Today on The Business of Tech, we’ve got an exclusive you won’t hear anywhere else.
Right now — as of February 2 — Mike Riggs is officially stepping into his new role as Chief Product Officer at Empath. And we’re the first to sit down with him to talk about it.
Empath is a platform built for managed service providers to standardize training, strengthen team accountability, and create repeatable operational practices. It emerged from the real-world experience of MSP leaders tired of spreadsheet chaos and inconsistent onboarding.
Joining Mike in the conversation is Wes Spencer, CEO and co-founder of Empath. Wes has been a visible voice in the MSP and cybersecurity community for years — as a founder, advisor, and speaker on risk, maturity, and operational excellence in the channel.
In this episode, we’re not just talking about another executive hire. This is the first public interview with Mike in his new role — and we’re exploring what this leadership change signals about Empath’s evolution. As the company moves from founder-led product direction to formalized governance and operational discipline, the questions shift from “what features come next?” to “how does dependency on a platform change the way MSPs govern their teams and systems?”
In this conversation, you’ll hear:
• Why Mike joined Empath and what he sees as his mission on day one,
• How Empath’s role in MSP workflows has evolved,
• What operational dependency looks like in practice,
• And why accountability tooling brings a different risk profile for MSPs.
Let’s get into it.
Dave Sobel:
Wes. Mike, thanks for joining me today.
Wes Spencer:
Thanks for having us.
Mike Riggs:
Yeah, thanks Dave.
Dave Sobel:
What was the problem in the product or the platform approach that made it clear to you that a Chief Product Officer was needed?
Wes Spencer:
Now when you have three founders that are not exactly technical, you do what you can with who you have and you build to your vision and you realize we’ve done a good job, but not a great job and we’re starting to outgrow our abilities.
Dave Sobel:
What was that thing that you saw here that says, yeah, I think I can really help?
Mike Riggs:
It was really Empath proving that they have product market fit right as bringing some good discipline and structure to the vision that those three have already brought to the table. I think is going to help immensely and just increase the velocity of the development on the platform itself and really just polish the overall product.
Dave Sobel:
When you come in, you have a thinking about the way you approach being a Product officer. What does that process mean for the way you would approach the continued evolution of the Empath product platform?
Mike Riggs:
The place where we started wasn’t from the technical, it wasn’t from the actual platform. It’s what do we want this thing to do? You know, what are we doing? Well, what are the things that people are raving at us about? Right? So really just building a vision and strategy of how we can deliver learning and development to the channel and even to their partners as well has, has really been the thing that has, has driven those conversations. And then naturally you start getting into the more nuanced pieces of marketing and design and engineering and those other pieces that come along with it.
Dave Sobel:
Tell me what you think. This kind of moment in the company’s development, in particular the product maturity. Where do you think that places you on the maturity cycle of a product?
Wes Spencer:
We met with one of our advisors and was working through our numbers and where we’re going. One of the things he said, he goes, wes, you’ve got the right partner account. You’re over 500 MSPs in the door. You guys are growing fast. It looks like your numbers are great, your gross margins are in check. Like, he’s going through everything with us. He’s like, you’re, you just need to put gas on the fire. This is the year of scale. We’ve got to continue to grow in scale and build into the company that we’ve already started to, to, to like sail into that true north, so to speak.
Dave Sobel:
Does that change with the way Empath has been doing work so far?
Mike Riggs:
The, the goal of the role is to bring maturity to actions that have been occurring, but maybe not with fidelity. Right. Everything from visioning what the platform is and should be doing with our partners, taking that, that part in applying our own experience and guidance to that and getting it built out. And there’s so many moving parts to that. Right. We have everything from design to engineering to marketing, to support and enablement and even, even the go to market functions there. And so to have, have this position opened up in an organization is an incredible opportunity for us to go through and start systematizing these things. Right. Things that may not have been well defined or just been happening in the background can actually become operationalized. All of these things become increasingly important once you start crossing that, because people are now starting to rely on the platform for operational requirements. It’s no longer just a convenience service. Right. People have started to deeply embed it into their own processes inside of their MSP or even inside of their customers.
Dave Sobel:
So you brought up a really good point there. And the more a, you know, MSP becomes dependent on the platform, the more they feel any potential product changes.
