Why clarity on the customer, the market, and the product drove the company forward.
Field Nation achieved remarkable scale before on-demand work went mainstream, a trajectory built on quiet execution and an early decision to bring in seasoned operators. What began as a small, scrappy team focused on solving real technician-sourcing problems has evolved into what is now the leading labor marketplace for the IT field service industry.
Founder & CEO Mynul Khan zeroed in on an industry inefficiency: companies relying on independent technicians operating with guesswork, unclear credentials, and a web of intermediaries that made quality hard to track. But identifying the problem wasn’t enough. Khan quickly understood that building a technician marketplace meant constructing systems stronger than any founder’s instincts: customer targeting, disciplined segmentation, and a product engine tied directly to customer demand.
“You have to obsess over what brings value to your customer,” he says. “You need to think in terms of systems, including finding the right people, putting in the right processes, KPIs, incentives … that’s what really scales the business.”
Executing on that vision fell to early key hires like Jackie Schneider, the company’s first chief revenue officer, who built the commercial model, and Wael Mohammed, its EVP of strategy, who instilled product discipline.
Cross-functional clarity
At the outset, the company needed a shared understanding of what it was selling, the value drivers for customers, and who the ideal buyer was. Schneider discovered that each department was focusing on a different customer. Marketing was spending heavily to reach companies and producing leads that sales didn’t pursue, while other teams were tailoring their efforts to their own interpretations of the buyer.
“Customer service, sales, and marketing weren’t aligned on who the customer was,” she says. “Each department had its own version of the target, so the teams weren’t moving toward a shared goal.”
Schneider convened a cross-department team to define what Field Nation was selling, articulate its value and market position, and agree on who the ideal buyer actually was. That meant forcing conversations across customer service, sales, marketing, and product that hadn’t happened before.
The debates were long. Teams arrived with different assumptions, along with various interpretations of what customers cared about. Schneider pushed them to move past gut feelings and toward evidence-based conclusions.
Over several weeks, the group mapped the commercial model, clarifying the problem the model solved, the outcomes it enabled, the fastest-converting segments, and the most motivated buyers. By the end of the process, Field Nation had its first unified ideal customer profile: a decision-making tool that governed messaging, pipeline focus, product priorities, and how teams showed up in front of prospects.
Go-to-market
Field Nation’s go-to-market strategy involved getting sales to focus on the core customer, supported by the right activities, quotas, and compensation structure. Marketing needed to target the right buyers.
“The marketing department was focusing heavily on trade shows, speaking engagements, PR, and branding activities for the wrong market,” she says.
After restructuring the team, she redirected marketing efforts toward data-driven lead generation, focusing on the ideal customer profile. The next step was segmenting the customer base. Another significant milestone was relieving the sales team from customer service tasks, allowing them more time to focus on selling. To achieve this, Field Nation created new job descriptions to formalize the split: sales drove new opportunities and growth, while customer service focused on retention. Metrics and compensation were updated “to incentivize and reward revenue retention and revenue growth,” Schneider says.
To help buyers use the platform effectively, Field Nation created a customer success role for high-value and high-growth accounts, as well as key prospects.
Product and strategy
Wael Mohammed arrived with a mindset shaped by his time at NativeX, where he served as the lead product manager, tracking every feature release, measuring its performance, and iterating quickly. Data wasn’t a quarterly review exercise — it was a daily operating rhythm. “Sense and respond” became part of Field Nation’s product culture.
He rejects the traditional sequence where the product team builds, and the sales team later figures out how to sell it. Instead, he says strategy, product, and sales should operate as a system, with product managers treating sales as a core stakeholder. The approach closed the loop Schneider had built on the commercial side.
“Strategy, product, and sales must work together closely to grow the company in a very tight feedback loop,” he says. “The make-sell sequences do not work in a highly agile world, especially for new ideas and products.”
Mohammed brought analytic rigor to understanding both sides of the marketplace: buyers posting work and technicians fulfilling it. Segmentation moved from broad categories to real patterns of behavior and economics. Meanwhile, customer-level P&L analysis informed pricing, packaging, and investment.
“At NativeX, we obsessed over segmenting both sides of the platform to understand their use patterns,” he says. “Understanding your market segments and their needs, with data and rigor, is key.”
Operating infrastructure
Mohammed pushed Field Nation to focus on long-term system improvements instead of one-off fixes.
“Platforms need longer-term infrastructure investments and strong platform product management,” he says.
This mindset shaped the decision to build payments, compliance, insurance, and tax automation directly into the platform, a move he called one of Field Nation’s most strategic.
Mohammed also emphasizes the importance of people and culture as a critical enabler. He credits the chief people officer with establishing clear company values and building the systems to reinforce them: regular surveys, strong leadership expectations, and a feedback culture that keeps teams aligned.
“Make sure everyone has access to data,” he says, noting that transparency enables healthier debates and faster learning. Those practices provided Field Nation with a leadership layer and operating rhythm that could grow in tandem with the platform. Together, those practices helped Field Nation move beyond its founder-led roots and operate as a company that learns and improves quickly. The takeaway: Field Nation’s growth didn’t hinge on one hire or decision. It came from moving beyond founder instinct and building the people, processes, and incentives that create sustainable momentum.
