Navigating the Path from Developer to COO: Lessons on Growth, Leadership, and Innovation

Hello, everyone. Today, we have with us, Burak, COO at Jotform. Burak, thanks for joining us today. I’m really excited to have you.

Yeah, me too. Thanks for the invitation.

Before we deep dive into your journey, which is an amazing journey and your journey at Jotform and the amazing things you’re doing there. It would be great if you could introduce your sofa our audience and tell us more about your current role.

I’m Burak. I’m the COO of Jotform. This is my seventh year in the company. I was graduated as a computer engineer back in 2005. I started my career as a developer. Then I ended up here after so many years.

Burak is just being very modest. He has had an amazing journey from software engineer to COO at Jotform. He has been a part of growth and now COO. Jotform has risen by leaps and bounds even during the pandemic. And Burak has been an integral part of that growth. So he’s just being modest. But Burak, talking about your amazing journey, like I said, from software engineer to COO, and you even maintained, handled the growth of Jotform before your COO role, what drove you to Jotform, and how did you navigate your career path within the company?

Before Jotform, I was working for a company named Komodo. I was managing multiple teams and multiple time zones. I was acting like a bridge between technical teams and the upper management, which was headquartered in New Jersey, United States. I met with the CEO of Jotform, I take in time, who is also the founder of the company in a party. Then he made it an offer. As I said, I was working in the technical side of things, but I was also good I was really interested in understanding people and acting as a bridge between technical and non-technical people. Which really- Which I worked for. I was also working as a journalist newspaper, by the way. I had a career for two years, and I really like writing, reading. The growth is about understanding the needs of the users, people, and coming up with a solution or promoting the solution or the problem that you solve actually to them. I took it, thought that I would be a good fit for the growth role in Jotform. That’s why he offered me the position, and it was a good challenge for me. Then that’s how my journey started in Jotform.

Jotform is a unique case for an 18-year-old bootstrap company with a founding COO. How does this impact the role of a COO at Jotform compared to a more traditional startup environment?

As you said, the company is unique on that. We are a bootstrap. We’re a non-stread company, so there are no investors in the board. We have been investing in our own company throughout the years. The good thing about having the founder and the CEO I feel in the company is that Aytekin is the first developer of the company, is the first growth manager, is the first support agent. He was just everything of the company. Working with him is easy, actually, because he knows what’s doable and what’s not. He does not just come up with some crazy ideas. He knows what’s doable, what’s feasible, what’s issuable. That’s why it’s really fun working with him. I really enjoy working with him. I’m just trying… He’s both the CEO and the founder of the company, which means we need him as a founder as well. We are investing in our own company, which means we need to come up with new ideas, new products, new features so that we can maintain our company growth. We need him as a founder. That’s why my role is creating the pace and time he needs so that he can act as a founder again.

You wore the growth hat at Jotform before your COO role. Like mentioned previously, what were some of the key growth strategies you implemented that helped Jotform reach its current success?

It’s all about understanding people’s needs, to be honest. You need to understand their pain points, you need to understand their use cases, and then provide solutions for those and promote those solutions to end. Probably that was the main reason why we maintained our growth during the pandemic, actually. The world was going crazy in those days. It was really hard for us as well as human beings. But still, we tried to understand the emerging use cases of our users, their needs. Then we really like working in agile mode. They developed the necessary features for our users, and then that’s how we maintained our growth rate those days as well. There were no use cases, keywords, no, nothing in the world. There was no way you can do a keyword research on coronavirus because that was the first time. It was such a huge pandemic in the world. We just try to understand what people are trying to achieve, what their use cases are. Even the stores has started getting online appointments. That’s why in order to help our users, we understand their pain points and then develop necessary features for them and then promote those use cases solutions.

And the problems that we solved. That’s how we maintain growth in Jotform.

Absolutely. You said a very important point, understanding your users. I think, like you said, even like you said, in coronavirus, there was no keyword research, no data. But even as a general rule, I think the information or the data that you can get from your users is invaluable. You will not get that in the traditional keyword research, understanding what your users need all the time. I remember we had this one campaign where we actually would take interviews of the users and then use those interviews to understand what they need. Based on that, create information on the website landing pages and stuff like that, which actually worked very well for us. And we did not find that information in Google Trends or Keywords. In Any particular strategy, Burak, that you use, that our users can get some benefit from? How do you understand the users? Is it just understanding the normal buyer persona of them, or do you actually talk to your users and understand what they need?

