Shadi Rostami:

People talk about 10x engineers, people who are giving back 10 times more than a mediocre engineer. To me, a 10x engineer is not somebody who writes 10 times more code. A 10x engineer is somebody who basically understand the customer, makes the right trade-offs, know what problem they’re solving. And I think having that perspective helped them build a better design. Engineers own the product experience. Just that ownership that I’m not just building to expect. I have an opinion that’s a very, very important part of our culture.

David Joy:

What is up everyone? And thanks for tuning in. In today’s episode of The Big Ideas in APAC Collector Podcast, I speak to Shadi Rostami who is the senior VP at Amplitude. We talk about Shadi’s amazing careers spanning across Palo Alto Networks and Amplitude and dive into her leadership philosophy and engineering principles. It’s a really fun conversations where Shadi is dropping golden nuggets on how to build successful engineering teams that are customer obsessed and outcome driven. So pump up that volume and get ready for this brilliant conversation with Shadi Rostami. All right. So welcome to the podcast, Shadi. How are you doing?

Shadi Rostami:

Very good. Very excited to be chatting with you today, David. Thanks for having me.

David Joy:

So how was your weekend? Anything special you did this weekend?

Shadi Rostami:

Weekend was good actually. I went to a little bit of a hike, which was nice. I felt like I moved a little bit, but that gave me good energy.

David Joy:

I think we all need something over the weekend that centers us, gives us the energy to come back into the week. I’m also like that. I live in Dallas so I don’t get a lot of hiking to do, but I go out and try to play some sports. It’s great to have you on the podcast again. I know we had just connected about a few weeks ago and now we are finally recording. It’s exciting to have you.

Shadi Rostami:

Very, very excited. Yes. And you should move to California or come to California and do some hiking with us.

David Joy:

I will give it a shot. I lived there briefly, had a great time, but I just felt like Dallas was my place. This is where we are. All right, so as we begin, right Shadi, and I know we joked about how Shadi actually means marriage because in India that’s the word, but I’m so familiar with the word Shadi and your name is Shadi Rostami. You have this amazing name. Have you ever thought about meeting people? And if you meet Indian people, have you ever introduced your name and they come back to you saying that’s an interesting name. Has that ever happened?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, that happens almost every time. When I meet an Indian fellow and I basically introduce myself, what’s your name? I say Shadi. And first they look at me and say what? I say Shadi. And then they say, how do you spell it? And then they said, do you know what it means in India? And I said, yes, of course I know it means marriage and I have the most popular website, shadi.com. I think it’s one of the most popular website in the world. I feel very basically honored. But I also joke and say actually in Farsi, Shadi means happiness. And I say probably all of these languages have common roots. If you go back thousands of years ago, marriage and happiness were the same and then they diverge. So one became Shadi as happiness in Farsi and Shadi as marriage remained in Indian.

David Joy:

That’s awesome. I mean I love the fact that you’re able to relate those and you seem like a very happy person and I’m really happy to have you on the podcast. All right, so as we begin, I wanted to start the conversation asking you about what your current role at Amplitude is. Tell us about what you do and kick us off and let the people know Shadi Rostami a little bit.

Shadi Rostami:

Yes, definitely. So I’m actually SVP of Engineering Care at Amplitude. I’m responsible for our engineering, entire engineering support and security at Amplitude. And I’ve been with Amplitude four and a half years and have had a very excited journey with Amplitude.

David Joy:

Now that you’re the SVP of Engineering at Amplitude, it’s definitely at some point in your career you chose that you wanted to do engineering somewhere when there was a young Shadi growing up and you’re like, yeah, I want to do engineering, something like that. So tell us a little bit about that. What made you choose a career in engineering and what were the motivations?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, actually when I grew up, my dad wanted me to be a doctor. And actually my dad was a math teacher, but for some reason he thought that being a medical doctor is the best path to go. He kind of encouraged in his own terms, but kind of forced me and my brother to be thinking about that path. My brother is actually a physician. He followed through that. He did that. I was the one who was rebellious and I really loved math and physics when I was in high school and middle school and I tried to go into the path of biology and medical, but then I realized this is not for me and I’m not going to be good at it. I went and cried with him and told him that no, please let me go back. And of course he agreed and I went back to the math physics path and eventually went to engineering, which I really am really passionate about.

David Joy:

Yeah. How long have you been in tech now? If we quantify that, you writing your first program to now, how many years would that be?

