On this week’s episode of Product Love, I sat down with Sri Srinivasan, the Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Zuora. Zuora provides cloud-based software via subscription that enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business.
Sri has 22 years of experience across several roles in software development, engineering, to product management. We talked extensively about his roles at PeopleSoft, Microsoft, Cisco, and now Zuora.
Sri also discussed “scale thinking” which in his experience, many SaaS organizations don’t develop. Scale thinking is all about making sure that there is no place for hero work, which is rooted from how teams engineer, how teams do software triages, and how teams think about their next features. Scale thinking is all about seeing maximized potential out of what is being built towards the furtherance of the customers that are being served.
If somebody is working 20 hours a day to solve a problem, Sri believes you should ask: Why did you have to spend 20 hours? Why could you not do it as part of your design? Why did you even hit the issue? These are the essential questions that make up scale thinking.
If you want to hear more about Sri’s experiences in tech as well as his insights on product management, listen to the episode below or read the transcript.