The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: Using AI and Design to Maximize Customer Impact w/ Dheeraj Pandey #169

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

In today’s episode, we’re resharing Dheeraj Pandey’s popular session from ELC Annual 2023 on the disciplined pursuit of less! As the Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of DevRev.ai, he shares how AI tools can maximize customer impact & reduce information asymmetry between various teams, including eng, customer support, product, sales, etc., ultimately creating a more customer-centric mindset. He reveals how to leverage AI to tackle “verbs,” such as classifying, routing, attributing, summarizing and more, further streamlining productivity and empowering your org to focus on customer needs.

ABOUT DHEERAJ PANDEY

Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder & CEO of DevRev.ai, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, with over 70 million dollars in seed funding.

He previously founded Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), a global leader in enterprise cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, and currently sits on the board of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) and is a member of their Audit Committee.

Dheeraj co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led as its CEO and Chairman for 11+ years. Boasting the largest software IPO in 2016, Nutanix is now a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in over 60 countries. Pandey has been recognized with prestigious industry awards, including Dell's Founders 50 and the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley.

Before founding Nutanix, Pandey was the VP of engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata). His technology and enterprise software experience include engineering and leadership roles at Oracle, Zambeel and Trilogy Software. Pandey has been recognized with several prestigious industry awards, including Dell's Founders 50 and the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley. Pandey holds a degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he was a Graduate Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. program.

"In my last company, we had brought almost 7,000 employees together. My biggest job was to really bring all the VPs together. What does it mean for them to work together, behave well together, and respect each other? And it's all because there were all these silos of departments. If you look at the power of AI, AI knows no boundaries. If anything, it needs the entire knowledge graph and the knowledge graph of customers and product and people and their work, not just people on the inside, but also users and their activities on the outside. That's a big problem that we all have to go and solve for.”

- Dheeraj Pandey

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SHOW NOTES:

• The role of essentialism in software dev & company building (1:52)
• Dheeraj’s experience fostering a customer-centric approach in all teams (4:22)
• Commonly used tools & why they fall short for full eng functions (7:20)
• Why it’s important to connect AI, analytics & collaboration features (10:15)
• How AI can help solve information asymmetry (13:12)
• Using AI for analytics to help make teams more customer-centric (15:14)
• Audience Q&As: A day in the life of a PM using LLMs in an interactive discussion (18:03)
• Tips for educating users to provide better prompts when using GenAI (22:50)
• How would a company typically use the DevRev product? (24:38)
• DevRev’s object model of support (27:21)
• Is DevRev capable of answering arbitrary questions once data is uploaded? (28:36)
• Methods used to measure performance w/ DevRev (30:02)
• Creating multiple namespaces w/in the same index to host multi-tenant data (31:10)
• Qualitative & quantitative benefits DevRev offers to its customer base (33:39)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Video Version of Episode
• All of the Sessions from ELC Annual

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/