Shadi Rostami:

Oh, I think you’re trying to guess my age by asking that question. I’m kidding.

David Joy:

Okay. It’s been a couple of decades. Should we say that? Would that be a good-

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:06:08]. No, actually it’s okay. You can know my age. I don’t have any problem with that. I did my first programming in basic languages and then I actually did Pascal programming when I was in high school. When I was in high school, there’s this international competition called Computer Olympiads. So I was part of the Iranian team that went to the International Olympiads. And we did actually… I was junior in high school, actually I was a senior in high school when we went to the international one and we a lot of… We had a whole camp of learning how to do programming languages, all of algorithms and so on and so forth. So that was in 1994. Since 1994, I’m coding a lot.

David Joy:

That’s amazing. Olympiads are generally the top of the top. People go in there and to win that is a pretty big deal, I feel like. That’s awesome. Was there anything that happened early on that really made you feel like this is what I should be doing? Engineering was just purely because you were like, well I don’t want to be a physician or a doctor, so I’ll just do engineering. Was that the decision?

Shadi Rostami:

I really like math problem solving and parts of me also when I was growing up in Iran, they would tell yourself that, oh, girls are not as smart as boys. And I joke with my friends is that my rebellion against the system was that to prove them wrong, that we can do everything that boys can do as a teenage girl, but I really love math and problem solving. I could go on and on and then when I start actually programming and learn program languages, I remember my first programming when I was in middle school. I didn’t have a computer at home, so I would go and write down all of these codes at home on a piece of paper, paper. I would go to school at 6:30 in the morning because the computer lab would open up at 6:30 and I would go and do my programming there and get the results. Just seeing that I’m creating something was very fulfilling for me. And also one other thing is that I’m not very good with my hands.

So if you tell me to go build a box, I’m not going to do a very good job. But here I can build something without actually using my hands and sewing or whatever. So that felt very satisfying and a high sense of accomplishment. That got me excited.

David Joy:

Yeah, no, I can relate with that because the first programming language that I got introduced to was I think C++ Backend. And so we had to do object oriented programming and I was like, I don’t know what this is the theory. I didn’t really like it initially, but then I started writing some code and I don’t know if you remember, we had to write [inaudible 00:09:02] and Fibonacci and the whole idea of writing, turn lines of code and then seeing it kind of pop out, you felt a sense of accomplishment in that. And so computer lab was mostly my favorite place to be because growing up in India, that was the only place we had some sort of internet access. So while we would write and run our programs, we would also go and check out American Online or MySpace and check and see what’s happening there. So it was exciting from that point of view for myself. I can completely relate with this idea of writing something, influencing or solving a problem.

From there on, you’ve started a career in computer engineering with a software engineer, and I believe you had a long tenure at Palo Alto, right? And I went through it on LinkedIn. So many amazing things that you’ve done. Tell us a little bit about starting your career and then Palo Alto, how the software engineering experience was for you.

Shadi Rostami:

I got my passion in Iran and then I went to graduate school in Vancouver, Canada. I went there in 1998. I remember in 1999 I could just get a master and graduate and everybody was telling me the market is hot, come and this is time to go. And I said, no, no, I love research. I’m going to stay at school. So I stayed there and I left school when the market has collapsed, the dot com boom has busted. But what I learned actually throughout that process is that I really liked it, but I’m not patient enough to just do research. I like to see the result of my work. I like to build and see it happening. It’s impacting right away. And it’s good to know your own weaknesses and patience is not my virtue. So that’s why I said, okay, I’m going to go work in industry.

I work at a couple of startups and they were not successful, but actually I learned a lot during that journey and actually recommend people in their… I tell my daughters who are now in college students that your first job is so important. And I think I really liked that I was in a startup because the good thing about startup is there’s a lack of resources, which means that you get a big area of ownership. And that basically helped me. I was working, I was a new college graduate, I did some project and then I think I did okay, I did good. But then they wanted to build a new product line and they offered it to me as somebody who was just a few months of experience, which doesn’t happen if you’re working at the big company. So I really liked that. I work on that and as I said, I learned in these two startups and again a lot of technical expertise.

