 Hey everyone, this is Carlos and the founder and CEO at Product School and today I'm here with Samit Arora who's the Chief Development Officer at ThoughtSport. Hello Carlos and hello everyone. So good to be here with you Carlos today. Thanks for joining the show. So Samit is a long time, he was a long time executive at Cisco. You were there for a long period of time and then you joined ThoughtSport. So while you give us a bit more of background around like how you broke into tech, how you grew to become an executive and then tell us more about what you do today. Sure, absolutely. I think Carlos, my journey as you currently pointed out, I spent quite a lot of time at Cisco and that was a beautiful journey. I started off as an engineer. I would say that was pretty much my first main job after school, after engineering school which I did in India and at Cisco it was a great career, grew from an engineer to be a business leader, running a multi-billion dollar business focused on service provider networking. We built a lot of great things, great teams, great products that form the backbone of the internet, great culture, built businesses around them but maybe what is a little different about me in that journey is that I changed domains. So I moved after spending two decades in networking and being almost like an industry leader there, I moved to ThoughtSport which is a domain change and not many people do that. So I refused to remain comfortable and continue and chose to join this domain of data and analytics with ThoughtSport. That's a little bit of my journey there Carlos. So I need to ask you this because you were an SVP and a GM at Cisco which is a huge deal. So what did they tell you at ThoughtSport for you to then switch domains and pretty much join a startup? Yeah, so I think both what they tell you and what you want, it's a combination. I think the thing I really liked about ThoughtSport is the team and the talent but the thing that I always focus on is the mindset and I noticed very quickly through interactions with the ThoughtSport team that the team has a growth mindset, people with a growth mindset. So if you think of it from my perspective, if I am making a domain change, obviously I'll bring some skills but I also have a lot to learn and I was looking to be with people who have this mindset that believes that people can learn and transition domains and can do very well in a new domain. So this growth mindset was the big deal. Of course, there are other things like being a unicorn, trying to solve a difficult problem. So ThoughtSport, the people and the team were the first attraction, Carlos, but there's a lot more I can talk about there. Yeah, let's go a little bit deeper because you mentioned ThoughtSport, it's now a unicorn, but for some people who don't know about it, can you tell us a bit more about the company today and what's the problem that they're trying to solve? Yeah, I would love to. So ThoughtSport is in the domain of data and analytics, like I said. The big mission statement for ThoughtSport is to help create a more fact-driven world and we want to do that by enabling every knowledge worker to have access to insights. Now, Carlos, the big problem statement is that almost every analytics product that has been built so far has been built with a focus on the analyst and that's a good thing, that's a beautiful thing. But what is different about ThoughtSport is we built the product as a powerful tool for the analyst, but with a much, much wider aperture. The aperture being your knowledge, common knowledge worker. Anyone anywhere should be able to access insights from that companies, that corporations, that value chains data in simple ways. So simple, smart and actionable analytics for everyone and that is not an easy problem because it ties directly to adoption of analytics and that culture in an organization. So that's the big problem statement that ThoughtSport began with. I agree with you that analytics used to be for analysts or for data people and it seemed like you had to have a technical degree or a lot of experience in order to really ask some questions to your database. Now we're going through a transformation where regardless of your background, your role in the company, it's okay to get access to information and hopefully you can consult this database in an organic language. You don't even need CQL in some cases. But just give me a more tangible example. Let's say I'm a product manager like a lot of people in the audience without strong technical background and they just want to check something related to their website traffic. How can they go about that? Yeah, I know you asked me a specific question on the website traffic, but you asked me about the product manager. So I'm going to give you a two-part answer there Carlos. First, if you're a product manager, you are building a product. And if you are building a product, and let's say that a lot of product managers today, the product is delivered through an application. So think about your users and your users who are using that application. So the first thing I want to mention Carlos is the concept of ThoughtSpot, the mission actually extends to this world of the application that is being built. If you embed ThoughtSpot into your application, you are essentially also including your application's users in that ecosystem of knowledge workers who can easily then in a smart, simple and actionable fashion access insights about your app, about their usage, whatever it is that you want to do to engage people. Now your specific question, which is you've built this app, you have website traffic, you want to analyze it. With ThoughtSpot, what you can do is you can actually analyze literally all the clickstream data. For example, everything that a user came and did on this app, you can collect that and then analyze it with ThoughtSpot. And ThoughtSpot can actually help you maybe, for example, you could find out how many people visited the pricing page and then ended up buying versus how many people actually visited only the homepage. So your, what we call as customer journey analytics or user journey analytics. As people came to your website, what did they do? What was their journey and where were they most likely to end up buying your product from? Through which journey? And then you can optimize, you can apply growth techniques to really optimize that journey to do that. And for doing that, you don't need to write hundreds of lines of SQL. With ThoughtSpot, it's like search. It's like a search engine. It's as easy as a simple keyword search and maybe a three keyword or a five keyword search. Carnot in most cases replaces hundreds of lines of SQL. And it's at your fingertips. You