Claire Vo: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I get asked about it a lot because it's not super rare, but it's not super common either, and I think it could potentially be rising. And I'm using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. It's very different. I've done both. It's very different than a pure product or a VP product role. And so first, I talked a little bit about how I got into this role. I do think you have to be technical to do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my broad leadership skills and leverage of a great SVP to keep engineering team going. But no, actually I spent quite a bit of time on the engineering side, because as somebody who is responsible for the business outcomes of the product, one of the best ways to drive value is having a highly performant engineering team that works on a scalable platform. And so I spend a lot of time making sure that we're building the right architectural decisions, that our infrastructure meets the needs of our team, that our edge team is operating in a way that drives velocity. And I just don't think you can do that job if you don't understand how software gets built on a technical level. So I'm the kind of person that when we're doing a product review, I have the PRD up and GitHub up and I'm comparing both, because I think both sides matter. I think the other thing that's different about this role is it's quite operational, and so you really have to know about operations and organization design. Edge teams are by nature much larger than product organizations. You just think about the classic ratios, there are more people in engineering than there are in product. And the talent challenges are significantly different in engineering, whether it's the high volume of recruiting, culture-shaped challenges are different. You have to really think about org design. And so you have to have a different level of mindset around organization design and operations when you're in a CPTO role. You're on pager duty. You're getting paged at 1:00 AM if a service, if there's a Sub-Zero and it goes down. That is not what it's like to be a product leader. So you got to know what you're getting into and you have to be technical. And then the thing I would be remiss to say about this role is the P and the T get a lot of air time. Product and engineering get a lot of air time. Design data, these are such functional, very important organizations, and why these roles get... That's what the role is and how you could be good at it or whether it would be a fit for your skills. The question of why have this kind of role, and I think there's two reasons. There's the obvious strategic reason of, they're all the same thing. They're all building capital P product, they're all builders, they're the same types of folks, they're all builders, and bringing them under one house allows you to optimize for the whole, as opposed to optimize for the function. P product, they're all builders, they're the same types of folks, they're all builders, and bringing them under one house allows you to optimize for the whole, as opposed to optimize for the function. And if you can find a leader that is effective at that, I think you can get a lot of value added. And honestly, the second thing is it provides a tremendous amount of leverage to the CEO in many ways. At the end of the day, R&D is a very expensive and complicated investment the company is making, and having a single person responsible for R&D investment at the executive level is quite important, especially when you're candidly spending a lot there. And so I think it's those two things. It's, these are one team. There should be be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering, what's best for design. It should be what is best for the organization at whole. What do our customers need and what do our business needs? And then it's the accountability candidly of this quite meaningful investment against business objectives and having a singularly responsible individual to care for that investment. It sounds wonderful, having one person to deal with across all these functions.…

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