And then eventually I decided to join Palo Alto Network. Palo Alto Networks was another startup. This was my third startup. When I joined Palo Alto, it was 40 people. It was a very tiny startup. We didn’t know whether we are going to make it or not. Actually it was in 2007 that I joined Palo Alto and then there was a whole subprime issue and financial issue in 2008 and so on. So there was point that we were questioning whether we’re going to make it or not, but it was an amazing company. I actually stayed there for 11 years and I grew with the company. I think when I left we were about 8,000 people. So it was amazing to see the growth and to see all of the exciting problem that we are solving for our customers.

David Joy:

One of the things you said that I really connect with a lot is this idea of working in startups when you are early in your career, right? Because it exposes you to different problems that you won’t get to get exposed to when you’re working in a big company. I also feel like it gives you opportunities to figure out if you have some sense of leadership capabilities because when you’re in a startup environment, it’s either you own up and be accountable for something that you feel is missing or you’re just somebody who is waiting for instructions. I wanted to talk about what you said about Palo Alto. Now that you’re a leader, right? Give us an idea from that tenure that you’ve had, how did that experience at Palo Alto help you shape your perspective on engineering and leadership? Because you went from 40 people to 8,000 people and that’s a big scale. So you’re growing with the company.

You got lucky, third time lucky with your third company. Tell us a little bit about, because now you’re a great leader at Amplitude, so I’m pretty sure you learned something there. What was that like?

Shadi Rostami:

A couple of things I really liked is that it’s actually very important for me. One of the important values that we have at Palo Alto was the ownership. And I actually… That’s part of the reason that you mentioned that it’s good to be in a startup because you feel that a high sense of ownership, you’re responsible for something. You’re not just a tiny little fish in a big pond, but the ownership actually, if you have that culture, it can happen as the company grows. I remember once I went to my VP at the time at Palo Alto and I said, “Rajiva, I don’t know, shall I do A or B?” And he told me, “If it was your own money and your own company, what would you make? What you make? What decision would you make? What would you decide?” And I said, “I would probably do A,” he said, “Then you know the answer, you don’t need to even come and ask me.”

Just going with that mindset of am I making the right decision if it was… And then aligning thinking about your growth while thinking about the company growth. It’s not two different things. I think that is very important and I think that ownership was very important. When I decided to join Amplitude, I wanted to make sure that culture existed and it’s one of their values and that’s why I felt like I’m connected. I have changed it a little bit slightly what my VP told me at the time, and I say I actually hire founders. I don’t hire employees. I wanted to be that founder mindset and I always tell people, put your founder hat on and tell me what you should be doing here. That mindset, it’s so critical. Of course, ownership is also, accountability is important. So you feel a sense of ownership, you dive into different areas, but you hold other people and hold yourself accountable to deliver that outcome.

That was one of the most important thing that I’ve seen actually. Sometimes you see counter example of when things go wrong. So for example, if you see at a company that people who are empire builders and all they think about how big their team becomes so they feel more powerful. If it was your own money, you would not be going hiring people and paying them a lot just to feel more powerful. But of course you would go hire people to make sure you add the capacity and deliver things that you want to do that. You’ll see it happening in a lot of areas with that. That’s my first important rule.

David Joy:

I really like what you said about founder hat. Do you think that that’s an ability, somebody who doesn’t have can learn in the sense to feel like, hey, I need to start owning this? Have you seen people do… Initially, I’m not thinking like that, but they do certain things and they learn that, okay, I can become a founder kind of thought process in my thought.

Shadi Rostami:

I believe that we can learn almost everything. It’s not that we are just born with things. I really believe in the growth mindset that we can put ourselves [inaudible 00:16:36]. It’s valuable to be in an environment that people are thinking that way. So you can see the patterns, you can see it. And I always say that people that it’s important to see what is important for you and make sure your environment that satisfy your need or your ambitions. And so yeah, I think definitely people can learn how to be in that mindset and always… One of the things that I think is important as you are thinking about things and how to improve is do the right retro, what decision I made, was it really a best decision for the company? How could I have influenced more people and so on and so forth to be in that mindset?

