Most people who've joined a fast-growing tech company in a commercial role have lived some version of the same first week. The product is impressive. The team is talented. Everyone moves quickly and talks about impact. Then you start looking at how the business actually buys things, and the picture gets complicated fast.

Contracts nobody has reviewed in years. Software renewals processed by whoever picked up the phone. A six-figure services engagement approved because a VP liked someone at a conference. Spend scattered across dozens of suppliers with no central view, no framework, and no one particularly worried about it.

This is what I'd call the founding moment. It's uncomfortable. It's also, if you approach it right, one of the most genuinely interesting situations you can find yourself in as a commercial leader.

The mistake I made first time around

I've walked into this kind of environment more than once, and I'll be straight: I got it wrong the first time. My instinct was to build things. Category strategies, sourcing frameworks, governance structures. All the components of a mature procurement function, assembled quickly and presented to leadership as proof that the hire was worthwhile.

The problem was that the organisation wasn't ready for any of it. Stakeholders didn't trust me yet. Senior leaders didn't really understand what strategic procurement meant in practice. I was trying to install sophisticated processes into a business that, at best, thought of procurement as someone who checked contracts before they were signed.

The lesson took a while to sink in. In a founding role, the first thing you're building isn't a process or a framework. It's credibility. Everything else depends on that.

The value of slowing down early

Whatever the urge to start building in the first few months, it's worth resisting. The most productive thing you can do at the start is spend time with the people who actually run the business. Finance leads, product heads, engineering managers, the CMO. Not to introduce procurement, but to understand what's genuinely painful.

You're looking for two or three problems you can solve quickly and visibly. A negotiation on a contract someone assumed was fixed. A sourcing process completed faster than anyone expected. Something that prompts a senior person to say they didn't know procurement could do that. Those moments are currency. You use them to earn the right to build the harder, longer-term foundations. Skip that step and the following year becomes an uphill conversation with people who aren't sure they need you.

Getting the foundations right before the frameworks

There's a temptation to jump to the sophisticated stuff too soon. SRM programmes, category strategy decks, supplier scorecards. These are real and valuable, but they sit on top of something more fundamental, and without that base they tend not to stick.

The foundations are unglamorous. Basic visibility into spend and suppliers. A contracting process simple enough that people actually follow it. A sourcing approach for your highest-risk or highest-spend categories. The ability to give your CFO a clear picture of the company's top supplier relationships at any given moment. None of it is exciting. All of it is necessary before anything more sophisticated will work.

The cultural reality of high-growth tech

The people who built the company are often the ones most resistant to commercial process, and in fairness, their caution makes sense. Speed is a genuine competitive advantage in tech. Autonomy is how good engineers and product people do their best work. A procurement function that adds weeks to vendor decisions is a real problem, not a perceived one.

The conversation worth having early and often isn't about new processes. It's about being useful. Faster turnaround than expected. Practical advice rather than policy recitals. Being the person who helps a team reach a good outcome rather than the one standing between them and what they need. Over time, something shifts. Stakeholders start bringing you in at the beginning of a decision rather than the end, not because they're required to, but because they've learned that involving you leads to a better result. That shift is the real indicator that the function has taken hold. Not the savings figure. Not the framework that got signed off. The change in behaviour.

The best procurement functions I've built didn't feel like procurement to the people using them. They just felt like good commercial sense.

On why this kind of work matters

People who do founding roles well end up using a combination of skills that most procurement professionals rarely need at the same time. Strategic thinking and operational delivery. Commercial expertise and stakeholder diplomacy. It's demanding and it takes longer than you expect. There are stretches where it genuinely isn't clear whether the investment is landing.

Eighteen months in, though, looking at what's been built and the relationships that now exist, it becomes clear why it was worth the effort. Building something from nothing, in an environment that wasn't sure it needed it, is about as satisfying as this work gets.

Gerard Troy has built procurement functions from the ground up in New Zealand, the US, and the UK, most recently leading strategic sourcing across a global SaaS platform. He advises technology companies on commercial architecture and procurement transformation.

I've delivered a lot of cost savings over the course of my career. More than $40m across a single programme at one point. That work mattered and I'm proud of it. It was hard, it required real commercial skill, and it made a genuine difference to the businesses involved.

Even so, one conversation changed how I think about what procurement is actually for.

I was presenting quarterly results to a senior leadership team. The savings number was front and centre, big and clean. The CFO was nodding. Then the Chief Product Officer, someone whose team I'd worked closely with for months, said something I wasn't ready for.

