The Exchanges

Q Thank you. I think it'd be really interesting for the audience, you know, you know, in a somewhat educational way, um, to talk about your, your role. What does that actually mean, uh, chief product officer at a database company? What's your role? What are your responsibilities?

A Yeah, so I'm responsible for a few things. The first is the product strategy, right? What are the investments that we're going to take on? What are the opportunities that we're going to pause on in order to build our competitive advantage? So fend off Amazon and some of our other competitors were also attacking this, uh, this cloud native SQL market. Um, the other big thing I do is I'd say Professionalize the process of innovating and taking innovations to market. So building out a predictable way to take inputs from our field and from our customers and translate that into outputs in the form of a prioritized roadmap, the way the product managers work with the engineering team and how they enable the broader team to take those innovations to market. And so the, the black box that translates those inputs to outputs is really where I spend my time.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so I'm responsible for a few things. The first is the product strategy”

Q And so who is in your team, for example, what, what are the roles, like how does a product organization look like, uh, you know, in a competitive stage?

A Yeah. So the product team right now is about, uh, 25 people. So There are about eight product managers, so there are the four leads, and they're generally organized around user journeys or jobs to be done. This is not an obvious organization for a PM team at a database company. It's much easier to be organized around layers of the architecture components of code, but, you know, similar to the last talk, we're talking about how can we deliver value consistently, and how can we organize the PMs around particular Customer pain point. So, um, what's involved in running a query? What's involved in, um, observing that, uh, query and understanding if it's slow or not versus what's involved in, uh, recovering from a disaster. So those are some of the ways we organize the, the product management team.

AI assessment note: “product team right now is about, uh, 25 people. So There are about eight product managers”

Q product and a managed offering, what, what, what do you do with the open source, um, project? Is that something that continues to create value in terms of like sort of testing out the products and giving you ideas? Uh, how do you think about community? Uh, what, what, yeah, what, how do you, How do you think about the pure open source part of what you do these days?

A Yeah, the, the open source business is very important for us, or at least the community is very important for us because it's one of the ways that we Improve the efficiency of our enterprise sales. So one of the things we measure when we're looking at enterprise sales is, you know, what percentage of opportunities have already at least evaluated CockerDB, if not already running in production by the time our sales team reaches out and the open source product is one of the ways that we support that. So yes, it doesn't have all of the enterprise features, but you can go a long way with just that open source product. So, so that's really important. And even for the enterprise features, the source code is still available. It's under a different license, but you can still see how everything works under the hood. And this has been really important as we've started to approach more sophisticated customers. So some of the, the streaming companies are the same day, uh, delivery services that are using cockroach. Oftentimes they'll say, Hey, you know, you have great docs. We understand how your resilience model works, but we want to dig a little bit deeper. Like how exactly does this feature work? And our engineers can point them to the code. They can read it. They can get comfortable with how it works. And then they're more confident when they're, they're going into production. But the, …

AI assessment note: “it's one of the ways that we Improve the efficiency of our enterprise sales.”

Q Interesting. All right. So switching to, uh, the product itself, um, especially for people who have never been exposed to cockroach, um, what is cockroach DB and what is the fundamental value proposition?

A Yeah. So copper to be, it's a SQL database and it makes it really easy to build resilient, scalable, and low latency applications and services. And one of the things that makes this database so special is that It really makes it possible to build the types of applications and the types of architectures that you'd see coming out of an Amazon or a Microsoft or a Google, but it makes that technology available to every developers. Now any developer can build a multi-region application or a global application. And when we think about the, the major value propositions for Cockroach, we bucket it typically into three categories. So there's the resilience aspect, Right. So how do I build an always on application and how do I have a database that can survive failures, whether they're planned or unplanned? So, uh, an unplanned failure in the cloud can be a virtual machine restarting, which would result in downtime in a traditional database. So it could be a data center going down or a region going down. But, uh, there's also planned downtime, which is a pain in the neck for relational databases. Like, okay, Hey, I want to upgrade my database, or I want to do a schema change and traditional relational databases. You're going to have to take the app offline. You're going to have to lock a table. And that is really no fun for the developers and the operators. The other big Value proposition…

AI assessment note: “it's a SQL database and it makes it really easy to build resilient, scalable”

Q And another area that I think is pretty interesting for people to learn about is, um, how do you win the hearts and minds of developers? It's a very different type of audience. What are some lessons to learn there?

A Yeah, the way that we've been approaching this is helping developers do things that they couldn't do before and helping them do that faster. Right. So I talk a lot about the global applications. That's, that's very difficult to do if you're a small team. It's very difficult to do if you're a large team and removing that burden and letting them build those, you know, Fang style experiences in their applications. Whether it's a startup or a fortune, 500 that may not have the same engineering capabilities. That's something that helps a lot. Um, the other thing that we're looking at specifically focusing on time to value is, uh, Postgres compatibility. And so, you know, right now, I'd say we have practical compatibility for most of the features that developers want. We do support it, but we don't have perfect compatibility. And what that means is there are certain features and certain familiar tools in the Postgres interface that are in the Postgres ecosystem that developers are used to using. Like, hey, this is my stack. This is the IDE I like to use. This is the specific GraphQL library I like to use. Why does that work out of the box with Cockroach? They can make it work the different, uh, workarounds, but that's friction. That doesn't have to be there. So we really do look at, uh, Postgres compatibility, but of course rebuilding it to work, uh, natively in those cloud environme…

AI assessment note: “helping developers do things that they couldn't do before and helping them do that faster”

Q like, how do we not blow it? Like, how do we not capitalize on, you know, the energy, which is, um, very palpable in, in, at least in my corner of the, of the world in, in, in startups where like people really want things to change, but don't really know what to do or how to do it. Any, any, any, any thoughts you have? I'd love to hear.