David Joy:

Right. So let’s switch into where you are right now with Amplitude in almost four and a half years. And I had such a great time. I went to your LinkedIn and I was like… And the company went public and I could see you in the photo. And I was like, let’s go. Shadi is there in that photo taking the company IPO, which is a big deal for any company to get to that point, right? When you joined Amplitude about four and a half years ago, tell us a little bit about where the company was and what were you guys trying to accomplish at that point and taking that forward?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah. When I joined Amplitude, it was a much smaller company. The entire engineering was not even 50 people. Our revenue was not 50 million, less than $50 million a year. And of course going public is a very important milestone, but I think it’s important to note that’s just a milestone. It’s an external validation that we are solving. The real thing that gives me the high and energy is the customer problems that we are solving. How are we creating value for our customer? After I decided I want to leave Palo Alto for the first time in my life, I decided to be intentional and I spent four months talking to different people trying to figure out what I want to be. I always tell people I’ve been lucky if I didn’t have a job the next day I would not die of hunger. So let’s use that luxury to figure out where is the next place I want to be.

And of course we are very lucky all of us to be in this time and age. Being in tech, there’s so many opportunities and I also had a lot of opportunities, but among all of them, I joke with my partner, I said during that four months I felt like an Uber driver because I was going from one meeting to another to another. It’s really crazy. At the time everything was in person, you would go meet people in person. It wasn’t over Zoom that much. But I really liked to go through that journey and first of all, there was a little bit of the path of self-discovery. What is important for me as I’m talking to different people, understanding different cultures of companies, different areas, but I really pick Amplitude for a number of reasons. Amplitude basically is in product analytics space. The goal is to provide visibility so the builder of products can basically understand how the users are using, have understanding of their customer and build a better product that we just want to make sure that people are building better products using data.

And I really believe that this is the right problem to solve and we are at the right time, right place. Because if you think about it, maybe 20 years ago people were building a physical gadget, it was going somewhere else. But the success of a companies was about how good is [inaudible 00:20:14] and marketing is. Sales actually how good the sales can sell the gadget. Nowadays, majority of the things that they’re consuming are digital products. I joke with my friends and I say I have used three different fitness app in the last week and I haven’t lost a pound yet, but we’re all consuming all of these digital products. Two things with this digital product. One is that people who are developing these products have a luxury because now they can see how their users are using the product. Before, if you were shipping something and nobody will see, you don’t know how people are using it. Now you can see that interaction.

But there’s also a negative side is that, I don’t know whether it’s a negative or positive, but consumer can easily move from one product to another. That’s why I say I use three different apps, fitness apps, which one can help me in my path. Because of that, it’s so critical that whoever’s building product or engineer product managers really have this visibility into the customer. I felt like this is the right problem to be solved. I joke with my friend, I said I cannot go cure cancer, but if I do my job well then the fellow engineer or product manager can know which part of their product to double down, which part to kill, basically how to work smarter than harder and build better product. And we have an indirect impact on the quality of everybody because they’re interacting with a much better products.

David Joy:

Right. And I think this whole understanding of product-led growth, while people have always had that, okay, we need to be conscious of data, especially in the last say eight, nine years. And I think COVID really… Those years actually accelerated that because we were like, well there is no real way to get quantifiable decision-making done, but through data and data became this new oil and what you at Amplitude have done is come at the right time and build a great company around that. That kind of makes sense as to what motivated you. I’m just curious, was there any other company that you were also excited for at that time that you were exploring that also blew up?

Shadi Rostami:

Actually, none of them have blown up yet, so I’m not going to go talk about them. But they’re all around. But I can say they’re not as successful. A number of them are not as successful as Amplitude has been on that journey.

David Joy:

So you worked 11 years at Palo Alto gaining this superior experience in a way, talking to different people, having that [inaudible 00:22:54], going into another company and now kind of trying to do the same thing but in a different way as an SVP, as a leader. What are the key differences that you see at Palo Alto when you were there to where you are right now? What is the engineering culture like in terms of, okay, I would say what have you brought here and what have you tried to do differently as you build this new team out?

Shadi Rostami:

At Palo Alto, I was a VP of eng. I was responsible for big part of our product offering, but my peers were other VPs of eng. I could learn. And I always believed that you learned a lot from your peer, you learn a lot. So I learned a lot from other peers and the other, but we are all engineers, we speak the same language and so on. At Amplitude, when I joined, basically I’m head of engineering and I report to our CEO. My peers is our CFO and our president, which is responsible for go to market and our CPO. So again, I really believe that you learn a lot from your peers. I’m learning a lot about what’s going on in the CRO role or CFR roles or other areas. So that’s one reason that I actually felt like this is… Because I always believed that we should always be learning and growing and different, otherwise we just, I’m going to be bored and obsolete.

