Joe Kiernan is a mindfully trained consultant turned strategic product thinker. He’s building a career around re-envisioning how great consumer products operate, serving as the first VP of Product at growth stage e-commerce startup Perch.
Joe grew up in D.C. but spent part of his early childhood in New Hampshire. When it was time to think about college, returning to New England was top of mind. He ended up in the northwest corner of Massachusetts at Williams, where I hear purple cows roam the streets. He loved it, studying Computer Science and Economics and experimenting with the things he could build and problems he could solve.
Following your passion and leading with kindness & trust were pillars in the Kiernan household. Joe’s mom was a 4th grade Math teacher and his dad was the CEO of a series of environmental non-profits. Both have been passionate about teaching and the environment respectively throughout their careers and taught Joe from an early age to find something he was passionate about that he could work on for a long period of time.
After Williams, he started at Bain Consulting in Boston. At Bain he developed his core professional problem solving skills, learning how to identify problems in the business world and then go out and solve them. Bain preaches the concept of “answer first”: identifying the key problems and quickly developing a first hypothesis about what the answer might be. This is followed by the lion’s share of the work required to validate or disprove “what must be true for this hypothesis to be true”. An Occam’s Razor flavor to problem solving, if you will.
For an ambitious early career up & comer, the mechanics & muscle movements of breaking down problems and solving them became second nature as Joe worked with more teams on more projects in more environments. Feeling pretty confident about his skills, he signed up for a 6 month externship with an early stage consumer startup preparing for their initial launch.
Andy Katz-Mayfield & Jeff Raider, the founders of Harry’s, were looking for some help getting their startup off the ground. Both had previously worked at Bain and they needed a resource who knew their way around spreadsheets to help with some data scrubbing, investor presentations, etc.
Initially working out of a corner conference room in Google’s NYC offices, Joe jumped all the way in and raised his hand to help build out their initial supply chain. Alongside COO Will Freund, Joe traveled to Germany to see their factory, traveled to China to witness the final assembly, and set up initial forecasting, purchase orders, and freight forwarding relationships. While the initial work looked a lot like his familiar spreadsheet & analytics motions from Bain, he learned a ton about the “elbow grease” actually needed to translate those spreadsheets into tangible consumer products out into the market.
When there was a manufacturing issue bottlenecking their immovable product launch date, Joe traveled from NYC to a chrome painter an hour and a half outside of the city. Driving to Pennsylvania after hours with Harry’s co-founder Andy behind the wheel, they tried to convince a bewildered chrome painter to take a 10,000 razor handle order on short notice and work long hours over the weekend in order to meet their launch deadline. What closed that particular deal was not the terms of the contract, but how Andy connected with the owner personally and brought along a nice bottle of whiskey as an extra “thank you”. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was only 6 months but it was a formative experience to be on the ground floor of a consumer product company launch and his first real operating experience, grabbing a paddle and rowing alongside a small dedicated team.
Joe spent almost 10 years at Bain, working largely with large Consumer Products companies, taking a break to attend Harvard Business School, before returning to the consulting leader as a Team Leader. At HBS he spent the majority of his time intentionally thinking about leading teams and developing his own authentic leadership style – drawing on his passion and positivity
He led teams at Bain for a couple years after grad school before he reconnected with Bain alum Chris Bell, one of his colleague’s previous managers, where they discussed a new startup he was working on. Chris’s startup, Perch, would give him the unique opportunity to build an e-commerce company from scratch after working with Fortune 500 brands for much of the last decade.
At this point, Joe had spent a ton of time crafting his mindset in stressful, deadline driven environments. There were plenty of moments of near burnout. Part of joining Perch was a decision to prioritize the type of work that would give him energy and a culmination of the personal work he had invested to evolve his mindset around embracing change.
In November 2020, the early Perch team was 20 people setting out to build a technology driven consumer products company that would slowly acquire more brands as it grew. They grew…a lot faster than that, raising a $775M Series A, led by Softbank in the spring of 2021. It became a wild year where the team completed almost 50 acquisitions, more or less acquiring and integrating a new brand every single week. An interesting time, to say the least.
Joe was originally brought on to lead the Growth team, doing familiar work across brand management, pricing, advertising, affiliate marketing, etc. When the team doubled down on building out a technology platform, Joe moved to lead the Product team. In the years since, he has led the build out of a platform that manages the supply chain and marketing of their expansive brand portfolio.
What that really means is Joe thinks deeply about the strategic direction of their product roadmap. Where do they want to be investing as a company? How do their technology investments align to the company’s overall direction?
In the year ahead, Joe & his team are focused on new product innovation, product launches, and operational tools that will help them create successful new products. This touches everything from the creative work involved to Generative AI tooling that will help streamline workflows.
Perspective on what’s important – Identifying the Right KPIs
When any business reaches a certain threshold of scale, there’s an overwhelming amount of data. One of the most important lessons Joe had to learn at Perch as they went through hypergrowth was to take a step back from the day to day fire fighting and understand what truly will move the needle for the business as a whole.
“It needs to start with connecting with your colleagues – talking with operational leaders and folks on the front line, understanding their own challenges, and building a mental, data supported, framework for what the real, important, underlying problems facing the organization as a whole are.”
From there, Joe identified the top level KPIs tied to those core issues, and then built process for the team to go “the whole chain down” against that initial KPI set to get to the root of the problems. One of the most successful tech projects they completed was led by former Lead PM Wyatt Bramhall around increasing their supply chain speed to reduce working capital.
They outlined the distinct steps of their entire supply chain against a bunch of metrics. One gap that stood out was the number of days it took from a purchase order being placed to a product actually getting shipped on a container ship. In short, it was taking way too long. Once they identified the time lag and the key intermediate steps that needed to be expedited, they could build tools and set milestones to increase the speed of their supply chain through the specific chokepoint.
The project culminated in Perch’s Product team shipping a more automated communication system with suppliers to expedite orders based on the logic chain they had originally laid out.
Career Insights / Learnings
Taking Ownership – “When you see an important issue out there or a business critical problem that should be solved by somebody, just dive in. Make it your issue. Until someone tells you that you shouldn’t be doing it, especially in an operating role, jump up and say ‘I got this!’”
Presume Trust, Build Relationships – “I’ve tried hard to always presume trust with everyone I work with. Especially when problem solving – It certainly leads to more collaborative relationships but it’s also an important mindset to have generally. So much of getting things done comes down to working directly with people, not focusing on blame for problems, but building personal relationships where they see you as part of their extended team.”
Joe believes all three pillars: developing a perspective on what’s important, taking ownership, and building relationships create a leadership “flywheel” that can accelerate your overall impact in an organization of any size.
This can be an exhausting flywheel, which is why he wants to be working in a space like Consumer Products that gives him energy, and he can continue crafting the future of what next generation consumer product companies can become. So much has changed in the past few years and Joe is excited to keep leading innovation from the frontlines. He looks forward to chatting with more Product folks in Boston too. A lot of his Product approach comes from consulting & business and he’d love to chat with Product venture backed startup leaders to round out his perspective.
If you’d like to learn more about Joe you can find him navigating change, building products for dozens of brands and millions of consumers at Perch, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see you continue to shape the future of next generation consumer products in the years ahead!