Zima: Looker hit its 80th-percentile target for 24 consecutive quarters
Colin Zima · How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker) · Oct 12, 2023 · at 49:20
Colin Zima, former Looker executive and Omni CEO, explains Looker's target-setting and performance leading up to its acquisition by Google.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We sort of just pick like the 80th percentile of a great business. And we said, that's our goal. And then we drew that line out for 24 quarters and hit it, which is, you know, no, no startup founder is going to be like, I am not happy with that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Colin Zima
Zima: Product management is not a craft, but domain expertise and caring
“I don't think PM is a craft at all, which is probably evident from my previous answers about, you know, the process. Like, I think a PM is literally the intersection of caring a lot and then having some domain expertise.”
Zima: Rigorous feature prioritization frameworks are a waste of time
“I just, I really think it's hard to come up with a great, like scoring framework for how to pick out the next 10 features, because I found that every single time that we tried to apply some sort of rigorous, like scoring framework to difficulty and reach and Y…”
Zima: Looker deprioritized app crashes for two years to build features
“Whereas like I had to go to the support team over and over again for probably a period of two years and say the app crashing is not a priority right now because I want to do more feature work and we can suffer through this and I know it's bad, but I don't thin…”
Zima: Looker Failed to Adapt to Modern Data Ecosystem Shifts
“Looker was not able to adapt to the changes that its sort of founding and popularization had resulted in.”
Zima: Looker's 6% spend on support drove 15-20% lift across metrics
“Even post Google, I wrote up a case study that said Google should retain Looker support because this six percent that we spend on support as a percentage of revenue is worth 15 or 20% in terms of, you know, like growth, retention, every kind of metric that we …”