Mike Riggs:
Absolutely. I think a Lot of it boils down to user experience. It’s those, those, those first minutes, hours, days and even weeks inside of the platform that really set the tone for, for how, how it’s adopted inside of an organization. But then even more importantly, what is that continued experience like once it’s been onboarded? And so really the goal is to, for, for lack of a better term, consumerize the experience. Right? Everybody wants that Facebook or YouTube type of experience where it’s instant, it’s very responsive, it’s, it’s, it’s on all the devices I want and it’s anywhere I need. And so, you know, starting to stretch and, and, and bring some of those concepts into the product as we continue to grow. Yes, the experience is going to change, but it should be changing for the better. There we, we should be bringing things that are more intuitive, more usable, quicker to respond and honestly even more flexible. We can be a learning and development partner, but then even an accountability partner. And so you’ll see things come from us, just simple notifications we want to go through and allow you to have visibility into either what you’re required to do as an employee at the msp, as a manager, what your team is needing to do, but then also help with the accountability motions around that people love dopamine hits. Right? And so like quite literally when we, when we go through and build good user experiences and that deliver those rewards as you continue to progress, you know, for, for our managers and, and, and, and such, you know, starting to bring in additional tooling to help them effectively do personnel management.
Dave Sobel:
What’s the most likely wrong conclusion you think they might draw from, from this announcement?
Mike Riggs:
One thing I would hate for people to misinterpret with, with this move is that Empath isn’t in, is, is in any type of trouble. Right? This is just a, a natural, logical progression of where a company needs to head.
Wes Spencer:
At some point you have to take a step back and say we’ve got to let the right people that are far better at building the thing than us do it. And, and that’s it. And I don’t know, I, I feel like those are like natural, those are natural things to easily misunderstand. I mean, in the early days of Empath, one of the things I think we didn’ job of was explaining exactly what it was that we do. You know, when you’re in the early iterating ideas of a company, you don’t really know and so you go to market early and you tell people, hey, we’re doing this thing and you’re learning as you’re going. We had all kinds of stuff in the early days, like, you know, it seems like a coaching company, right? It’s just you’re, you’re kind of often it’s like, no, not, not at all, actually. And so we’ve gone through those iterations of like, learning from the community what they think. And so for us, I’m glad we’re having this interview because very much we want to continue to focus on the vision and let the right people help us build towards it.
Dave Sobel:
Well, gents, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain the move.
Dave Sobel:
And Mike, congratulations on the new role.
Mike Riggs:
Thank you, Dave. It was great talking to you and it was wonderful being on. Appreciate it.
The interview makes clear that this move is less about adding leadership and more about formalizing control as Empath scales.
Wes is explicit that the founders have been compensating for limited technical depth with vision and iteration, acknowledging they “did a good job, but not a great job” and were beginning to outgrow their approach. That places Empath firmly in the high-velocity, intuition-led phase typical of early product-market fit.
Mike’s explanation of his role confirms the transition underway. Rather than leading with features, he emphasizes bringing discipline and structure, systematizing actions that had previously happened informally, and adding maturity across design, engineering, marketing, support, enablement, and go-to-market motions. This is the classic shift from rapid iteration to governed execution.
The growth inflection point is explicitly tied to scale. Wes highlights crossing the 500 MSP mark as validation of product-market fit and the beginning of a new phase focused on scaling the company. That aligns with a common maturity pattern in the channel: early experimentation at one customer, early validation around ten, real traction around fifty, and then a fundamental shift around five hundred.
That five-hundred line is where tools start becoming platforms.
Mike reinforces what that scale introduces. Customers are no longer using Empath as a convenience service — they’re relying on it for operational requirements and deeply embedding it into internal processes. Once a platform reaches that level of dependency, product changes stop being incremental improvements and start carrying business impact. Stability, rollout discipline, and change management become first-order concerns.
The roadmap discussion further signals a category shift. Mike frames Empath’s evolution as moving beyond a learning management system into a learning and development partner and even an accountability partner. Notifications, visibility into required actions, and tooling aimed at personnel management move the platform from content delivery into behavior influence.
That’s a materially different role.
Training software provides resources. Accountability tooling implies performance oversight and behavioral expectations. As platforms begin shaping progress and compliance, they inevitably intersect with HR policy, managerial responsibility, and internal governance.
At the same time, the push to “consumerize the experience” highlights an emerging tension. Engagement-driven UX optimizes for ease, responsiveness, and dopamine-style feedback, while operational infrastructure demands predictability, auditability, and controlled change. As Empath becomes more embedded, balancing those priorities will become increasingly consequential for MSPs.
Even Wes’s description of bringing on a product leader as “giving away a bit of your baby” underscores the governance shift underway — a move from founder-led intuition toward formal authority and structured decision-making. That typically brings greater stability, but also slower, more deliberate evolution.
Taken together, the interview doesn’t signal trouble. It signals maturation.
But it also confirms that Empath is crossing from optional tooling into operational infrastructure — while simultaneously expanding into accountability and behavior-shaping functions.
That combination increases both value and risk.
And that’s the opportunity as well.
Business of Tech Plus members have access to the full interview to learn more.