Intelligent CIO talks to Shahid Nizami, Regional Vice President, APAC and Japan, ActiveCampaign, about his career, his approach to management and helping businesses digitize their operations.
What is the most rewarding aspect of management?
In my opinion, the only role of a manager is to hire great people and grow them, so the biggest satisfaction is seeing your team members advance into big roles. I’ve been leading teams for about 15 years and many of my former direct reports now hold senior leadership positions in companies like Google and Microsoft. Feeling that I played a positive part in their early career journeys makes me proud – it’s a small feather in the cap.
How did you first get into technology?
Growing up in India in the late 90s, we heard a lot about this big thing called the Y2K bug. It was a very hot topic – people were saying how the world could come to an end if we didn’t fix it. My interest was piqued and I started reading about it. That got me interested in technology. I was about to enrol in an MBA and I decided to specialize in IT and marketing. That led to me learning how to program and code – and then that was the end of my plans to become a chartered accountant!
What style of management philosophy have you adopted?
The servant leadership management philosophy really resonates with me. If your focus is on hiring and nurturing top talent, you don’t want to get too embroiled in the day to day stuff. I leave it to my team to complete their tasks and deliver their goals, and my job is to remove the roadblocks. It’s a modus operandi that requires you to be open and transparent and to share the values that drive you – mine are people, passion, purpose and positivity.
What has your technological focus been in recent times?
For the last couple of years, it’s been Digital Transformation. Before Covid, I spent a lot of my time with customers and prospects convincing them of its importance. Then along came the virus and people realized it was the only way they could survive! At ActiveCampaign, our piece of the puzzle is customer experience automation – helping businesses digitize their operations so they can scale across market segments and geographies.
Do you have a way of turning negative experiences into positives?
There’s no two ways about it, I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career. On the upside, those failure points were good learning opportunities. Experience really is the best teacher, even if the lessons are less than enjoyable at the time. And I’ve certainly never had any regrets about giving the bean counting beat a swerve – I would have made a terrible accountant!
What do you identify as the major areas of investment in your industry?
For us, it’s all about creating a ‘segment of one’. Gone are the days when businesses could create a buyer persona and say, ‘this is the typical customer for our business’. We’re moving towards a world where every person and prospect is a segment of their own and to service customers in that way, organizations need to be able to automate at scale. It’s easy when you have just 10 customers but with 10,000 or 100,000, not so much. That’s where we see a lot of time and money being spent.
In terms of technology, are there any specific challenges that the APAC region has to deal with?
Because it’s a diverse region with its own nuances, you can’t roll out a new product or solution in one go. You need to identify the unique features of each market and cater for them. If you’re a vendor, things like pricing, packaging and user interfaces may need to be localized and your go to market strategy should reflect the knowledge level of your target market. Inevitably, all that means prioritizing which territories are most important to you and focusing on those first. Do that and, over time, you’ll get where you want to go.
What will be the main focus of your role over the next 12 months?
I’ve only been with ActiveCampaign since October 2021 and the past six months have been spent laying the foundations for our regional expansion. We have a formidable team in Australia and New Zealand but we’re really just getting things off the ground in the rest of Asia Pacific. I see incredible promise for our company in this part of the world.
ActiveCampaign is squarely focused on the SME space and APAC is a huge market for SMEs. It has five times as many of them as the Americas, so the opportunity is enormous. Over the next 12 months, we’ll be building our local presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong and India and showing SMEs in those countries how customer experience automation can help them compete with the big players, without having to invest billions.
What advice would you give to ambitious colleagues who wish to achieve a C Level position?
Embrace the mantra of ‘always be helping’. Actively seeking to assist your team mates and your manager will stand you in good stead. And before you move into your next role, start doing it today. I always used to ask my managers, ‘what’s on your plate, what are your biggest challenges and where can I help?’ Seek out gaps in the business that you have the capability to address and educate yourself about the organization and the market dynamics it’s affected by, irrespective of whether your current position requires you to do so. Taking that big picture approach will change your mindset and get you thinking and acting like a C-level executive before you attain the role.
How do you recharge your batteries when you are away from the office?
Outside the office is a kind of fuzzy term now, with most people working from home! I try to maintain firm boundaries so that when I leave the study, I’m leaving the office. Playing tennis three times a week helps me to destress – focusing on the game and releasing energy is a great antidote. That, and spending time with my nine-year-old son. We enjoy learning new things together like riding a bike and, most recently, playing the guitar.
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