nytimes. hei sreenavasan and sri srinavasan

Nytimes. hei sreenavasan and sri srinavasan software#

Everything we do in SaaS based solutions has to be scalable. If you do it that way, then the editing takes care of itself.

I don’t really think in terms of negatives - let’s not do that, let’s cut that - so much as amplifying the right behaviors with data-driven decision making. On the flip side of that coin, how do you decide what to deprecate? How do you cut stuff, how do you triage? We recently discussed this issue with Gitlab. Lately, that’s been an imperative to move beyond subscriptions into point purchases and monetize anything as a service. The fourth, of course, is what are our prospects asking us to do, and often those requests are really good leading indicators of where the market is headed. So it’s a combination of where the market is going, competitive positioning, customer's current usage patterns and where they're pushing our systems. All of this informs a growth mindset, which is also the title of a book by a psychologist named Carol Dweck that I recommend and live by. And then when you get back to brass tacks usage, you always know what’s going on in each tenant. As a platform company, we’re always looking at where customers hitch to us, and where they want to push our capabilities, and often that activity is congruent with where the market is headed. So the usership of our service, as opposed to the ownership of a box of software, defines our priorities.īut there are also business incentives to consider as well, right? Of course, we’re always listening for where the market is headed, and it’s a confluence of a lot of input streams, right? There’s the Subscribed Strategy Group, for example, which is talking to management teams. At Zuora we’re listening to over 1300 customers every day. So to answer your question, I don’t prioritize. And so we’re living in a continuous feedback cycle, which is what subscriptions are all about. You can look at the feedback cycle and either cull back or move forward. You’re able to do things like basic flighting, which is when you try something out to see how your users respond. Today you’re seeing your users in action every single day. We could finally see and hear what was going on. One of the basics with SaaS is that all the listening systems were embedded. And then, eventually, we got to this concept of consumptive add-ons for specific use cases, which broadly speaking is SaaS.

Then along came the cloud, which basically started with infrastructure as a service. But there were a whole bunch of problems with that, right? Adoption, feedback cycles, you didn't know what the experience of the end-user was. Some of our competitors still do it that way.

Nytimes. hei sreenavasan and sri srinavasan software#

If you look at the way software used to work, everything used to be sold like a product in a box, as opposed to creating a service in the cloud.

Welcome Sri! Let’s start simple: How do you prioritize new features in a subscription offering? I discussed some of these issues during a Q&A with our customers last week, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Sri is an expert in enterprise software, of course - he was previously a VP at Cisco and a CTO at Microsoft - but he’s also a big picture thinker and a sharp communicator who offers helpful insights about subscription offerings of all kinds. This week Zuora announced a lot of exciting new product features during our big Customer Day event, so I thought it would be fun to peek inside the hood and find out how Sri thinks about building new products. Welcome! This week we’re talking subscription product strategy with Sri Srinavasan, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Zuora.