"That's great. But what I actually care about is that my team can get suppliers onboarded in days, not weeks. Are we measuring that?"

We weren't. That was a problem worth taking seriously.

Why savings are a starting point, not a destination

Cost savings are easy to count. You negotiated a contract from $2m to $1.6m and that's $400k on a dashboard, clean and reportable. Finance appreciates it. Leadership sees a number they can point to. The problem is that it positions procurement as a price optimisation function, which is a narrow and ultimately limiting way to think about what commercial leadership can contribute.

It also creates the wrong incentives over time. Teams measured purely on savings will run longer processes to show bigger numbers. They'll recommend cheaper options that create downstream problems. They'll optimise the metric rather than the outcome. Most importantly, savings reporting doesn't reveal whether procurement is genuinely influencing the business or just tidying up around the edges.

What we started measuring instead

After that conversation with the CPO, we redesigned how we reported on the function. Four things ended up mattering more than we'd expected.

Speed to value. In a fast-moving tech company, the time it takes to get from identifying a need to having a supplier engaged and productive is often more expensive than the contract price itself. Tracking cycle times exposed the real bottlenecks in our process and gave us a concrete improvement story that stakeholders could actually feel, not just read about in a report.

Stakeholder NPS. Measuring satisfaction sounds soft until you consider the alternative. If business units are going around procurement because they've learned it's faster to sign things themselves, the savings number is masking a serious dysfunction. We ran a proper NPS measure and pushed it above 40 over several years. Getting there required changing how the function actually operated: faster turnaround, more practical advice, fewer unnecessary steps. The score became useful evidence that the function was genuinely working for the business, not just working around it.

Commercial risk coverage. How much of your critical spend is sitting on robust contracts? Where are the single-source dependencies? These things are hard to attach a dollar value to until something goes wrong, and by then the cost can dwarf anything on a savings dashboard. Tracking coverage gave leadership visibility into what was being protected rather than just what was being saved.

Early involvement rate. The most telling indicator of all is how often procurement is involved before a supplier has already been chosen. If teams are arriving at the contracting stage with a vendor already selected and a relationship already formed, you're doing contract administration. Getting into decisions earlier, even informally, is where the real commercial leverage sits.

Framing the conversation differently

None of this replaces savings reporting. Savings are real and every finance function I've worked with cares about them. The shift is in how you tell the story around them. Rather than reporting a number in isolation, the more useful framing connects the saving to what it enabled. Running a competitive process on a cloud infrastructure contract and completing it in three weeks, which let the engineering team start a migration on schedule, is a different conversation from simply reporting the saving. One is a transaction. The other is a contribution to how the business moves.

The functions with real influence aren't the ones with the biggest savings numbers. They're the ones that get called before a decision is made, not after it.

Report that way consistently, and over time something changes. The function stops being the team that reduces spend and starts being the team that helps the business operate with more clarity and less commercial risk. That's a considerably more interesting place to be.

Gerard Troy has led commercial and procurement functions across New Zealand, the US, and the UK, most recently managing a $200m+ technology portfolio at a global SaaS company. He works with technology businesses on building procurement functions that create genuine commercial advantage.

Ten years is a long time to spend anywhere. Long enough to watch a company go through several versions of itself, and long enough to be genuinely honest about your own role in that, the parts that worked and the parts that didn't.

I joined a fast-growing global SaaS company in 2015 to build its procurement function. The business was losing tens of millions of dollars a year at the time. The product was impressive, the culture was strong, and the commercial infrastructure was, to put it charitably, not a priority. A decade on, as the company crosses a significant milestone, I've been thinking about what that stretch of work actually taught me.

The early mistake

When I arrived, I assumed my job was to save money. That's not wrong, exactly, but it turned out to be a much narrower lens than the situation called for.

The business had spent its first years focused entirely on product, customers, and growth. Commercial process was an afterthought. Contracts went out without proper review. Software got renewed automatically. Millions of dollars in spend had essentially no oversight. The temptation was to go straight at cost reduction, show some numbers, and prove the hire had been worthwhile.

I did that, and it helped. We moved the business from heavy annual losses to its first positive free cash flow over the course of a few years, and procurement contributed to that shift. But I was telling the wrong story about it. Reporting savings when I should have been reporting value. The two things look similar from the outside, and they're quite different in practice. Savings are a transaction. Value is what earns you a seat in the room before a decision gets made.