Interviews really help a lot. That’s not enough. You need to have visibility on the user journey within your platform. What the users are They’re trying to achieve with your product, you need to have great visibility on that. You need to really understand your users. If you have some IDL customer profiles, then you need to check the news, check their websites, what they are trying to achieve those days. Those are all important, especially during a crisis like a coronavirus pandemic.

With JotForm’s impressive growth, managing a large and talented team becomes crucial. What leadership philosophies do you employ to keep your team motivated, agile, and delivering results? Because I understand you have a very large team, an amazing team, and a distributed team. What leadership philosophies do you employ?

The most important one, I believe, is giving them some freedom so that they can test ideas, see the results. They should not wait for approval from a higher executive. They should be Coming up with ideas, testing them, even if it’s on a small segment, still they should be testing some stuff and then check their results and then roll it out to a wider audience. That’s why we want our teams to have that freedom. We want them not to be afraid from testing ideas or sending a commit to millions of people, for instance. That’s the main philosophy, I believe, that we have. That also affects our organizational structure. We do have effective small teams who can go wild and test ideas and improve the metrics that they track. That’s the main philosophy.

We talked about the good part, but I’m sure There must be some challenges as well managing a dispersed and a remote team. Tell us some of the challenges handling a cross-functional and a remote team.

We’re working on-site, by the way. I look at the job from offices. Our system, employees are working from the offices. We don’t have a hybrid schedule. We don’t have a remote schedule. Everyone is coming to the office. We really believe in that, by the way. It’s not just about assigning a task to an employee and expecting them to finish it. As I said, we really like small teams with rhythm, so they should come together, discuss new ideas. They should brainstorm together. That’s really hard if they are remote. That’s why also we have teams that are composed of… We don’t have a design department, for instance. We don’t have a development department. We have small effective teams, and those teams have all of the necessary skills that they have within the team, like the designer or backend developer, frontend developer. That’s how we structure our organization. They don’t make a design request from some other department. Because otherwise, the organization becomes really unmanaged. What you need is small but effective teams in your organization, secretory.

What are some of the common mistakes startups make in their growth strategies?

As I said, Jotform is a bootstrap company, especially during the early days. If you have investors, it’s investment. So someone is trying to maximize the return on investment. But in Jotform’s journey, it was all about increasing the number of active users. That should be the key metric startups should be focusing on, trying to understand people’s use cases and add more and more active users to their user base instead of trying to maximize the investment of investors. Sometimes it’s also, of course, if you need cash, investment is, of course, needed. But if you don’t need the money, then you shouldn’t be seeking poor investment or investors. That would be my advice for especially early startups.

You have written about the power of storytelling for startups. How did JotForm leverage storytelling to attract customers and build brand loyalty?

In JotForm, we say every journey starts with a form. People are not building forms just to build forms. It’s part of a story, actually. It can be a patient intake form, it can be a conference registration. There’s a story behind it. What you should be promoting is not the product itself. It should be the story of the user because there are other users that have the exact same story. That’s why we really like storytelling in the company. Especially during those interviews that you just mentioned, the interviews that we do with users, we really like having them on our demo days on Fridays, just listening to the stories of our users so that we brainstorm on how we can help better them.

Looking back at your career, what is that one lesson you have learned that you believe has been the most valuable or let’s say, the turning point of your career?

You really need to understand your users, and it’s not that easy. Here’s a funny story. When I graduated from university, I first started working in aviation industry. I was working as a developer in computer graphics. We were building light simulators, and there was a famous bug in the system in one of the simulators. They were just filling out the form to report the bugs. I’m referring to the client, and it was I was just saying, The environment is dark. That’s it. That was all we have in the bug report. Our engineers tried to fix the projectors, the interior lights, anything. But the bug was there for ages. One day, I was working in the cockpit of the simulator, and then a pilot just entered the cockpit. They were just chatting about something, and I was really curious about that bug. I just wanted them to tell me again about the bug because no one was able to fix it for months. Then one of the pilots just pointed his finger out of the window and he told me that the Bay Area is never that cloudy. I was shocked. He was referring to the class that we render in the 2D graphics.

