Prisma COO, Nitin Gupta, explains tech to my mom, operationalizing hackathons, the balance of commercializing open-source, planning, and a team psychologist

00:12 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice and, at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, michael Koenig, and our guest today is Nitin Gupta, a COO of Prisma, a company that's creating the next gen of Nodejs and TypeScript, object relational mapping libraries and query building tools. No clue what that means, not to worry, nitin's going to tell us all about it, but you should know that there are 250,000 active software engineers on it. Now, with such a highly technical product, you'd expect Nitin to be equally technical, and that happens to be the case. He brings over 20 years of experience in the high tech sector, and a business like Prisma brings all sorts of unique challenges and creative solutions that I'm excited to hear about. Nitin, welcome. Thanks for being here. 

00:59 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Thanks a lot, michael, it's a pleasure. 

01:02 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So to kick it off, one of the biggest challenges in any highly technical company is trying to explain to my mom what the company does. So how would you explain Prisma to her. 

01:17 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
I actually did explain Prisma to my mom. So you announce your new job to your family, friends, parents, et cetera. And of course I go tell my mom. She's always known that I'm in the technical field and she's always interested. She has a science background, she has a master's in science, so she's always, okay, explain this to me. So that's my litmus test. If I cannot explain to my own parents, especially my mother, what I do, I should just stop. So here's what I tell her, right? So I go. Okay, mom, what's your favorite application on your phone? And so let's say she just uses WhatsApp because she's in there all the time. Okay, mom, let's break down WhatsApp into three layers the UI layer the things that you touch. The logic layer what happens when you touch something and then the data layer where's all that information stored. So three layers. 

02:20
Now, most developers, or the developer of WhatsApp, when they were making WhatsApp, they were going to use some kind of language to create layer one and layer two. Just for the sake of argument, for now let's call this JavaScript. But when they have to store data inside the database, they have to context switch into a language called SQL, because that's the language most databases speak. The equivalent would be mom, if you switch between Hindi and English all the time, which, as Indians, we do all the time. So it's easy, but for most application developers it's a real pain because it's not a language that you're familiar with. 

02:59
So what an ORM does which is what Prisma's primary product is an object relational mapper, and ORM sits between the database and the developer and basically says you know what, keep writing code in your normal language and we'll take care of all the abstraction, of all the translation to SQL or whatever the database needs. This gives the developers confidence. It gives the developers more productivity. It also allows the developers to really switch out databases in the future if they want to. So you're not locked into database A. You could switch out database A with database B and Prisma would take care of migrations etc. 

03:45
So my mom got it. I'm hopeful that it made sense and not what we're doing on top of the ORM, because the ORM is an open source product. We are actually taking our learnings from having an ORM be in the market for about six years and now we are creating new products again with the same idea of sitting between data and the developer, and we've launched two new products in early access, accelerate and Pulse. Accelerate is all about CDNs and how developers can make use of CDNs without really having to learn about the underlying infrastructure. So you simply make a function call to Prisma and all of a sudden you've got a CDN up and ready. So that's where we're headed with our commercial offerings in the future. So hopefully that made sense. 

04:37 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah, hang on, I have my mom on a call, so just one second. Yeah, yeah, does that make sense? Yes, it does. Thank you, all right. Thanks, mom, I love you. Okay, yep, yep, bye-bye, all right, cool, amazing. So that's. Hey, look, you know what? It's a good litmus test right there. Exactly, you're highly technical. You have to be to be the COO of this company. You also have to bring along everyone else that is not an engineer your sales team, your GNA, your CS folks. How do you go about training folks to really understand what it is you make? I've worked for highly technical products before. This is like a whole different level for me. 

05:35 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
We do our best, in the sense that not everybody on the team, as you write fully identified, comes from an engineering background. But if you look at the company values that we have, one of them is curiosity. We do want to hire people who are highly curious, and we actually test for this when we do our interviews, because the net result is you end up having a team member who may not understand the ins and outs of everything, but they're curious and they want to learn. So, as a result of this curiosity, they are then able to take advantage of processes that we've set up internally. So, for example, we are building out something called Prisma University. It's an internally focused education series, because the pace of technology is changing quite fast, especially in the edge and serverless space that we operate in. 