A Yeah, this is something we've thought a lot about at Cockroach Labs. It's something I think a lot about personally. And one area is just accountability and transparency. So, you know, everyone Posted black squares in the, the, after the, the murder of George Floyd and he said, Hey, here's how we're going to change. Here are the programs, here are the donations we're going to do. All right, a month and a half later, two months later, where are those programs? How are they doing? What are your diversity numbers? Have you put anything in place? That's, that's the first step to me. Um, the, the second thing is realizing that it's, it's not going to be easy because one thing that we've seen is, hey, okay, these programs sound great. They're really easy to put in your OKR. Yes, we're going to spin up a rotation program, or we're going to do certain things like, oh, wow, it's, it's actually hard to, to build this pipeline. And then you say, oh, it's a pipeline problem. Well, build the, you know, you can build your own pipeline. And one of the ways that we're doing this at Cockroach Labs is really looking at those requirements. You know, I talked about what does it mean? You know, what are the requirements to be a product manager? Do you have to already be a product manager? Do you have to have a computer science background? Or can we, um, add some flexibility? Can we take on the burde…

AI assessment note: “And one area is just accountability and transparency.”

Q And then you're saying that's unusual in a, you know, database, uh, company to be organized that way. And I guess as a related thought, what, what, what, I guess problems are never solved, but, uh, once a problem gets solved, like it does that, uh, does that team get disbanded and then they move on to the next problem?

A Uh, no. So we, when we organize the product team, it's really around the product areas, which are collections of problems to be solved. So the, You know, like one problem may be queries are too slow, so we can solve that by making some changes at the storage layer. We can solve that by thinking about our query optimizer, our cost-based optimizer, and how that performs in different environments. So we never run out of problems to solve for a particular product area or set of user journeys, but, um, that is one of the reasons we organize that way, because if we organized by a feature, Features can certainly be done, but if you have categories of problems, ideally they're, they're longer running problems.

AI assessment note: “Uh, no. So we, when we organize the product team, it's really around the product areas”

Q like Cockroach cloud, you know, for Anybody in the audience that is, uh, starting an enterprise software company and, you know, starting with open source and says, yeah, at one point we'll monetize well, you know, by, by building our own, you know, cloud product. What, what's, uh, yeah, any lessons learned or like, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly of, of, of, of building something like that?

A Yeah, there are a couple big lessons. The first is that this idea of Running a managed service ourself was not an obvious one. Like first principles, we knew we wanted to remove barriers between, uh, developers and our value proposition, but we also could have done that with, uh, partnerships and licensing, right? We could have let other people run, uh, talk to the service and built the business that way and just focus on the core database. So that, that was a choice. And we decided to go more for a vertical integration, just so we could get that hands-on experience running the database. So we could get those Uh, learnings and start to feed that back into our, our product in our community. So that was one of the reasons we went with, uh, vertically integrated. Uh, the other aspect was the, the data and understanding our customers. So we don't look at the data that is in the database, but you know, where are people getting stuck when they're signing up? How long is it taking them to run that first query? That's information that was completely lost to us when we were just offering the open source and the enterprise product. The other big challenge here is a cultural one. So, you know, if you, if you think about what strategy you want to have as a business, what features you want to build, you have to think about, you know, what are the, you know, what's the, what's the market? Do…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there are a couple big lessons. The first is that this idea”

Q I guess one last question on this topic. What, what, how do you recruit people? What do you look for? What makes a good product manager?

A Yeah, that's a, that's a great question because, you know, my path to product management leadership has really Taken place over the last few years in the New York ecosystem where there are not that many classically trained or, you know, if you can, I don't know if there are any product managers that are classically trained, but they're not that many experienced product managers. So I really had to build a capability around identifying a potential, whether it's a great, uh, leadership potential or great communicators or people from say a customer success organization that really had deep empathy for the customers and figuring out how do I build programs to help close those gaps. So To date, I've really focused on those things. It's the communication, the leadership, the customer empathy, and then I focused on, all right, how can we help people understand the core problems? How can we help them understand how to work with engineer and design and understand what is the role that product plays in enabling the broader organization? But those are skills that are easier to close than some of the other ones that I mentioned. And it also gives me a personal advantage in, in hiring. Because I can hire product managers a lot faster than someone that says, Hey, you already have to be a product manager or you have to have a computer science background. So I think that's a personal competiti…

AI assessment note: “identifying a potential, whether it's a great leadership potential or great communicators”