Early in his career, Nick McCleery had an amazing boss and mentor who taught him all about product management, how to build out product development teams, and how to advance in his career. He and his mentor wound up moving on to different companies, but they stayed in touch over the years. Then, five months ago, his mentor, Kari Hensien, who had since become the CEO of RizePoint, hired Nick as the Director of Product.
A robust product management background
Nick has been focused on product management for 13 years, ever since he graduated from Utah Valley University. He started his career at Novell, a large enterprise software company that had approximately 8,000 employees at the time. There, he started learning the ins and outs of product management and how to understand (and meet) customers’ needs.
From there, he moved to Workfront, a software company in Lehi, UT, where he met Kari. They worked together for two and a half years, and throughout their tenure at Workfront, she coached him and encouraged his growth and career development.
When he left Workfront, he went to a growing unicorn called Pluralsight, a company that had “very high product development standards and gave lots of autonomy to their team,” Nick explained. In this role, he said he “learned how to really do product management very well and how to build out product development teams.”
A few other jobs followed, including Purple, the mattress company, where he helped develop their ecommerce platform. Then, he worked as a Senior Product Manager for a startup in the e-learning and Artificial Intelligence space. After that, he spent six months at Benevity, which provides charitable donation-management and grant-management platforms to help large enterprises with their ESG programs. He had no intention of leaving Benevity at the time, but when Kari, his beloved mentor, invited him to play an important leadership role on her RizePoint team, he couldn’t say no.
Solving customers’ pain
“What I love the most in my position at RizePoint is that we get to go out and really focus on the customers’ needs, pain points, and motivation, and then we get to put together solutions to solve those problems,” Nick explained. “I love the feeling you get when you make something really great to solve their pain.”
“RizePoint has a strong reputation in the QA industry, and this sets us up to be a major player in the trends that are evolving around QA. This is more than just brand reputation, but it’s about company growth and trajectory, safety, and health. RizePoint has the opportunity to make those things a lot easier and safer for our clients,” Nick added.
Empowering his team to solve problems
Nick is passionate about empowering RizePoint’s product development team.
“We enable teams to go out and solve the problems,” Nick explained. “Instead of telling them what features to build, we tell them the problems we need to solve. When you give your team members ownership, they’ll want to work harder to figure out how to solve the problems. They’ll work as a group, develop empathy for the client’s problems, and create products our customers will really love.”
In fact, Nick believes that RizePoint’s customer-focused products are the organization’s key differentiator.
“We work closely with each customer to understand their specific use cases, and design solutions that will meet the needs of all our customers,” Nick said. “Our platform can be customized based on each customer’s specific situation. We offer a whole suite of solutions that they can use.”
User-friendly, customizable solutions
While he believes strongly in all of RizePoint’s solutions, he’s most excited about Ignite, which he calls a “true SaaS platform.”
“The nice thing about Ignite is that it’s opening up a new vertical for us with Supplier Quality Management,” Nick explained. “A lot of companies are stuck in these old models, doing things manually on paper. It can be hard for them to adopt a software solution. Ignite simplifies that.”
“Ignite is very user-friendly and easy to get set up. Companies don’t have to go through massive integration or onboarding,” Nick continued. “They can be up and running on day 1 and start getting value out of it right away. Ignite really meets customers’ needs with elegant solutions.”
RizePoint encourages their customers to set up programs to ensure and automate their quality control, quality assurance, workflows, and processes. Customers can create programs that can be repeated and automated, which is considerably easier than manual paper checklists.
“Let’s say you have 1,000 suppliers. Those suppliers each have 10-40 documents that are certifying whatever requirements your brand has,” Nick said. “Now imagine a year goes by. How do you know when, how, and what documents are expiring? How do you keep on top of this massive amount of information? If you try to do it manually, it’s a full-time job for multiple people. RizePoint’s system automates it all in the background, and it does it all for you.”
A family/fix it guy
When he isn’t working, he’s spending time with his wife and three sons, ages 10, 12, and 16, who are busy with various sports, musical instruments, and generally making a lot of noise.
He’s also a big DIY person, and likes fixing and building things, woodworking, and working on his truck. He also enjoys boating and skiing.