various timelines and acquisitions. With over 25 years of experience, he is all set to build an IC hierarchy in Mindtickle and set new benchmarks for innovation and efficiency.

For more information, please reach out to the Marketing Team.