I felt like that is an area for my growth and I really like that. But coming to the team… But okay, so this is good, so I’m growing, but what am I bringing to the table now? Why do they want me? Right? So one of the things that I really, really like about Amplitude was that it has a very solid engineering nucleus that they can go build around them. It had the right culture. As I said, ownership was an important part that related to me. We have two other cultures, humility and growth mindset that it’s very, very important for me. I felt like I’ve really resonated.

So it had all of that, but now I can come in and add processes, I can add in to figure out what is the right way of how do we scale the team, what are the things that I have learned, what are the mistakes I have learned in the past that I can not make that or make new mistakes and figure out? I feel like that I can bring that experience, bring that perspective while we have such an amazing team and build around that and take it to the next level, which turned out to be very exciting.

David Joy:

It feels like you kind of lived these principles and these values because I feel like if individually as a person you don’t align with these values, then it’s very difficult to fake them. From what you’re saying, I like that you left them out.

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but I think you set a very important goal. I always tell people that it’s very important to be authentic. You can’t really fake things. If people read through, sorry, read through, I don’t know if I can say it in the podcast, but I’ll say it. Read through BS very easily, right? You cannot fake it. So make sure that you feel good about something. Actually, I joke and say… This is my joke I’ve used a lot. I said that sometimes I go to a meeting and I get beaten up. I don’t know, it’s a board meeting or whatever and as I’m leaving that meeting and going back to my desk, I have to feel good about myself. Otherwise people would read through me and I know that I am beaten up. So I said, okay, I need to be thinking good about myself. What do I say? I say, I’m such a good mom.

That’s why I go back to my desk. Something that gives me that energy and I joke, I say sometimes my kids give me such a hard time and I need to feel good myself. I’m such a good employee. That gives me the energy.

David Joy:

And Shadi, what you brought up is a challenge as a leader in itself. I don’t lead a team at Cockroach, but I’ve led teams in different spaces and even let’s say you are leading a sports team or something. Sometimes you have this idea that you’re a leader and so you sometimes have to set the right example or be inspiring and there are days when you are beaten up and you have consciously struggling or mental health challenges and all those things that’s going on with you. But then you also have to lead, right? And again, you also have other functions say as a mother or as a wife or as a partner, all those things kind of happen in your life, but the role of a leader is still to inspire, still to direct. And I’m glad that you brought it up. When there was something like that happens, so once you say that to yourself, are you able to exactly get back into the groove of things and drive the team out to succeed?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, exactly. I think you said it very well. Your job as a leader is to inspire the team, right? So you have to see how you take care of yourself, what gets you to be in that good mood. As I said, I feel good about myself because I say I’m good mom or whatever. I say something good to myself to feel like that I feel good about myself and I feel I’m in a good mood because the energy gets transpired before you know it, everybody gets that energy from you. That is why it’s very important to be thinking about how do I take care of myself maybe, I don’t know. The fact that over the weekend I go for a hike and I just forget about the world for two, three hours and I’ve been in the wilderness, helped me to get into that. But I think that’s very, very important as a leader. You take care of yourself so then you can take care of your team and set the right example and do that.

David Joy:

I wanted to take a segue to now from being a leader to the team itself that you’re leading, right? Tell us a little bit more about at Amplitude, how do you approach or the design process, the architectural process? What’s the process looks like for you guys in terms of when it comes to designing your products, building your products or doing some innovations, do you have any special principles that you have set in place?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, we have a number of principles in engineering. I think it’s very, very important and we try to basically operate on that. One of our principles, we call it ship fast. I am actually telling people ship fast with quality. And why is that? Because we really believe in the culture of iteration and it’s not because we just want to put something quickly out there, it’s because we want to get customer feedback as soon as possible. Because if as an engineer you go into a closet and build something that’s going to come back two years from now, but then you might realize either is obsolete, nobody cares about it, or you are not solving the right problem, people just will not. Getting it as everybody talks about MVP of your product, getting it early on in front of the customers. We say that if you want to build a car, don’t go build a car first, build a skateboard and then scooter and I don’t know, motorbike or whatever, eventually get to a car so you can get all of those feedback.

