GROWING ALONGSIDE THE COMPANY

When Christine Watts joined Ninety in 2017, her role was supposed to be in marketing and client success.

Ten years later, she's held five different roles and lived through some of the most important moments in our company's history. Christine helped build our Customer Success and Product teams, worked closely with Engineering, served as Chief of Staff, and now leads Professional Services. She’s been close to the customer, close to the product, and close to many of the decisions that shaped who we are today.

In a recent conversation on my podcast, we talk about the parts of company building that rarely fit into a clean anniversary post: the product decisions customers were pushing us to make, the constraints we had to work within, COVID changing the way teams worked, and the period when we were told we needed a Plan B or we had to shut down.

Hear more in Building Ninety: 10 Years Through the Eyes of Our First FTE.

Building a company isn’t just about the milestones. It’s also about the tense calls, the hard tradeoffs, the moments when the plan stops working, and the people who keep showing up anyway.

Christine had five roles in ten years because Ninety is always changing. In every stage, the company needs new things, and she continues to grow with the next version of the business.

If you want the clean anniversary version, we can tell that story too. But this conversation gets into more of the mud we had to walk through to get here.

PERSPECTIVES

“I know now about myself that I love the unknown… I’ve got this big mission, and we’ve got to figure out how to get there." — Christine Watts

MARK MY WORDS

Looking back on the last ten years, I’m struck by how many times we could have convinced ourselves this thing just wasn’t going to work.

There were moments when customers wanted things we weren’t allowed to build. Moments when the market shifted faster than expected. Moments when our relationship with EOS® was uncertain. Moments when people told us we should be angry, fight harder, or just walk away.

Instead, we kept going.

Christine was there for a lot of that. She saw the tough decisions, the customer conversations, the product debates, and the Plan B work that eventually helped us become a stronger company.

That’s one of the lessons I hope founders take from this conversation. You don’t always get to choose the constraints, but you do get to choose how you respond to them and who you bring with you.

Sometimes the very thing that feels like a threat becomes the reason you build something better. That’s not always clear in the moment. It’s much easier to see ten years later, sitting across from someone who helped carry the company through it.

INSIDE NINETY

Learning from Someone Who Helped Build It
Christine recently launched a new video series for founders and leadership teams looking to get more out of the Ninety platform. From Accountability Charts and Scorecards to Rocks and meetings, these short walkthroughs share practical guidance drawn from years of helping leadership teams get aligned and execute more effectively.

[Explore the Setting Up Ninety Series on YouTube]

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

In case you missed it, here’s more from Founder’s Framework:

How Founders Grow Faster by Focusing on Less

One thing that stood out as Christine and I looked back on the last decade was how many opportunities we chose not to pursue.

Building a company isn't usually limited by a lack of ideas. More often, it's limited by focus. In this piece, I talk about how companies that endure learn to separate what's interesting from what's important and stay committed long enough for the right work to compound.

[Read Now]

Christine joined Ninety to help with marketing and client success. Ten years later, she's held five different roles and helped build parts of the company that didn't even exist when she started.

Some people stay in their lane. Christine kept finding the next road.