06:29
We have highly technical team members who are more than happy to take their time explaining, recording videos, and that's how we get the knowledge to disseminate it to the rest of the team members. Now, funnily enough, it's also reverse, is true. Most of my technical lean doesn't understand how finance works, so we do the reverse as well. We have our finance team members and say, okay, when SBB went bust, what happened? Why did that happen. So it's a good back and forth that we have in the team in terms of how Prisma University is operating. But we make sure that this content is available and we keep it fresh and we keep it front and center. 

07:08 - Michael Koenig (Host)
How have you operationalized that type of knowledge sharing? And I ask because it's something that every company should have. It connects each person not only to the company, to the product, but also to each other. When you have a better understanding of what someone does, you have a better appreciation for what their life is like and how they go about their day. 

07:31 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yep, absolutely Great question. So two things, and they're going to sound very basic, but they're very effective. So the first one is simply a mentoring program internal to the company. So people raise their hands and say, look, I'd like to be a mentor in such and such topic. It could be anything under the sun. Mostly it's technical topics, and it's amazing to see team members who are just hidden gems Right, yeah, they're working on their projects, etc. But then they have this insane ability to explain technical concepts or come up with amazing prototypes, and so we ask for these team members to raise their hands and to make themselves available in a setting of one, two or three people, where you then get to share this knowledge. 

08:27
The second and we just concluded one today is an internal hackathon, where we again simple idea, but we pair people who usually don't work together, and so people come up with project ideas, and we just finished one, like I said today Amazing ideas. It's phenomenal what people can come up with when they've got a time crunch and the desire to win something. Competitiveness comes out really well. So we've operationalized this this way. I think there are multiple other ways you can do this, but for us, the team size that we are at right now, which is about 47 people. This is working out really effectively. 

09:07 - Michael Koenig (Host)
This is interesting Hackathons Back when I was at Automatic, which we have a lot in common. Automatic was based on the open source version of WordPress. Prisma, of course, has deep open source roots, but back when I was at Automatic it's a highly technical group of folks, mainly engineers. We'd get together and we'd have hackathons and, as a business and operations person, it would always be a little bit challenging to fit me into a hackathon and find something that I could do and sink my teeth into Great learning experience. But very challenging. How do you all go about that? 

09:45 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yeah, that's a great question. Again, a hackathon doesn't always have to be about technical topics. However, your technical team members are contributors to non-technical projects that may come up. This hackathon that we just concluded, I was on a team that was looking at how do we improve our product development process. So every team has their own way of developing products. 

10:10
Now, you cannot come up with a really nice and comprehensive product development process without having PMs and engineers on this team, but the output is not a single line of code. It was a very expansive mirror board that showed our eight-stage process and, at each stage, which artifact we expect the team to produce, thereby declaring that particular stage is finished. So what you're saying is absolutely right. Hackathons have this connotation that, oh, it has to be technical, we have to write code, we have to come up with something. We clarified up front that it doesn't have to be code. It could be anything that improves either our users' experience or our own experience. So, of course, there were a few technical projects that were created blew our minds, but some of the non-technical ones also blew our minds and now that I think back to it, I haven't been part of a hackathon since 2014. 

11:10 - Michael Koenig (Host)
And I remember it being so much fun. But one challenge that we always had was they were generally a week, and what happens during that week? There's everything else that's going on. How did you manage that up? First off, how long did the hackathon last? And then two, how do you manage basically freeing up everyone to go work on something together during that time? 

11:34 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Absolutely. This is where early thinking around this comes into play, right. So I own operations. Part of my team owns events external events, internal events so we have somebody her name is Flo. She's amazing she effectively has the charter to plan this out, to take into perspective everybody's time commitment, right? So your question about how long was it? 72 hours. So we started Monday evening and we finished today, thursday. So 72 hours of getting together and doing stuff, and we've given people a heads up that in case a priority item comes in, you are supposed to handle that first. 

12:18
Now, given again the team size we are at, we are aware of what's going on If something breaks or something needs attention. We do have team members who always kept an eye on those things, but a majority, almost 90% of the team of the company was freed up on calendar. All the recurring meetings were paused. One-on-ones were paused. So everybody knew that these days were meant to be dedicated to working together, to working with people you've not worked with many times and to just create something amazing. So we had to operationalize it. It's almost a playbook at this point, because we want to do this a couple of times Our approach towards a lot of the planning that happens inside of Prisma is along similar lines. We've done events externally, internally, and we tend to think through things. Otherwise it's haphazard. It's a remote team. Prisma is a 100% remote team. You don't want to run into issues at the last minute, so we're trying to anticipate things that may come up, all the way down to how will team members get food, so making sure that they're fed, happy and energized. 