That’s one of our core important principle that is very, very important. Another one that I think I always say that engineers, people talk about 10x engineers, people who are giving back 10 times more than a mediocre engineer. To me, a 10x engineer is not somebody who writes 10 times more code. A 10x engineer is somebody who basically understand the customer, makes the right trade-offs know what problem they’re solving and I think having that perspective help them build a better design. Don’t Over-engineer it or don’t under engineer, know what they’re solving. That is so core and that’s so important and that’s why one of our other principles is that engineers own the product experience and it’s very aligned with [inaudible 00:30:53]. I always tell people that if I go and tell somebody, okay David, why did you build this ugly product? And you tell me, oh because the PM told me and I built the spec, I said wrong answer, but if you tell me because I thought it’s going to be pretty but it turned out to be ugly, I said, okay, that’s okay.

What are your learnings from that? Just that ownership that I’m not just building to expect. I have an opinion I know and I think that’s a very, very important part of our culture. And the other thing that I think is always very important is that company greater than team, greater than me. So always figure out that of course I want to grow, I want the team to grow, I want the company to grow. But there are sometimes if they’re at conflicts, it gives people to figure out how to balance that out. These are the principle that can help people as they’re going through the processes and figure out to make sure to make the right decision and the right framework to make decisions.

David Joy:

I just want to dive into the second point that you made. I think all three were really great to know. The idea that you have the product team and the engineers designing the product experience. Do they get feedback from customers or data from customer? Of course, you’re building a product for everybody. So do they get access to Salesforce data or customer feedback or customer experience comes to them and they start looking at that and start dissecting it?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, engineers owning the product experience. First of all, it doesn’t mean that it’s only engineers. We believe in the triad. We have product, design and engineer working hand to hand with each other. But you’re absolutely correct. If you want engineer’s own product experience, they have to have exposure to customer. We have this thing that I want engineers on a call once a week. It doesn’t happen once a week. They go maybe once a month or like that. But I want people to really talk with customer. Any new feature that we are developing, we have to have a customer development partner. I actually tell people don’t start developing if you have not found somebody, a customer willing to spend time and be part of your journey. Because if you cannot find that maybe you are building a vision nobody caress about. So have a customer development partner to build things.

That’s on the qualitative side, but one thing that is very, very important for us, again because we are amplitude and we are making sure that we are [inaudible 00:33:20] our product also is that we look at data, right? We have all of these metrics of how people interacting with our product, where are people, how people have delightful moments, [inaudible 00:33:33] happens and all of those. And we define some outcome. The goal of the team eventually is we define this north star, these metrics that define where you’re going. The goal of the team is to improve those north star or those metrics. Actually that’s one of the practices that we do in product development at Amplitude is that every week actually it’s very important for me and every week I go into a meeting with the leaders of product development and we look at all of our metrics. It’s like an OKR, these are metrics that we have set and each team can tell us, okay, how they’re improving, what is happening with their data.

So having that visibility and know what am I improving, being able to use amplitude and dive deep and understand where customer are dropping off, where things are going, that gives the engineer a tool so they can make sure they’re building the right thing.

David Joy:

A couple of years ago I got introduced to this design book somebody had written which was titled Outcomes Over Objectives. Have you read that book too or have… But you get the whole idea, right? Just from the statement of the title. The interesting thing was they did a case study where somebody was trying to design something and had a similar story to what you were saying. They designed something for two years and after two years they brought the product out and was so not where it was supposed to be. And they learned from that experience that we have to set what the outcome is or objective. The idea was they were trying to build a button and they were like, well the button needs to be a triangle or color should be pink or red or whatever that is. But nobody asked the question, what does the button drive for the company or for the customer what the outcome needs to be. I’m glad that you brought that up. Is that the sense of how you guys are looking at it? Okay.

Shadi Rostami:

Exactly. And actually one of the quotes that I like and I use it a lot, is that engineering goal at the company is to help the company win or increase our capacity to win. We are not just sitting in the corner. We are not a research institute to basically solve a hard problem. We are solving something that can move the business forward. And actually if you are customer obsessed and you’re thinking about solving customer pain that’s very aligned. You solve customer pain, it’s going to help move the business. But I think it’s so important to measure that. Am I moving in the right direction? Am I doing that? And I think that’s why the outcome really matters.

David Joy:

Yeah, no, I like it. And also you were talking about the customer, right? Customer needs are changing. I mean, I’m a customer. Today, I want something next day, I want another feature. I’m continuously… I’m probably the worst customer to any product company. But the point is that generally what we’ve noticed is our behaviors change, our needs change. And according to that technology stack also changes, right? We have been observing the last decade. We went from VMs to, we were on cloud. We had VMs there, we are talking about Kubernetes orchestration. Some people are talking about Lambda functions not touching anything, no code, low code, whatever that is, right? How has customer behavior changed for Amplitude and say cloud and how do you kind of engineer for these scenarios when behavior changes, how do you consider all of those things?

