SSC Leadership Highlights: Making Data-Driven Decisions in a People & Values-Centric Culture at Ghost Inspector

We recently had the chance to chat with Justyn Maglalang about his experience since joining SureSwift Capital as General Manager (GM) at Ghost Inspector last May. Founded in 2014 by Justin Klemm, Ghost Inspector was created to address the challenges companies face with manual browser testing. Using automation, both technical and non-technical teams can easily ensure the stability and quality of their web applications without using code. Since then, Ghost Inspector has become a full end-to-end testing platform that helps streamline quality assurance (QA) processes.

Keep reading to dive into what brought Maglalang to SureSwift, his main areas of focus so far, and where Ghost Inspector is headed over the coming year. You'll also learn just why our core values mean so much to him and how he regularly brings them out and recognizes them in his team.

What was it like joining SureSwift? What prompted the change for you?

The story goes back to when I met James DeGreef (SureSwift's CEO) while looking for opportunities. A mutual connection put me in touch with several different people to help expand my network, and one of them was James.

This was at the start of the pandemic. He asked me about going mountain biking, but as I didn't have a bike, we met over Zoom instead. It was awesome to meet him, talk to him, and learn from what he was up to in the tech space. I ended up pursuing an opportunity within the not-for-profit space for the next three and a half years.

From there, I was just looking for the next step in my career. What led me to SureSwift was the General Manager opportunity I saw posted — but I didn't realize it was for Ghost Inspector at the time. When I heard it was, I was really excited.

I'm an operator, through and through. Operationalizing data is a superpower of mine and what I saw in the role was something within my zone of genius — that's what got me really excited about it.

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Funny enough, when I applied for the role, I saw that Amanda McKay, someone who I'd previously worked with several years back at another Victoria tech company, was the VP of People and Operations. She reached out quickly and we started connecting about the opportunity.

Tell me about your experience onboarding with Ghost Inspector, meeting the team, and learning about the product and company.

It was fast and furious. The one thing that I said throughout onboarding though was that, throughout my career, I don't think I've ever had this level of support to get up to speed with what's happening. Having worked both in enterprise and startup environments, I know that many times you just figure things out as you go.

But here, through the amount of support offered by the executive team, the internal team at Ghost Inspector, and also across the different portfolio teams and their leaders, everybody's been really supportive and understanding of all of my questions. Specifically, meeting regularly with my onboarding buddy Dave was a great way to learn more about being a GM within SureSwift, but also about the successes and challenges he’s experienced within his portfolio business as well — something I've really appreciated!

The internal team at Ghost Inspector was also really supportive, allowing me to get to know them all right away, and helping me understand our product and why our customers love it so much.

What core values of the company have you seen demonstrated? What resonates the most with you?

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One of SureSwift's five core values, "Win Together" is the biggest one that I feel from the larger SureSwift side of things because the team has been so willing to jump in and help me. The way I've perceived it is that everybody feels we're in this together, so people want to help others learn from things they've gone through. I've tried to embody that myself by making sure I offer as much help as I can within the domains and areas in which I have expertise. It's been pretty rewarding in that regard.

When I was first going through the interview process, I asked the executive team about SureSwift's core values because corporate values are something I appreciate, but also so I could understand what it takes to land on successful, meaningful, and intentional values.

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I think core values help with organizational and team culture development because they're a guide to how you expect people to operate and they're the standards we set to grow as a company and as a team. 

With that in mind, I implemented "core value shoutouts" at our team meetings. It’s a way for team members to recognize and celebrate someone they feel exemplified a core value that week. We're constantly looking at how we live those core values, for instance, when people are "stretching" or being "customer-centric." It's about celebrating those doing things that speak to our core values and, to me, it's a way of showing that these values are important.

Switching gears a bit — for those unfamiliar, can you explain what Ghost Inspector is?

Ghost Inspector is an automated end-to-end browser testing solution that helps businesses in SaaS, e-commerce, and technical environments test the various elements of their websites for functionality.

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A common use case is for QA testers. Typically they’re testing new features and functions in testing environments, to make sure everything works as it should. With testing generally being done manually, some of their pain points often come from an inability to scale testing activities due to timelines, potential human error, and an overall difficulty in catching all potential bugs. This is where Ghost Inspector can help!

For example, users might be testing a login process. Doing this manually might take five to 10 minutes, but Ghost Inspector helps one person test this easily, enabling them to perform multivariate testing across different devices and geolocations, efficiently and at scale. The platform also allows users to catch bugs early and continuously throughout their development cycles with testing schedules.

