Q&A with Smitha Gopal, Chief Operating Officer, EcoMap
- Heather Fields
- Posted on
- Compass Series
In this series, we deep dive with the minds behind EcoMap to break down how we do what we do and how it helps ecosystems to grow and thrive.
Scaling Operations and Ecosystem Impact
As EcoMap’s Chief Operating Officer, Smitha Gopal oversees all revenue functions, including sales, marketing, customer experience, and finance. But her highest talent is establishing best practice processes and systems to support rapid growth.
Gopal is no stranger to strategic growth. Prior to this role, she was the CEO of Rendia, a Baltimore-based medical software company that helped more than 8,000 doctors educate their patients, strengthen relationships, and improve outcomes. Gopal started with Rendia as an early-stage employee and eventually became its CEO, helping reinvent the company, transition its business model into SaaS, and spearhead its successful acquisition in October 2022 by PatientPoint. That experience informs her work and makes her a powerful asset to EcoMap’s continued success.
You scaled Rendia from an early-stage company to a successful acquisition. How do you apply what you learned from that journey to scaling EcoMap’s ecosystem technology?
There are two things I keep in my head all the time: build a sustainable business where we please our customers and what does the end result look like. What’s the most compelling thing we’re offering? What’s the differentiating piece that might be attractive to a buyer?
I sometimes see leaders getting stuck on one or the other, but you have to be thinking about both simultaneously. You can’t just build something because you want to sell it. It has to be valuable and meaningful to your customers, employees, and stakeholders. Likewise, you also shouldn’t be so immersed in the business that you miss the landscape at a macro level, how you fit into that bigger picture.
What went well at Rendia — and we’re doing well at EcoMap — is listening to our customers, and prospective customers about what’s missing, their pain points, and how we as a company fit into that larger landscape of solutions.
At EcoMap, you oversee a mix of finance, people, and revenue operations. How do you decide what to prioritize when everything feels urgent?
Prioritizing in a fast-paced environment is like choosing which fire to put out first. I start with the biggest one, the issue with the most significant consequences, and work my way down.
Obviously, all these components contribute to the larger mission of the organization, but looking forward, I focus on revenue first, then operations, then finance. Revenue is about staying connected to our customers and delivering what they need. Operations is about making life easier for our team, creating efficiencies so we can work smarter.
Finance is about setting clear guardrails upfront, like defining discount limits or understanding tax implications, so we can operate smoothly. By addressing customer needs and team efficiency first, we ensure we’re building a strong foundation while keeping the business on track.
EcoMap’s mission is to help ecosystems thrive. What’s a key principle from your leadership experience that you lean on to make that happen?
Every stakeholder matters to a business. Your customers matter, your employees matter, your vendors matter, the community matters. The impact you intend to leave matters. That’s essentially what ecosystems are, right? You need all these diverse elements, and they’re all important. Some are flashier and more visible, some are more connective, but they all matter. As a leader, you have to be thinking about every problem and solution from that holistic view.
Building a company takes tough calls. What’s a time you had to pivot strategy at Rendia, and how does that shape your approach to guiding EcoMap’s growth?
Before I took over at Rendia, we had a bad habit of saying yes and spreading ourselves too thin. To get back to what I said earlier about holding two things in your mind, we were only focused on pleasing the customer. We said yes because our customers were asking for it, but it meant we had too many products, too many one-off solutions, and stretched resources.
The tough call was learning that sometimes you have to say no, so you can ultimately give customers something that’s better. EcoMap is similar to Rendia in that we develop very close relationships with our customers and so the instinct is to say yes, but we have to think about the end result as well. We want it to be meaningful and useful. Saying no to distractions allows us to channel our energy into building technology that delivers lasting impact.
EcoMap serves different customers, from startups to universities. How do you adapt your operational know-how to meet such varied needs?
The fundamentals between our customers are the same. People are looking to do a better job and be more efficient with their time.
It’s helpful that we serve different types of clients because, for example, we can take the best practices one sector has already embraced and bring them elsewhere. There’s a lot of freedom to try new things. We’re supporting customers who are supporting innovators, so there’s this greater willingness to be creative or think outside the box.
Tech moves fast, and so does EcoMap’s ecosystem AI platform. How do you keep a team focused and agile when the landscape keeps shifting?
It is hard to streamline when everything keeps shifting. For EcoMap, what we’re trying to do is offer a single source of truth so people with different needs can get to the information that’s relevant to them.
We are also trying internally to streamline. Instead of creating new documents or processes for every question, we edit ruthlessly, keeping resources concise, up-to-date, and accessible. We hold fewer meetings but make them count, packing in as much value as possible.
It’s a little like editing your closet, how do you condense so you are building off a foundation rather than reinventing the wheel each time? This discipline helps us stay agile, ensuring the team has what they need to adapt quickly without getting bogged down. We are aiming for quality over quantity.
You’ve seen a company through massive change. What’s one practical system or habit you’ve brought to EcoMap to keep operations humming as it scales?
A thing I like to do personally is back mapping. Start with asking, “where do we want to be by the end of this year?” That answer can be different for everyone.
Some people have a revenue goal, some people have a product goal, features we want to roll out, whatever it is — where do you want to be at the end of the year, and then what are we doing along the way? What are those checkpoints? And then, what is our system for mutual accountability? That’s what helps me as an individual, but also for my teams.
Ecosystem builders often juggle limited resources. What’s a lesson you can share from your experience to help them stretch what they’ve got?
Figure out how to use technology to meet your needs and improve your efficiency. When I worked in healthcare, I found this was a fundamental problem. You have a fixed number of doctors but increasing patient needs. There’s only so much capacity. You have to figure out how to do more with less.
The same thing is true for ecosystem builders. Embrace technology in as many forms as you can. A few weeks ago, we hosted a workshop on ecosystem mapping at the InBIA conference. My favorite part of the workshop was when we had people go around the room and talk about an AI tool they are using day to day. Everyone’s answer was different, and everyone was writing down tips for things that might be helpful for them. Exploring technology, even in small ways, can make a big difference in stretching limited resources.
Collaboration is huge at EcoMap. How do you foster alignment across teams to deliver results for customers?
What I love about our team is how invested every single member is in our mission and creating the best solutions for our customers. Our strategy for fostering alignment between teams is strengthening that communication so we all understand the larger goals we are striving to achieve and how each team member plays a role in that.
Alignment is an area we’re actively improving. It’s tempting to say yes to every customer request, but that can lead to inconsistent solutions and misaligned expectations. Instead, we’re focusing on clear, shared goals. When we say no to a one-off request, we explain why: to deliver something better that benefits all customers. We’re also setting consistent deadlines and expectations so teams can rely on each other.
By creating these shared frameworks, everyone is working toward the same outcome, delivering reliable results for our customers.
EcoMap’s pushing boundaries in economy tech. How do you balance bold innovation with the day-to-day realities of running a company?
We try to stay grounded in the fundamentals. I’m not going to lie, it’s fun to talk about the latest and greatest tools and how we can be even more efficient. But we don’t innovate for the sake of innovation. Innovation has to serve a purpose. We might experiment with a new feature, but only if it addresses a real customer need. By tying innovation to customer outcomes, we balance bold ideas with the operational discipline needed to run a sustainable business.
Our customers don’t care if we’re using the latest tools. They care that we’re helping them solve their problems. They want reliability. They want to feel like they’re getting value. They get that with EcoMap.