ask a question through search, you get the answer, you get the next question. When you look at that answer, you have the next question. So you ask the next question again through search and it's very simple. It's really a natural language like, and there is no limit to your curiosity. You can drill down, you can go all the way down. There is no limits to what you can ask and every person can ask. Every product manager can ask. We don't need any SQL backup. I think that is the key for a lot of PMs. The fact that you can ask in simple terms, it's a huge trend in product called NoCode. It's about really empowering creators to just build something without having to understand exactly the little details. So having those type of visual interfaces are empowering a lot of more people, creators, users, customers to understand what's going on and then use that to make the next move. Absolutely. Well said. So I know it's your title is Chief Development Officer. It's really interesting that we've hosted a lot of Chief Product Officers, VP's of Product CEOs. You are officially the first Chief Development Officer on the product podcast. What does that mean? Yeah, that's a question that comes up, Carlos. And it's actually something that is now beginning to happen more. So functionally, a Chief Development Officer has engineering and product management typically in their function. In ThoughtSpot, we have integrated engineering, product management, and information security together as functions. The idea is to make sure that we have closed linkages between these functions and we are reducing execution impedance. But the big leadership role here, Carlos, is about actually creating a product development system or engine, as I call it, a software engine or a product engine, where the best ideas, the most creative ideas, whether they come from our customers or from our employees, they are able to go from idea to value created for our customers in the fastest possible time and with highest productivity. So how do you create such an engine, such a system, such an organization where these best ideas can get selected and move forward? So that's kind of job number one. And then the other angle with the CDO role, which is why it is built that way, it's about scale. How are you able to scale a company to multiple product lines? And then the role of the Chief Development Officer is to invest wisely and really empower leaders to grow their businesses and scale them. And these could be multiple businesses. So that's generally what we do here. So in terms of the team that is part of Chief Development Officer, is there any, how many people report to you and what are their roles? Yeah. So the size of the team depends on the company in my company, obviously, Engineering Product Management InfoSec. So if you look at the people, there is engineering function, there is product head of product management, there is product line leaders. So we have three product lines at ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot, our ThoughtSpot everywhere, which is our embedded analytics for app developers. And then our functionality for operational analytics, which is about taking analytics from analytics systems and actually moving them back to your applications where the users are. So these three product line leaders are also part of this organization. And then, of course, there is the InfoSec team, which is a critical, critical part of any company. Got it. So you see this role as appeared to the CTO and the CPO? The CTO role, in this case, the Chief Product Officer role is actually part of the CTO organization. That's how it is structured. Yeah. Okay. So that's really cool. Like I'm learning. And it's so incredible to see how these product organizations have evolved. Because back in the day, the product team was one product manager. And now we're seeing how there are so many more flavors to it. And there's no just one single, one size fit all solution, depending on how the organization evolves, you can create your own product organization. So how has that evolved for you compared to your experience building products at Cisco and now building products at ThoughtSpot? Is there any specific like high level methodologies or things that you think that are different today? Oh, yeah. I mean, the whole world is changing. And I think Carlos, you and I were chatting before we came here. And like you said, we are all learning and growing together. So I'll just share what's going on at ThoughtSpot. Clearly, the big change for us over the last couple of years has been the power of the cloud as data has moved more and more and is moving more and more to the cloud. We are also evolving as a SaaS company, as a cloud company, cloud first company. And how you build products in a cloud first world is very different. And for us, what that means is if I were to kind of look at describe it in three bullet points, I would say the following. One is the concept phase of a product, where you do a product hypothesis and you validate that has become a lot more democratic. You have to get the best ideas from everyone in our hackathons at ThoughtSpot. We have almost everybody participating and it's just flowing with ideas. And you have to do that. So the concept phase has become very democratic. Second is the phase from concept to development to deployment. That loop between the developer and the user is fully connected. And it's like a high velocity closed loop now. That was not the case in the past. In the past, your concept to when a user used your product could be quarters, could be years. That's no longer true. You are able to do this very fast. And you're also able to get feedback, which was very difficult to get in the past. So that's the second thing that has happened. And the third thing that has happened is this constant ability to digitize the entire experience of the product itself. So whether, you know, from all the way from the developer to the user, the entire pipeline is fully measured, instrumented, measured. You can get the metrics. You can get telemetry. You can learn from it. And you iterate your way to your North Star product objective. And this entire technique has really evolved in the last few years. And it's very different for us. For me, coming from a very different background to here, absolutely has been a huge change. So let's say we're all in the cloud right now. We understand that everything is more about recurring subscription products and less so about just buying something and keeping it in house. What is that next frontier in terms of product management? What do you think it's some of those major trends that are going to change everything again the same way cloud