Lessons from a Pro: Insights from Jonathan Lyons

This week, I interviewed Jonathan Lyons. Lyons is the founder of Among and Between, a boutique climate tech strategy firm, with over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship & business development.

15 Mar

⚠️ Key Takeaways

💡 How Lyons thinks: gaining experience in multi-stakeholder environments is incredibly useful; frameworks are key — learning how to build them helps you communicate with many audiences

🛫 Journey to the space: strategist in public policy → BD in energy consulting → leadership in the SaaS platform connectivity space → Among and Between

😁 What excites Lyons: role of government in new climate and energy markets; breaking down & understanding the role of strategic partnerships for corporations

👋🏽 Quick Intro!

One of the tenants of SIP is highlighting how nontraditional product roles are useful to product management. Jonathan Lyons is the perfect example of this. He has learned how to leverage those “unconventional” experiences to understand how the commercial side of the business can compliment product strategy.

With business development experience in energy and crowdfunding spaces, a startup of his own in agtech, and rich education most recently from Wharton’s MBA program, Lyons has succeeded in a number of different contexts. Those rich experiences have made Lyons a strong proponent of framework thinking, seeing it as the “language that people speak” after his 15 years innovating in those various spaces.

Lyons’s perspective as a “product-adjacent” thought leader elucidates how, even without a traditional product background, we can develop the necessary skills to be great PMs.

🎙️ The Full Story

💡 How has Lyons’s experiences affected the way he thinks about and approaches problems?

Work with great talent

Lyons attributes becoming a thought leader in product and SaaS to “osmosis, by primarily working with great PMs and organizations, and seeing how they do things.”

He credits his ability to effectively framework his exposure to “multi-stakeholder mindsets, especially in public policy.” By understanding how government and policy leaders work, what motivates large corporations, and building startups, Lyons has been able to better predict the actors and markets in which he has worked.

Develop strong frameworking skills

It is his career versatility that has given him strong framework making abilities. He has recognized the effectiveness of his ability to communicate problems and solutions through frameworks, which he now channels into his consulting work.

In launching Among and Between, he follows principles that stuck with him from his time at Wharton — the greatest corporate value is created at the intersections: “between founders and their teams, between companies and their investors, among companies and their customers, and among leaders and their external stakeholders like NGOs and strategic partners.“

Lyons studies and identifies the best practices that enable successful long-term partnerships at these intersections. Using framework thinking, he’s able to identify patterns and leverage those findings to create corporate value. He believes this to be an “underfunded area for companies.”

Use shortcuts

His interest in product comes from his view of it as a “powerful lever for change,” one that he sees as instrumental to creating impact in the coming years.

Even with having so many rich experiences, Lyons says “there are shortcuts" when becoming more product oriented. “People can get base frameworks out a lot quicker from resources like the Product School that exist now.”

Lyons believes it is critical for every person in the startup ecosystem to deeply understand the role of the product org - and especially so for people in commercial leadership functions (CRO, sales, corp dev, and success). Resources like the Product School can drastically expedite that learning process.

🛫 Lyons’s journey

Lyons started first on political campaigns before moving into public policy as an Associate at the Dewey Square Group, a political consulting firm in DC.

He learned there how to “understand the needs and desires of the people he works with,” apply political knowledge to corporate strategy, and got unique insight into the government's role in our markets.

He then attended the Wharton School of Business to get his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. It was here that he was able to act on his interests in energy and climate, joining GreenOrder, an energy and sustainability strategy consulting firm, and later Cisco Smart Grid and Gridium, developing frameworks for energy data offerings.. He then founded his own startup, Plontz, a consumer agtech startup focused on residential markets. After, he transitioned to TigerConnect, a leading clinical collaboration platform before serving most recently as Senior Director at Plume Design Inc., creating SaaS experiences for Communication Service Providers.

Through this journey, Lyons has experienced the stark contrast between working in impact-oriented fields and profit-maximization industries. His time working on SaaS platforming tools “just wasn’t intellectually satisfying”, he says. For him, it was important to apply his skills towards the most pressing issues. That feeling has now brought him back to climate and impact.

“When you think of the climate challenge globally, every sector needs to be involved,” Lyons remarked. He is intently focused on “how to generate momentum in each sector and across sectors to push climate solutions forward.”

😁 What is Lyons’ most excited about in the next year? Next decade?

Next year

Lyons is keeping a close eye on how the “political macro economy” evolves in the next year, especially the “way that the IRA and federal policies allocate what gets distributed into state and local organizations and ultimately companies.” He links the recent slowdowns in tech spending and the recent layoff economy to the explosion of interest and talent in impact-oriented fields and roles.

He calls this influx of talent into climate, “brain drain, but in a good way. Leaders are reevaluating how they can use their skills to make meaningful, lasting change.”

Next decade

“Although I’ve been working in or thinking about climate tech since 2008, for anyone thinking about a career in this space: climate and climate tech is another 30 year market, at minimum,” according to Lyons.

He is focused on how both innovation and government institutions impact the development of these markets. He believes many people still have much to learn about how the “government, non-profits, suppliers, and customers” all interact.

‼️ Learn More

If you are a founder in the climate tech space or would like to learn more about Among and Between, please reach out to Jonathan at [email protected] or www.amongbetween.com.

A huge thank you to Jonathan Lyons for contributing to our community! I am always trying to make this content more useful and impactful. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I would love to know!