Kristin Darrow
Founder and Principal
Kristin builds category-defining products and thriving companies by helping teams relentlessly improve themselves alongside the products they create. As a founding executive and Chief Product Officer at Tessitura, a leading business platform for live events and ticketing that processes over $20 billion annually, she was pivotal in driving the company from startup to industry leader.
Kristin brings deep experience in leading end-to-end product development, encompassing Product, Engineering, Design, Customer Success, Implementations, Sales and Marketing. Her extensive leadership background lends itself to coaching from a holistic, full business angle.
Driven by a career-long passion for optimizing organizations for innovation, Kristin founded Matters Coaching in 2021.
Matters Coaching focuses on helping leaders and teams align company strategy with effective product creation, creating strong product companies that build things that matter.
Matters Coaching is part of Silicon Valley Product Group’s approved network of coaches.
Why it matters.
Why are some companies so good at staying evergreen and delivering their best ideas to their world time and time again. And what makes other companies slowly fade, lose relevance and back themselves unintentionally into “innovation theatre” instead of protecting their biggest asset of all— the company’s consistent ability to innovate and deliver what matters.
I have spent most of my career being a product and innovation leader in tech. Along the way, I have seen up close many hundreds of companies. Invariably, the companies I admire most seem to understand there is a lifecycle to innovation. They understand that creative risk tolerance and making truthful and necessarily tradeoffs are akin to cardiac fitness for a company. They understand that the risk of taking bold steps can be managed well if met early in the idea cycle when changes are easiest and cheapest to make.
Most of all, great companies seem to know that their best ideas only matter if they are acted upon… feasibly and successfully. Innovation at-scale is a fragile machine, uniting human (creativity, advocacy, collaboration and skill) and hardened precision (process, delivery, technical excellence).
No wonder companies have trouble balancing the two poles… tending toward “all too human” at startup phase and fighting monotony of “process and procedure” as they gain success and size.
It takes both — human and process — united, fresh and balanced, to make a great innovator company work.
How does Matters Coaching help?
Matters Coaching is a product and innovation coach for companies who want to improve their company’s ability to deliver their best ideas into the world.
Making real your company’s best ideas is extremely hard work.
It often means culture change which is the hardest thing of all.
It requires crisp clarity from leadership on company direction and the trade-offs you are willing to make.
It requires aligned team structures and deeply ingrained product innovation skillsets. It runs on the rails of individual accountability, yet requires cohesive corporate action at-scale, both.
Building a great product company can be done at any company stage or age. We work with startups and long-tenured organizations. We are here to help you through the whole thing.