did? Yeah. So I think one thing that is very different that we are seeing, and I'll probably say this more from an enterprise software company background. It's more common in the consumer world. But one thing that is absolutely taking more root now. And I think every product manager should take this to heart. So of course, building products in the cloud, like you said, that's a given. But the second piece is even in the B2B environment, because at the end of the day, when you're building a product for other enterprises, whether they use your product for their employees or they put your product inside of their app with our hotspot everywhere product, there is a user or a consumer at the back of that. And the focus on that consumer or user is so important. So one of the things we have invested, and I think it's a little unique for us is we've invested in a growth team, which is different. It's not normal for an enterprise company. It's very normal for a consumer focused company. And this understanding of growth, which is the ability to look at user journeys and nudge and enable users so that your features are not just being launched, but they are actually landing correctly with users is something that every product manager needs to understand. So I think over the next one to two years, I expect this to be like a DNA thing for us. And that's kind of my big focus area as well right now, Carlos. So what I heard when you talk about growth for enterprise team is the adoption of certain features at the enterprise level. Correct. So adoption of the feature at the enterprise level having a success metric for the feature that, hey, how am I going to measure the success of this feature? And then working backwards from that success metric in terms of what levers do I have to make sure that that success metric happens. And then working backwards from there to make sure you have the right instrumentation, and then being able to really, really improve the experience and the outcomes. More importantly, the outcomes as well for your users. So applying these growth techniques, which were more common in the consumer domain, now to the enterprise domain, I think it's something that I see as a major thing. And at ThoughtSport, we do it not just for our mainline product, but we also do it because a lot of product managers Carlos are embedding ThoughtSport into their application using our ThoughtSport everywhere product. So we want those application users to also feel very engaged with the analytics that is being served. And that user acquisition, engagement and retention, we do it through the growth techniques. And that's where the big changes go ahead Carlos. You know, one thing that is part of that theme of growth, I've noticed in a lot of enterprise companies is integrations. It's switching the mindset from trying to build every single feature to become the platform, the single source of truth to being actually, you know, more of an integrator with other tools where the data flows. So you instead of having to reinvent the wheel and try to be okay at everything, you try to be the best, but that brings an additional complexity, which is creating an easy way to integrate between your tool and many tools some of them don't even exist yet. So how do you go about that? Great question, great question. So, you know, some very solid points in your question itself Carlos. One is the point you made about complexity and the other is the point you made about leverage, right? By integrating, especially in the cloud ecosystem, by integrating very well with other apps, you are creating a much, much more valuable solution. There is no question. And there is no point building those things, it's better to integrate and leverage. So we are all on that. But the complexity point is an important one, right? And at ThoughtSpot we have this philosophy called less input, more output. And when I say that, it's for the user. We want the user to be able to do their, get their outcome with the minimal input possible. That's why we try to build a very smart system. And so what we do Carlos there is we look at the end-to-end user journey across these tools and applications, including ThoughtSpot. And our goal number one is how do we make things so intelligent and so auto, we call it auto-magical, right? So we try to look at logs from other tools, look at usage patterns from other tools, and we try to actually pre-do things for the user in such a way that we drive down complexity. Because removing complexity and making things simple is actually the most difficult thing Carlos. So that's just one example of how we try to do that. Let's say I'm a CPO and I'm hearing you talk, I'm like, okay, this makes sense. But I already have slack. I have a data warehouse. I have an analytics, a data visualization tool out there. And I'm trying to create this puzzle in my mind to know how can I simplify this whole equation and make sure that the different teams that need access to data can do it in real time and the data is consistent. What would you say are some best practices for people to get the most out of your tool even before they have your tool? Yeah. So I think, look, having clean data, having data governance, security, trust, these are the normal answers. And they are important, absolutely important Carlos. But I think the number one best practice to be successful with the tool like ThoughtSpot is actually the culture around data that you want to build. The best best practice is what is the culture you desire. You look at any value chain, we are all parts of value chain, any value chain, any value chain today is getting connected and digitized and a lot of telemetry is beginning to come. If your value chain values delivered through an application, you are more likely a data application than just a software application. So when I talk about culture, what I mean is if you, your goal, first goal is do you want analytics to be like this ether that is available to everyone, wherever they are. If that is the goal, because you want the best decisions to be made by pretty much every person who's involved in that value chain. If that is the goal, which I think it is, then the best practice is to first focus on that cultural objective and then choose the tool that really lets you do that. And as far as ThoughtSpot is concerned with ThoughtSpot, we are well connected to the modern SaaS application like Slack and others. We are well connected to the modern data warehouses or so we call it as the modern data stack. And we are almost like the analytics operating system in the middle, which is ready for any human, including the analysts, including the business user, including any knowledge worker to be able to get the most