Shadi Rostami:

Good products are the one that they adopt to their customer rather than expecting customer to adopt to them. You want to be successful, you have to be adopting to your customer and customer needs change. Also, you might get different level of maturity customer. For example, at Amplitude we started as product analytics. We were getting a lot of digital native companies who were coming and they really wanted to get that insight to their data and working with Amplitude and getting that and they wanted more sophisticated features so they can do slice and dice the data more accurately. We built a loss of features working with our customers. But one other thing that has happened, especially of course COVID has accelerated that it’s not just a digital native companies who are building digital product. A lot of traditional companies are building digital products. Your banks have digital products, all of those things.

Your healthcare, you have a digital product that you’re interacting with. There’s a lot of more traditional companies that are building digital products and I think it’s very important for us if we want to serve it, to understand that the needs of this customer might be different than the needs of the digital native customer who are more advanced. Maybe thinking about maybe usability becomes even more important how you get this customer. [inaudible 00:38:18] is going to become more important. So to get them on their journey. One of our strategic direction that is even simple, make sure that we get people to get started earlier and how do you make sure that the product experience is easier for people and they don’t get overwhelmed by too many bells and whistles as they’re starting their journey. These are the important thing that I think is very important that as you are building your products to make sure that you’re satisfying your customer needs.

David Joy:

Back 10 years ago, 15 years ago, your website was down. I mean few people would hit you up. Now you would go to X or there are different places where you will have your customer start posting about a bad customer experience that they’re having because your app is not available. Availability is such a big issue. So I believe you guys also run on the cloud and you’re a cloud first company. And have you ever had situations where you have to design an architect for multi-region, high availability? Do you consider those parameters?

Shadi Rostami:

Absolutely. I think availability is very important. The latency is very important. I always say that when you build product people first think about the functional requirement. I have the button. Is the button red or blue as you said? But then as product becomes… You prove that there’s value. Then the non-functional requirement, the availability, the operability, the performance becomes even more important because then the scalability of your solution. Absolutely. I think it’s very, very important. Make sure people… If they have their business running on your product, they want to make sure they can rely on it. And there is business continuity going on. If for example, at Amplitude, one of the things that is very important for us is that we want to make sure that people are gaining insights from the data self serve, which means that they need to be getting their response very fast.

Because if I’m asking one question from the app to slice and dice data somehow and it takes five minutes to get that, I’m already context switch and I want something that’s exploration stuff. But if I get the answer within a few seconds, then I can ask the second question and I can ask the third question and then I go to that explore. That’s why for example, latency of how fast we get the response, it becomes more important. And actually that was one of the important things for Amplitude. That’s what we have build our own backend engine, our [inaudible 00:40:56] our data store. It can provide ability for people for us to slice and dice this data fast to get that response. It again goes back to the what is important for your customer and what experience you want the customer to have.

David Joy:

Now you have so many cloud providers available like you have GCP, Azure, Microsoft, the top three. As an SVP of engineering, do you like that you have more options now that you can have your product run anywhere or all of them at the same time? What’s your opinion on that? Has that helped you or that you have these options now?

Shadi Rostami:

I remember in, I don’t know, in 2010 or something, we were building a product and it was a new product line and we were thinking of should we ship an appliance? Should it be there? Should it be on the cloud? There was a question, are people willing to send their data to the cloud? Would they trust that? And so on and so forth. And I think we made a good decision at the time at Palo Alto to go with a cloud-based solution and people opened up. Of course we have all of the security requirement, but that they open up [inaudible 00:42:00] and then people can gain the benefit from this collective of everybody’s running on that. The same thing… Cloud provides a number of valuable things for people. As I said in Palo Alto days, when people use that product, if one customer sees a [inaudible 00:42:22] malware on their environment because it’s running in the cloud and everybody can get protected and everybody can get the benefit of that, in Amplitude, I think people can get the benefit of these clouds because we are running a multi talent environment.

