Why Headcount Is the Wrong Measure of Success

Jeanne Grosser, COO of Vercel · Grit

Jeanne Grosser is chief operating officer of Vercel, where she owns marketing, sales, field engineering, support and partnerships. She spent a decade at Google, joined Stripe when it had about 400 people, and left over nine years later as chief business officer when it had about 8,000. She advised Vercel for about a year and a half before joining full time, and has been there almost a year and a half. Vercel grew from about 600 to a little over 800 people in that time, with revenue growing well north of triple digits.

Summary

Grosser says the way to run go-to-market in the AI era is to make teams leaner and measure leaders by output. Vercel resolves 91% of support with an agent, qualifies inbound leads with agents and raises sales quotas every six months. She builds an operating model of what must be true for the founder's number, and tests product-market fit by putting the product team in front of ten customers. She says the founder relationship matters ten times more than the rest of a job's list. She wants managers to stop counting headcount and report revenue per head, and she is annoyed by AI-written sameness.

1. Blame the Product or the Sales? Grosser says technical founders find it easier to blame sales than the product, because the product reflects them, which she thinks is part of why the average CRO's tenure is under two years. No test for product-market fit exists. At Vercel she and the product manager and lead engineer ran ten enterprise customers in a row through the same conversation, and all concluded the product lacked full enterprise fit. She also has the engineer sit in on her pitch and asks afterward what she got wrong, and her team extracts objections from call transcripts, scores how they were handled, and files a product request when the objection is a product gap. ▶ 9:33