out of this data and not just get the most out of this data in terms of analyzing it, but also taking action on that data by, because we are connected to these SaaS applications, which are all part of the workflow. So you can trigger the actions there. So yeah, the best practice to be candid, Karnos is on the culture that you want, which is spreading the value of analytics to everyone. And I'm actually going through that journey. I told my team this data culture is a journey. When companies start, they don't have the resources to invest that heavily into the entire stack, although that doesn't mean that they should invest in just understanding data, but it's true that it gets to a point where this becomes much more complex and there are more applications and there are more people and there's more inconsistencies. And, you know, taking those baby steps that allow team members to have some wins along the way feel it's really important because I've been in projects before where there is no visibility and you hear stories around, well, we're working on something and then it's almost scary because you don't know if that new data stack is going to remove your job, make your job less efficient. And I noticed that by involving the team members and allowing them to try and see that, yes, there's something that maybe the machine can't do yet, but maybe we can see how many users visited us last week and how that connects to something else is just a good way to be part of that culture. Absolutely, absolutely. And you said it right, you know, you start, it's like any change management. You start with some people, they're like agents of change and you spread the goodness that way, absolutely. Product management, in a way, it's extremely data driven. And there was, when I started the company, there was this misconception around, well, you have to be a visionary, you have to be born a product manager. And it's not true, you can learn it, there are some hard skills and data is at the middle. And of course, I agree there is some art to it and intuition and experience that you acquire with time, but you can't just rely on that. There's a lot of data points out there, both quantitative and qualitative and you can't just miss. Absolutely, absolutely. And your point on qualitative is important Carlos, because a lot of times, yes, data is important and we want it, we want measured, we want to analyze it, but talking to users and collecting the qualitative input and really going behind the need, the symptom to the need, the need is so, so critical in that whole process. So to me, I want to use the last seven minutes of the interview to go back to your own personal story, because when you introduce yourself, you were very humble and you said, you started some engineering at Cisco and then you started business as a, you got promoted through business manager. So I just want to understand from your own perspective, what are some of those marks of great leadership? What really helped you grow to where you are today? Yeah, so I think, sure, I'll share that. I think, look, leadership is associated with many attributes. People talk about being able to provide direction during uncertainty, inspiring teams around compelling missions, and those are very, very important ones. Lately, I have been focused on one other aspect of leadership, which is to be a multiplier. And what that means is how do you kind of be there, but not be there, right? It's almost like being this oil in an engine, the engine is humming, the oil is there, but kind of people don't look at the oil, right? So how do you create a system where a lot of people or all the people in your organization are able to operate at their potential? And therefore, your organization is firing on all cylinders, right? And I think that is kind of what I have been really focused on, you know, developing more and more as a leader. Now, there is one more angle that I'll share with you, which is important in my journey. And that is the value of persistence. Because when you're trying to create value as a product manager, it's possible and likely that you have to solve a hard problem to create that big value. And it is a hard problem. So, you know, hard problems require, they don't, you don't achieve overnight success. You know, whether you're building the largest routing or networking systems in the world, or at ThoughtSpot, whether you are trying to really widen the aperture and bring every knowledge worker that access to simple, smart and actionable analytics, right? To do that is not simple, not at all. In fact, ThoughtSpot, our founder says this all the time, we are only 2% done. So, it is a tough problem. But persistence that we will make progress, even if it is by inches, and we will never give up, I think that is the other aspect that I look at, besides being that multiplier. So, those are my few notes on leadership today. I like what you, I like both, especially the first one multiplier, I'm going to take it for me. The second one, I use the same, I just call it quick wins, but it's basically that persistence that you are talking about knowing that you are still a working progress. Yeah, absolutely. So, if you were to go back to your early beginnings and give some advice to that younger summit, what would you say? Advice to the younger summit, okay. All right, maybe just a two-part thing, right? I would stick to the three words that I've always stuck to, which is adapt, learn, and make impact to your organization. So, that's a given, but there are two things which I think I would absolutely add to that. One is, when you imagine your career, think in terms of a decade. Don't think in the next two, three, four years. I mean, that's okay to think that, but always think a 10-year horizon. It'll help you make better decisions. Think of the skills you want in 10 years, work backwards from that, right? The big skills and work backwards from that. That's an advice I wish I had given myself, you know, when I was young. So, that's one. And maybe one other, which is absolutely something I have learned more and more, surround yourself with people who have a growth mindset. Because these are the people who will then believe that you can learn, you can do, you can change. And when you have those people around you and you have that willingness to adapt, learn, and make impact, you will do well. So, that's what I would tell Thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure to learn from you. Absolutely, Carlos. Really enjoyed it. And love to see you in Spain as well. I know you're based in San Francisco, but Spain is beautiful as well. So, would love to see you sometime. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye bye.