What happens if you’re running multi talent environment, then you don’t have a dedicated resources for that use case, which means that when your hard query comes, you can get the benefit of a lot more resources and you get that response. If you wanted to guarantee that, then you have to allocate a much bigger infrastructure, whether you were doing it on your own data center or running an AWS, Azure. So cloud, all of these services are great. I think competition is great, it’s good to have different provider, but also it brings that ability of efficiency. How can I get the best value from what my investment are? And of course these days in the days of 2008, 2010, we had to go and rack and stack and have our own data center and so on and so forth. And it’s much harder for a company who’s starting nowadays. If you want to start something, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You just run on one of these cloud providers.

David Joy:

Exactly. I think I also feel like for early adopters or people who are trying to build POCs or do some R and D, having the cloud readily available… Of course you have to put some guardrails when you are a public company on how you enable that experience for your engineering team as to hey, how much you should spend. You don’t want somebody to run a workload that suddenly you get a $50,000 bill in like three hours. Of course, you have to have those kinds of things. But that is a segue to the question I wanted to ask is how do you do innovation and R and D at Amplitude, especially considering you have the option to pick all these products or services from these environments?

Shadi Rostami:

Yeah, I think these days everybody’s thinking about AI, for example. Innovation, they’re thinking about all AI and so on. The way I think about it is that all of the innovation we do AI thing that we do, they’re not strategy. They’re a tool to help us solve customer pain. If you are connected with the customer, you understand what is it that you… You understand their needs. As you said their needs might be changing. You have a point of view when their needs are going to be. That is going to be the thing that drives you to figure out what should I be investing in and what is the right problem to [inaudible 00:44:52]. For example, we started as a product analytics company for a single product, but you realize customer requires a platform, they need to have one environment, they can get experimentation on top of that, personalization on top of that. It’s valuable.

And these are all the innovations that we have been doing on top of that to basically solve the customer pain because that’s customer obsession and customer centric to figure out what is important, what are the things that are important for them. It’s very, very valuable.

David Joy:

And I was also curious when you were saying customer obsession and it kind of lines up with what you were saying, like, oh, you want your product teams to make product experience based on this customer obsession. I’m curious when it comes to challenges with this idea, right? Have you seen situations where folks are not completely understanding customer experience or any other challenges associated with that?

Shadi Rostami:

First of all, you need to understand your customer, but also you need to have a strategy. You don’t want to go to a path that you didn’t expect to go. So for example, I was talking with somebody that the customer might be very sophisticated. They might be asking for very advanced functionality. Do you feel like this is only solving that single customer problem or is it going to be applicable to wider range of your customers? That helps you prioritize and say whether it is the right thing. Having that strategy and knowing where we are going, as I said, helps people to make that trade off that is this the right problem to solve or is it just one off for this particular customer? We are another consulting firm. We are solving for a large number of customer. Actually, this was what did we learn when we added the new product line?

One of the learning was that originally we were setting the goal of just revenue for that we realized the goal of number of customers, number of paid customer was a much better metrics because if you send revenue, you might be just going and building for one customer. If you set the number of paid customer, you are solving a problem that applies to more of those customers. Being in tune what customer needs and also being in tune that it’s not just one single customer. And that’s why I think quantitative data is also very important. It’s not just qualitative and talking to one single customer.

David Joy:

I know we are coming to the end of the podcast and one of the questions I wanted to end with was what is your advice to young engineers who are on this journey to become leaders and who are aspiring to be? What would your advice be to them?

Shadi Rostami:

Be hungry and be curious. Just go and try more and be hungry. Ask for opportunity. One of my favorite quote is, luck happens when preparedness meets opportunity. Prepare yourself, push out, be hungry, get out of the comfort zone, be curious, learn things and then make sure you are somewhere that opportunity exists or create opportunity for yourself. I think when those things happen, you’ll get lucky.

David Joy:

I feel like you can also have your own podcast. You’re very inspiring, or you can do a TED Talk. Have you ever thought of that?

Shadi Rostami:

No, I haven’t done that. I’m not sure how many people would like to come and listen to me. But yeah.

David Joy:

There’s so much positivity that I’ve been receiving for the last 50 minutes. I mean, it’s awesome.

Shadi Rostami:

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

David Joy:

I feel like your team is in great hands. You’re such a positive person with such great experience and it’s been such an honor to have you on the podcast, and I’m pretty sure folks who are listening to us around the globe are going to enjoy what we just shared and especially your experience. Thank you so much for hopping on the podcast, Shadi. I really appreciate it.

Shadi Rostami:

Thanks David for having me. It was great chatting with you.