13:30 - Michael Koenig (Host)
With a remote company, you have to be so intentional about how you create engagement. Hackathon seems to be a wonderful way to create engagement within teams and across teams and throughout the company. Now, you all are open source. I don't suppose that there's any chance and you all are open sourcing. That playbook that you just mentioned, I'd love to do it with my team, maybe. 

13:54 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yeah no we actually are. We are working on a few different things that are process-oriented that we actually will open source as well. So keep an eye out on things that are coming that are non-technical, but we will open source them. 

14:07 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Fantastic Now you talked about how finance got up and explain what was going on with SVB. That's a very fast and rapid response, I'm assuming. So do you have platforms and practices already in place that just facilitates that type of interaction, that type of getting everyone together on pretty short notice? 

14:31 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yes, our call to action is an all hands and this is ingrained in the thinking of the team members. So when they see an invite for an all hands, they automatically know that it is something that's going to be supremely interesting. Slash important. Now, our traditional all hands happen once a month and we try and have a very repeatable format to it. So people otherwise all hands tend to get extremely boring. 

15:00
So we've actually done a very specific structure to our all hands, starting with Q&A. 

15:07
So we have team members ask questions 100% anonymously and we answer questions as the first item of the agenda versus doing it in the last because then you run out of time. So we want to emphasize to our team that look, your questions are Paramount, we want to answer all of them. So we get a healthy amount of questions and they're challenging, difficult questions. But that's our job as leaders is to be transparent, which is a company value for us, and so when you as a team member get an all-hands invite, even if it is in 48 hours, we first of all tend to not rush things right. So, as we be happened, we gather information, we let the team know that four or five days out They'll be a All hands. A mini all hands will specifically cover what happened at SVB and what are responses. We prepared some content, we went through it. The meeting is recorded so if you are not able to attend, you can listen to it later and then ask your questions as well. 

16:08 - Michael Koenig (Host)
We dove right in. Let's back up to usually the first question I asked. Of course, this time it was getting my mom on the phone. I had to get her off quick. No, I can't. What are your areas of responsibility within the company? Coo's such a amorphous term. 

16:25 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yep, absolutely. When I joined the company, the desire on the side of our Leadership was to have somebody who counterbalances our CEO. So you look at CEOs. In my experience, there of three types sales, marketing or product. That's the category most CEOs will fit in, and and for Prisma is very clear that our CEO, soren, he's very focused on product. That's his experience, he's amazing at it and he wants to continue doing that. So, while he focuses on product and engineering, the rest of the business, which is finance, sales, developer, advocacy, support, sales marketing Basically anything that's not product and engineering falls under my remit that. 

17:12 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So you have all commercial and all GNA, which can be a pretty big spread, a lot to manage there. How have you structured your organization to Tackle all those? 

17:27 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
we have within business operations, which is what I call the rest of the company, which is not product and engineering. We've got developer advocacy, or developer connections as we call it, which is most of our outbound efforts. So sales and marketing will fall under developer connections, and developer connections is all about events, all about developer relations, basically Everything we're doing to create connections outbound. Then we've got legal and finance, so anything legal finance falls under that team. Then we've got people and HR and then, last but not the least, we've got data and analytics. So that's the way I've divided up the group today, and it's been about six months since we made this structural change and it's been working out fairly nicely. Now we know that we will probably end up pulling out groups from within this as they mature. So, for example, marketing down the line could be its own function, sales down the line could be its own function, developer advocacy could be its own function, versus being all under developer connections right now. So this worked out really well. 

18:40
What we've also done is we put a very special emphasis within the HR team because, being remote, it's all about people. The example I give we have actually a trained psychologist on staff. The example I give people is have you seen Star Trek? And when people say, yep, we've seen Star Trek, or if they say, no, we haven't seen Star Trek, I usually tell them that look, on every Starship there was a guidance counselor, and the guidance counselor could actually overwrite the captain Because he or she knew what the crew wanted best. So we actually have a guidance counselor on staff and this person is part of our HR people team and they tend to be the ones who have a pulse on what's going on within the rest of the team and we encourage our team members to go have conversations with this person to talk about stuff, because sometimes you just need to talk. So that's another part of the structure of the team that I've built. 

