PERSUIT is one of the fastest growing Strategic Sourcing & Procurement solutions initially focused on sourcing legal services for corporate legal departments. Currently working as a product manager on the ‘Client Side’ squad.
The PERSUIT SaaS platform enables in-house legal teams at Fortune 500 companies to streamline the RFP process and competitively source legal work from panel law firms to obtain true market pricing for their services. PERSUIT was named #6 in Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies (Enterprise) in March 2020 and raised $20m as part of it’s Series A funding in October 2021.
Working at PERSUIT enabled me to relive and re-practice the knowledge and skills that I had picked up at my previous positions at IHR, Settify and SEEK. I was excited by the product that was being built and the impact that I could potentially make working with a mid-sized product team here in Melbourne.
It was also the perfect blend between my legal and tech skills, as I came into the role having worked in tech previously, but also as a subject matter expert and knowing the voice of the user, due to my previous experience practicing in tax law for nearly a year and a half at Deloitte.
What Do I Do At PERSUIT?
The following are some of the features that have been developed and released by my squad during my time at PERSUIT:
- Worked together with the Head of Engineering and Head of Product to co-write the spec sheet and API integration white paper for our product. This is the company’s first ever API integration spec sheet and ‘state of play’ that allows the company to market our API skeleton to any interest clients.
- Identified, prioritised and executed an identification system and database that allows client users to refer to request for proposals or proposals in a simple, intuitive and easy way. Resulted in an increase in client and law firm user satisfaction (e.g. NPS score) by implementing a highly demanded feature, which helps them to easily reference RFP IDs without the need to send long and complicated URLs to each other.
- Identified, prioritised and executed an ‘undo’ feature allowing client users to allow firms to re-enter the RFP workflow by ‘undo’-ing a previous unsuccessful RFP back to the ‘evaluating’ status.
Why Did I Leave PERSUIT?
Although I was enjoying my time at PERSUIT, I realised that I had to branch out to something new if I were to shake the tag of being a ‘legal tech’ expert and adopt the tag of being a product manager that can work in multiple industries other than just legal tech.
PERSUIT ended up being the perfect place to re-introduce myself to the tech scene, through the lens of legal tech, and develop a legal procurement product that tapped into my knowledge of the customer (i.e. my time as a lawyer) while re-learning and re-introducing basic Agile frameworks to a team that had not worked in that fashion before. Regardless, I realised that, by continuing down the road of creating products in legal tech, I was in danger of being categorised and labelled as merely a ‘legal tech’ expert that can only contribute solely and specifically to solving problems in the legal field, rather than what I wanted to be labelled as, which is a product manager that can take his toolbox to solve a different variety of problems in many different industries.
As such, I decided to accept the offer to become a product manager at Octopus Deploy and left PERSUIT in March 2022. Despite my short tenure with the company, I still hold many fond memories of my time at the firm and am pleased to have been able to deliver several key features to the product, as well as introduce some rigour and frameworks to my squad, which should set them up for success into the near and far future.