Serval puts engineers in customers’ daily conversations

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 35:00

   scope is very broad. How do you organize like the cadence or the, you know, the EPD team? We are embedded with customers. So even the engineers that are not necessarily deployed, they are in the customer Slack channels. We are talking about customers nonstop. They're hearing from customers every single day. Most engineers are on at least one customer call a week. I think most of them are actually on at least a customer call a day. And so what this is, it's like immersion in a country to learn a foreign language. You become so immersed in your buyer and your customer's mindset that you understand what they want. You understand how they're thinking about things and you are adapting to their preference changes in real time. So as they're moving with the market and they're starting to talk about different products

2. 35:45

   that they're trying out and things that they're excited about, our engineers are constantly aware of all this and able to adapt very quickly. So we've decentralized product development really to the engineering team. We don't have a product function because they're the ones talking to customers every day and they're able to rapidly adapt to whatever customers are saying today and this week versus what they're saying a month ago.

3. 36:05

   That sounds like a really like natural way to keep pace with like a ripping market and changing priorities for your customers. How do you and Alex and leadership then make sense of it? Like, you know, in a traditional enterprise software company, you'd have like architectural review. Yeah, you have a control. Totally roadmap and you prioritize the roadmap and you, you know, train all your customers on the new launches.

4. 36:29

   And you'd communicate with your customers that like things aren't going to change too fast because they can only absorb it so fast, too. Yeah, it's a big challenge. Our product ships and changes faster a lot of times than anyone can keep up, including myself. We just try to make sure that, one, the engineers that we hire are really product oriented. That's one change we've made is they have to really understand our customers and we want to put them in front of our customers because they're going to have to make so many decisions at the edge.

5. 36:53

   and not every single product decision can be bubbled up to leadership every single time. That is a fundamental change is you have to be willing to push a lot of the product decision-making down below and you have to be willing to move fast and also undo and revert if you go in the wrong direction and kill your darlings. You have to be willing to change course on things that you thought were fundamental to the product and switch gears when your engineers bring you something that, hey, this is how the customer sees things now and this is what we should do differently.

6. 37:21

   And one of the things I'm proudest of at Serval is how many times we've decided to erase things we've done in the past that we're very committed to and just say, you know what, the market's changed, the customer's changed, we're going to do things entirely different. And I think that is what's enabled us to keep up is that ability and willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over again. It's one of the most durable things in this era.

7. 37:43

   Thanks, Jake. Thanks for joining us.