Ghost Inspector is a powerful no-code/low-code platform allowing non-technical users the ability to perform user acceptance testing (UAT) on their sites, without writing any code. Our browser extension easily records clicks and identified assertions and then takes you to our codeless test editor where you can edit and manage each step simply. This ease of use opens the door to a different customer — not just an engineer, a technical developer, or a CTO — non-technical users like product managers can easily test to ensure their websites are working as they should.

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Oh, and we can't forget about our mascot, Ghosty.

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What markets does Ghost Inspector target?

Ghost Inspector primarily targets product managers, software engineers, QA testers, CTOs, and freelancers in web development. That being said, the product can be very helpful for single operators also.

There are so many different applications and ways to implement testing, and we’re always excited to see the different ways our customers find value in our product.

What have you been most excited about with the team and the product itself?

I’ve really been excited to dive deep into how we operate — everything from how we engage with leads and how we support our customers, to the ways we measure and track success.

As a team we’re focusing on establishing more data-driven practices internally, leveraging this data to better understand what’s working but also what needs improving. It’s been great to see the entire team embrace this.

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What do you see happening for the team and product in the future? What are your plans and goals for Ghost Inspector?

The opportunity is really about building a strong foundation within the company, the team, and the processes. This is what drew me to the role — with a strong foundation, we’ll be set up for future success and scale.

We're leveling up, we're going through a transformation, and I can’t wait to see where we’ll be a year from now.

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Are there any details or specific things you're doing to get ready for that scaling and growth?

I've focused on a few big areas since I started:

1. Build relationships. This has been incredibly important to me as a first step since joining the company. I wanted to get to know each team member, their role within the company, and what their perspective has looked like. Establishing a good baseline of trust with my team members, and them with me, has been key to making sure we’re all aligned and knowing we have each other’s backs.

2. Evaluate and assess the current state. From there, it's been about understanding what’s working and what might need to be improved — learning from the team where the challenges lie and how we can do better. Sitting down and mapping out what's going on at a high level functionally has been a great way to look at the big picture. With this, we decided to invest in a CRM and hire a sales team member to introduce a sales-led strategy focused on optimizing the lead-to-live process (the journey from initial lead acquisition to fully engaged customer). 

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3. Build, learn, iterate, learn, and repeat with data. As we work to build out our CRM for our sales, marketing, and customer success processes, we’re adding to ensure the right data anchors are in place at each step, enabling us to gain a good line of sight within the business. From there, we can learn where further refinement is needed and take data-driven action by iterating and continuing the cycle. 

4. Product refinement. While we’re working to improve our sales and marketing strategies, we’ve also been working to develop our product strategy. Addressing technical debts along the way, our Engineering team has been closely working with our customers to better understand key areas to improve quality and improve platform performance, while learning about potential new features to consider in our product roadmap. 

Ultimately, we’re aiming to align the sales, marketing, and product strategies to ensure a balanced go-to-market strategy while delivering a valuable, successful product for our customers.

Sounds like it's an ongoing relationship. Is that a fair way to describe it?

100%. Some of our customers have been with us for a handful of years, some from the early days as the company was growing.

The founding team did a great job of nurturing those relationships, and where we've gotten to today, I think, is attributed a lot to the product we have and how well that product has been built to solve problems for our customers. That's been visible as we see how many customers have been with us for such a long time.

On the post-sale end, what are you working on right now?

We're re-evaluating our relationships with our customers. The sales funnel is shaped like a bow tie: the top-of-funnel is where customers choose to make the sale, and then it grows back up again on the other side of the bow tie where there are stages of onboarding, adopting the platform, and evaluating onboarding to ensure it's gone smoothly.

Once a user is onboarded, how do we help them scale what they're doing? How do we guide them towards further success with the platform? How do we create loyal customers who would love to refer us or give testimonials (which ultimately grow monthly and annual recurring revenues (MRR and ARR) along the way)? This is where the bow tie opens back up, into this larger bucket.

Through that, we try to leverage an element of marketing — for example, using some of those testimonials back at top-of-funnel.

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The next phase for the upcoming year will involve acting on some new ideas, doubling down on what’s working, and continuing to look for opportunities to put Ghost Inspector in front of more people to help support their development journey.

As Ghost Inspector prepares for what's ahead, whenever the time is right to grow and scale, it's clear that Maglalang's balanced leadership will help get it there. His combination of data-driven decisions supported by a human, values-centric approach is helping set the team up for success.

Want to learn more about Ghost Inspector? Check out our interview with founder Justin Klemm (who actually got acquired and bought the company back before selling again!), or visit Ghost Inspector's website.