The CEO view: David Battat on the strategic and tactical value of Sugarwork

David Battat led an $800MM Nasdaq-listed medical supplies company as CEO for nearly 14 years until its acquisition in August 2024. He made the initial decision to partner with Sugarwork to ensure the organization could retain knowledge from highly-skilled, hard-to-find employees. But he quickly realized that Sugarwork was also a strategic tool. We asked him a few questions about his view on Sugarwork from a management perspective.

How did your company leverage Sugarwork with regards to your original goal of retaining knowledge from highly-skilled employees?

We had a risk in terms of a lot of specialized tacit knowledge being held by a relatively small number of employees. Originally, we began to work with Sugarwork to capture this knowledge from our blue collar workers — fewer younger workers were interested in learning the skills we needed, such as plastic molding, and we really needed to keep this knowledge in-house. But we quickly widened the scope across other departments. Sugarwork was leveraged across engineering, manufacturing operations, and talent development, and provided employees with a prescribed way to capture and transfer knowledge.

Can you walk us through how you began to see Sugarwork as a strategic tool? What was the challenge it solved?

Sure. In an R&D world where you’re trying to pursue new opportunities and do things that you’ve never done, you really need to understand the talent that you have. Every manager is going to say “I need five more people.” But from my level, I need to be sure we prioritize two kinds of hires; either the people who are going to keep the lights on tomorrow if we lose a skill, or the critical skill that helps us get that R&D project moving forward.

Can you elaborate on how that plays out day-to-day?

In a highly-skilled and regulated industry such as ours, finding the right hires takes time, and onboarding them can take up to a year. One or two key people leaving the company can result in it losing the race to file a patent, which means that months or years of investment and future potential profits are lost.

I’ve gone into meetings and said “I think we should do X”, and received enthusiastic responses. However, the reality can look very different when you dive down several layers deeper and ask “Do our people possess the right skills? Should we invest millions in this specialized equipment just yet? What if this key person leaves?”

And how did Sugarwork solve this challenge of understanding your skills?

Prior to Sugarwork I would look at the number of R&D engineers we had available, and assume that we would be able to pursue certain goals based on their skills. But with Sugarwork, all of a sudden I had this detailed map of where we were, and it was very clear to me that some of the products we wanted to pursue were not possible unless we added a lot of specialized talent. Sugarwork helped me realize that just because someone was in R&D, it didn’t necessarily mean we had the right skills to move forward with our product roadmap. Given the precious time and investment it takes to find and onboard skilled talent, this was a hugely valuable insight.

How would you describe making a business case for Sugarwork?

I like to talk about this in terms of time. If you spend a year bringing someone up to speed and they leave, not only have you lost that year, you’ve also lost a second year training someone new, and that’s only if you find someone immediately. So you can see very quickly how much time can be lost when you’re hostage to a small number of highly skilled people, who hold very specific knowledge. But on the flipside, any tool that’s going to help you onboard people more quickly is really helpful. That is one side of the business case.

And on the strategy level, you really need to draw the connection between growth and talent, and what you can execute on is what matters for growth. Sugarwork was valuable for us here in terms of executing our strategy, by making sure we had the right talent.

Any final observations from working with Sugarwork?

In terms of the original reason to work with it, Sugarwork delivered in two ways. First, it offered a prescribed set of steps to follow, which helped the process. Second, it gave management visibility into the depth of knowledge we were capturing, and where we were in the process. Since knowledge transfer is a task that is important but not urgent, this helped everyone understand it was an imperative for the organization.

And in terms of its strategic value, it really helped us ensure that we were able to make smart choices about what to prioritize and how to execute on our product development plans.

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