Roger Nessier comes to Steelwedge from Symphony Services where he was a founding executive and Vice President of Products and Services. He grew Symphony from 80 to 4000+ people over eight years and has worked with over 300 software companies to deliver outsourced development, support, services and process consulting. At i2 Technologies where he served as the Vice President of Development, he managed 150 team members in India, Canada and US, developing and deploying order management, marketplace and content solutions.
Roger is passionate about sports, especially snow skiing and bicycling. He has a strong interest in learning about other cultures and is an active member in a Vietnamese Cycling Club. He takes great pleasure in accomplishing feats such as bicycling from San Jose to the top of Mt Diablo and back. He often rides as much as 70 miles in a single day on weekends. Roger and his wife have been married for 19 years and live in San Jose.
Q. Why did you choose to join Steelwedge?
A. It is important for me to feel engaged and excited about the value my company provides for our customers, but also feel that I am doing something socially and environmentally responsible. The Steelwedge solution appears simple in its approach, but the results it achieves for our customers are game changing. I can’t say that about many trendy software products on the market. Steelwedge’s solution is one of the rare software solutions that is able to satisfy both the capitalist and the environmentalist in me. Working at Steelwedge I feel I am doing great things by reducing waste and fuel costs, but at the same time improving the bottom line for our customers!
Q. What best practices does Steelwedge employ to effectively and efficiently undertake customer adoption?
A. User adoption is a top priority for me and my Steelwedge colleagues, because our business is growing by word of mouth, and high adoption translates into great customer satisfaction. We ensure high user adoption by carefully reviewing current business processes and ensuring that leveraging Steelwedge becomes a natural amplifier and extension of current processes. We also heavily emphasize leveraging customer super user evangelists to help spread the value Steelwedge provides so users are led to Steelwedge, not forced to use it. Lastly, we ensure that the user experience is impeccable by making sure our solutions are always available, reliable and intuitive.
Q. What new process do you hope to employ to empower the Steelwedge Solutions team?
A. Our company has doubled in size over the past year, and with that growth we need to continue to ensure we are paying attention to the needs of our employees and satisfying their career objectives, so they can continue to drive high levels of customer satisfaction. Happy employees deliver happy customers. As a smaller company, it was easy to give employees personalized attention without much thought to the processes for doing that, but as our company grows it is necessary to ensure we have formalized reward programs. I am working with our HR organization to ensure we have frequent and material recognition of our exemplary team members.
Q. What immediate changes (if any) will you apply to make the Steelwedge Support process stronger and more efficient?
A. My support team members have heard me say this often: The journey is as important as the destination. Our team members are very good at developing extremely creative solutions to difficult problems, but are sometimes remiss in frequently communicating progress. I believe in over communication and giving updates even when there is no update. I also believe that our customers appreciate it when we can develop a solution with minimal overhead to our customers, i.e. we quickly ascertain the challenge, investigate an approach and come back with a solution without our customer having to spend a lot of time explaining their issue.
Q. What steps will you take under your leadership to improve collaboration between solutions, implementation, development and support teams?
A. We are instituting an engineer rotation program to ensure our engineers are exposed, educated and empathetic to the challenges of other engineering departments. For example, we are putting engineers that typically conduct support on engineering projects and have implementation engineers work to solve tricky challenges in support. The benefits of this program are great for Steelwedge and great for our employees that are looking for a more varied work experience vs. what you get in the siloed departments of large companies. It’s even better for our clients, who can be sure that all of Steelwedge is working as a team to solve any problems and come up with creative solutions.
Q. What are your thoughts on the work culture at Steelwedge?
A. I am very impressed with the teamwork here at Steelwedge and the willingness of various teams from different departments to work through a challenge to ensure that challenges are overcome and resolved. I am particularly impressed with the caliber of everyone comprising the Steelwedge family. There’s a lot to learn with this organization and plenty of opportunity for interesting interaction with many intelligent people. I joined Steelwedge at an interesting period of its growth and I am glad to take part in the next phase of growth.
