85: PagerDuty Chief Product Officer Sean Scott - Data is king
Sean Scott spent close to 15 years at Amazon where he ran their shopping experience and autonomous delivery product, Scout. In January 2021, Sean decided to join Pager Duty as their Chief Product Officer. Pager Duty is a software company founded by 3 former amazon developers that helps customers move at ‘machine-speed’ in critical moments. Pager Duty’s business has dramatically accelerated over the past 2 years as the rise of remote work made real-time incident response and work orchestration incredibly important to the enterprise. While Pager Duty is mainly known for being an industry leader in notifications and work orchestration, they have recently launched new products for AI ops and automation. Scott joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of being data-driven, how the modern product leader’s skillset is shifting, and what aspect of Amazon he made sure to bring with him to Pager Duty. Here are some quick takeaways: Having the right data is paramount. The question is do you have everything instrumented to get those insights and learnings. And, more importantly, are those insights actionable. To understand your customer, you need to break down the user experience and instrument it for all the metrics that matter so that you can truly understand what is happening within your product. When analyzing your product’s performance in aggregate, it is easy to trick yourself into believing everything looks good. When customer anecdotes disagree with the data, the anecdotes are usually right. Companies experiencing hypergrowth need to make a habit of revisiting and questioning the effectiveness of the processes they have in place. They usually grow stale every time the size of your team doubles. Companies need to move away from having separate motions for sales, marketing, and product. You must analyze the entire flow holistically and combine how every team interacts with the end-user to create a truly great customer experience.