It was just 10 seconds, I believe, for me to fix it. I just reduced the density of the class and that was it. There were pilots on the client side, of course. We do have pilots in our team as well. But then they talk to each other. Our pilots confirmed that the environment was dark because having a Well, the environment means the environment is dark in their context. What we ended up with in the bug report form was the environment is dark. Then I realized that it was an aha moment for me. It was not that easy to understand your client, their use case. But once you understand them, then you can only develop a solution or new features for them. It’s not theoretic. It’s about role-playing, I believe. You should be able to role-play as your client, and then you will be successful in developing products for them.

How are you leveraging AI and automation to improve Jotform’s product and operations?

We have been working on AI products a lot recently. We haven’t released enough them yet. But of course, it’s again about understanding what our customers need. Releasing a product with AI behind it doesn’t matter. People do not just buy a product just because it has AI in it. It’s about optimizing something I think, reducing cost, you should be able to solving your problem or creating some benefits. That’s how we are working on our AI products. We do have an advantage, by the way. We already have a user base, more than 25 million users, so that we can test our new products with them in better programs. We have been heavily investing in AI recently. As the COO of the company, that’s one of the areas where our founder I’m very much focused on the product that I’m currently working on. As I said, I’m creating the necessary time and space for him so that he can work on AI-related stuff in the company.

All right. Congratulations on Jart from Teams as well. It looks like it is a success, and you guys are promoting it a lot. Would you like to share some more insights about it on this show?

Yeah. Jotform is a single-seed platform, so it’s a B2B product. But the plants, like the free plant, bronze, silver, gold, those are all single seed plants for individuals within an organization. With the release of Jotform teams, we have a very strong enterprise product right now. If you need Jotform within your organization, where you will be using it organization-wide with finding teams and more collaborative features than what you need is Jotform enterprise. It’s really helping us on that front. It’s the point where users are switching from Individual usage to team usage. That’s how we will invade the world. Having Jotform in each and every organization, that’s our mission.

What is next for Jotform?

As I said, we are a bootstrap company, so we are trying to invest in our company, which means we will continue releasing new products for our users to follow more use cases for them. Form builders are, of course, primary product, but still we do have a lot of products in our arsenal. It’s just the starting point of digital transformation online forms. People are using those forms to collect data. The story doesn’t end there. They can build workflows, they can build reports, they can build documents. We will continue releasing new features, new products, and there will definitely be AI in many of them in the upcoming months or years. Yeah, stay tuned.

Burak, would you like to tell us any one of your favorite client stories?

Yeah. As I said, interviews or checking the journeys of the users. Then the platform is a way to understand users’ needs. These are all proof that you have. But providing support is also a great tool. Those people are trying to use your product, but they have an issue. Maybe they didn’t understand the product. Maybe the user experience is not that easy to understand, or there really is a bug in the product, or there’s a missing feature. That’s why we give great importance in our support organization. Each and every platform employee should do customer support for a while when they join chat forms. Me and our CEO also do a part from time to time, by the way. We do taking care of our clients. One of our VPs was dealing with the issues of a customer, and he was really friendly. Probably he I don’t know how many, but probably more than five issues. We just took care of more than five issues. One day, we find a support ticket in our support form, and the customer was just there just to say hi and check in to see how our VP was doing. That’s why we just printed it on paper and posted on the wall.

It’s all about the users that they’re human beings. They are real. You really need to understand why they are using your product or why they want to use your product. We take care of them, understand their needs, and support is a great part of it. It’s a great channel to understand your clients and the problem is with your product or the opportunities in your product, I mean. Even if the customers do not directly tell you what the features are missing, if you understand what they want to achieve with your platform, then it’s also a gold mine to coming up with new feature ideas as well.

All right, Burak, in the end, I like playing a quick rapid fire round of 3-5 questions. Are you ready?

Yeah, go ahead.

Tea or coffee?

It was coffee until this year, but I started drinking more tea, I believe. As of today, I would say tea.

Early mornings or late nights?

Late nights. They’re going to be late nights.

Last Google search, if you remember.

Probably I checked the restaurant because I went for lunch today.

Okay. Favorite holiday destination?

My hometown, Ismir.

Okay. Favorite superhero?

Favorite superhero? Probably Superman. Okay.

Burak, thank you so much for your time. It was fun having you, and we wish you all the best.

Thank you. Thanks again for the kind invitation.