kubell COO Shoji Fukuda on Strategy Premises, Hiring, and Operating Through Uncertainty

Shoji Fukuda, COO of kubell (formerly Chatwork), argues that rigorous debate of underlying assumptions — not strategy documents themselves — is what separates companies that adapt from those that stall.

• Fukuda separates premise from strategy: he argues that debating world-view assumptions rigorously matters more than the strategy document itself.
• He projected 2 years of COVID-driven demand and scaled inside sales; when the boom ended in 3 months, he pivoted to marketing quality, calling it a premise change, not a strategy failure.
• Chatwork embeds HRBPs inside each business unit so recruiters understand specific capability gaps before sourcing, replacing centralized HR with business-aligned talent strategy.
• He reads all inside-sales and customer-success daily reports to build customer hypotheses, substituting breadth of internal data for direct customer face time he lacks.
• 70–80% of recent mid-career hires previously used competing tools; publishing detailed IR and strategy documents shifted their perception of Chatwork’s competitive position.
• His top hiring criterion is adaptability — specifically the capacity to extract learning from ambiguous outcomes and absorb rapid strategy reversals without disengaging.
• Chatwork’s true long-term competitors are LINE, Facebook Messenger, and government SMB support programs, not messaging SaaS rivals.
• For pre-PMF startups, over-strategizing risks killing valid ideas; strategic frameworks become most powerful when shifting from product-out intuition to market-in discipline.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube