Meet Ironclad’s COO, Jen Paau

This week, we’re welcoming Jen Paau as our COO and we could not be more excited. Jen was previously a Senior Director at Salesforce and brings to Ironclad a wealth of experience in operations and strategy. At Salesforce, Jen lead programs driving adoption of the Salesforce Lightning Experience within the Consulting partner community. At Ironclad, Jen will build the processes that will grow us into the Salesforce for Legal.

I sat down with Jen to chat about things she’s learned over the years and what she has in store for us as COO.

Tell me about yourself. Where were you before Ironclad?

I started my career in management consulting, where I spent about 7 years at Bain & Company and A.T. Kearney. Management consulting is a great place to start a career because it lets you see different functions and solve different types of problems. For example, you can work on a cost reduction project with a procurement department or develop a go-to-market strategy.

I left management consulting because I wanted to go deeper into an operational role. I wanted to get deep experience owning the implementation of a solution, which you don’t often get to do in consulting.

For the past six and a half years, I’ve been at Salesforce in a variety of strategy and operations roles, including as COO of SalesforceIQ. Most recently, I was Senior Director of Salesforce Lightning Adoption Programs, which is one of their newest technologies. I’ve seen a lot of growth over the years and it’s been an amazing experience.

What did you learn at Salesforce?

One, it’s super important to be data driven. Salesforce was great at making sure you understood how to measure success and track progress against it. You don’t have to get completely wrapped around the axle on whether you have the perfect target at the beginning, but you do need to start somewhere and invest in the system, resources, and processes for tracking your results. That’s how you know you’re making progress.

Second, you have to keep trying new things. This is so important. In any new area, you’re not necessarily going to know the exact right path forward. Testing different ideas and tactics, whether it’s a new process or a new marketing campaign, will give you more data. Some of these ideas will work and some of them won’t, but either way you take the results and work to improve on them. Once you find the right tactic, you can then scale it to have a broader impact. But you need to try new things first.

How do you try new things?

You have to be at an organization with teams and leaders who support experimentation. Start small, take baby steps, and as you learn more, adjust. You don’t necessarily roll out a program globally, but you can do a little pilot in a specific region and collect whatever feedback and data you can. It’s hard to do, which also makes it a lot more fun.