I was reporting savings when I should have been reporting value. It took me longer than it should have to understand the difference.

When the strategy changed

The middle part of the decade brought a shift I hadn't fully anticipated. Growth slowed considerably from the extraordinary rates of the early years, and the company's response was to pivot from organic expansion toward acquiring capability through partnerships and strategic relationships. Speed became the priority, and the question changed from how to spend less to how to spend smarter and move faster.

I spent time in the US during this period, and it reframed my understanding of what procurement is actually for. The commercial conversations were less about price and more about what each relationship could unlock. Which vendor relationship could help the business scale faster than hiring alone would allow? Which partnerships gave access to capabilities that would take years to build internally? The function that adds value in that environment isn't a cost centre. It's closer to a commercial architect, building the external relationships that make the strategy possible.

The hardest thing to learn

The lesson that took longest to sink in was about culture. The company had talented people who were used to making fast, autonomous decisions. The idea that a procurement function might need to be involved in their vendor choices was, at times, genuinely unwelcome. Not because anyone was obstructive, but because they simply didn't see what it added.

My initial response was to lean on process. Clearer requirements, mandatory steps, structured approvals. Some of it landed. A fair amount generated workarounds, and I ended up technically in the loop on decisions while being practically irrelevant to them.

What eventually worked was simpler. Being genuinely useful to people rather than positioned as a checkpoint in their workflow. Turning things around faster than expected. Solving problems that hadn't occurred to anyone were procurement problems. Making it easier to do things the right way than to go around the process. Over time, stakeholders started coming to me earlier in their thinking, not because the policy required it, but because they'd found it produced better outcomes. That shift mattered more than any framework I built. It didn't appear in a savings report. It changed the nature of the role entirely.

On staying in one place

I get asked occasionally whether spending a decade with one organisation was the right call, whether I missed something by not moving around more. I don't think there's a universal answer to that. What I can say is that the value of accumulated institutional knowledge is real and considerably underrated in how procurement careers tend to be discussed.

By year five I had a clear picture of how the business actually made decisions, who the genuine influencers were regardless of title, which stakeholders needed a different approach, and where the commercial risks were quietly building. That kind of understanding doesn't come quickly. It accumulates through relationships built over time and through the education of making mistakes you don't repeat.

When the business faced genuinely difficult moments, restructuring decisions, strategic pivots, the kind of choices that determine whether a company comes through a period intact, I was part of those conversations. Not because of seniority, but because I'd spent years being useful enough that people trusted the judgment. That kind of trust is slow to build and not easy to replicate by moving frequently.

A few things worth passing on

Start earlier than feels necessary. Businesses that build commercial foundations before the pressure arrives are in a meaningfully better position than those that wait until the spend is out of control or the supplier relationships are complicated. The ones that treat it as urgent tend to spend the first two years catching up.

Build for the organisation in front of you. The processes that worked somewhere else may be exactly wrong for this culture. Read the room. Build what fits the pace and the people. Sophistication can come later. It's considerably harder to rebuild trust than to add capability to a function that already has it.

Measure beyond savings. Speed, stakeholder satisfaction, risk coverage, how early you're involved in decisions. These tell you whether the function is genuinely working or just producing a number that looks good in a quarterly review.

Spend time with the people least convinced you're useful. The product leader who thinks procurement slows things down. The engineering manager who deals directly with vendors. The CMO who signs things without review. Those relationships, when they shift, change the entire perception of what the function is for.

Procurement done well is largely invisible. Nobody talks about the contracts that held up, the supplier risks that were caught before they became problems, the deals that closed cleanly because the groundwork was done. They just experience a business that runs well.

Where things stand now

The commercial environment for SaaS businesses today is genuinely different from 2015. AI is changing how companies buy and how suppliers operate. Software costs are growing at rates well above industry averages. The pressure to demonstrate efficiency alongside growth is more acute than it's been for years.

I find that more interesting than daunting. The fundamentals haven't shifted: understand what the business needs to achieve, build the external relationships that make that possible, and make it straightforward for people to make good commercial decisions. The tools change. The context changes. The actual job stays recognisable.

Ten years in, I'm more convinced than when I started that procurement, done with genuine commercial ambition and positioned as a business function rather than an administrative one, is one of the more impactful roles in a technology company. It just takes some time to demonstrate that. Worth it, though.

Gerard Troy spent a decade building and leading the commercial and procurement function at a global SaaS company, from its early growth phase through profitability and international expansion. He advises technology businesses on procurement transformation and commercial architecture.