19:32 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I've been building remote companies for 16, 17 years now. I've spoken with so many folks running remote companies. There's not much that surprises me anymore. Psychologists on staff surprises me. Walk us through that. Where did that concept come from? Did it come from legitimately Star Trek, where you're watching Star Trek, you know? 

19:57 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
yeah, no, I'm gonna give away my TV watching Habits. There actually came from the show billions. Have you seen billions? 

20:04 - Michael Koenig (Host)
No, but is it similar to succession and ruthless people, kind of sort of? 

20:10 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yeah, it is it is about. 

20:12
It is about a ruthless hedge fund manager, high pressure, high attention it's basically Wall Street on steroids and he there's a character by the name of Wendy Rhodes who is the guidance counselor for this team, this company, this high performing, high pressure environment, and she basically allows people to decompress and it has a magical effect on people. And when I was watching I was thinking why don't we have this in companies? Because people run into these situations all the time and then they go to their manager. The manager is not trained to handle this in most cases, because it's an emotional outburst from the individual. Maybe it's even masked and it's not emotional, and so you need somebody who's trained to listen, to understand, so they can help this person, this team member, decompress before it escalates and then eventually people leave if their needs are not met. And then I was thinking well, I've seen this before in Star Trek, so kind of put those two together and it's it actually, from an explanation point of view, people really get it and in practice it's working really well for us. 

21:28 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's amazing. I love that. It's also phenomenal Just as a side note here how much you can learn from just various TV shows. I pulled something from the last kingdom. The last kingdom is about Vikings for Saxons. It's on Netflix. I love it. It's incredibly gory. The thing that I learned is the main character, uhtred, is quite impulsive. What I've learned now is don't do what Uhtred would do. It's interesting where we can pull any idea from this. Bringing a trained psychologist on staff is. It's incredible. Definitely going to take this. Take this with for some thought there. Now. Prisma is an open source ORM. I shared how I'm such a big fan of open source, especially at two cows. We have a heavy history and culture around open source. How is open source impacted your company culture and how do you maintain that that culture as the company grows in scales? 

22:30 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
So there's open source, and then there is popular open source, right, and we happen to be in the category of popular open source, which means you are at the mercy of your users. They will tell you, without holding back, what you're good at, what you're bad at, what you should be doing, what you should not be doing. So we absolutely care deeply about what users are telling us. It informs our road map. At the same time, we also have to be very judicious in understanding what is it that really the user is asking for, and this requires formidable product management. And so on our open source side, we do have a formidable product manager who is able to, at many times, put their foot down and say, no, not doing this. I don't care if a thousand people are asking for this. I have a very particular vision and I'm going to execute on it. But then on the flip side, they can also see that, yeah, not many people are asking for this one thing, but I can see that it is going to become important down the line. 

23:44
So our company culture internally is heavily influenced by such decision making processes. Now, I wouldn't say we are 100% at decision making right now. Decision making is an evolutionary process, right. You throw one new person into the mix, the whole thing goes on a tailspin, right? Because they bring their own ideas, culture, etc. So we realize that the moment we hire somebody and the more senior that person is, the more effect they'll have on our decision making. So we then revert back to the standard practices of taking user input, assessing it, evaluating it against our roadmap, seeing if it has a place, and then eventually communicating back with our users through various mechanisms, communities, things like Discord, slack, twitter, etc. It's been an amazing experience. I don't think we'll ever lose our open source roots, even though we are a commercially focused company, having taken in almost 57 million in overall funding through Series B some amazing investors on our side. We are a for profit business at this point, so we have to convert those users who are using and loving our products into users who will love our commercial offerings as well. 

25:04 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It's a difficult balance to strike, which is commercializing an open source project, maintaining the community and vibrancy that makes that open source project work. Now you have a big focus on community. How do you all approach walking that fine line? 

25:27 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
So there is a model called the 123 framework that was popularized by Adam Gross of Heroku, and we are very much married to that 123 framework and Adam is an investor in Prisma as well. The central idea in moving from one to two to three, where one represents individuals, two represents teams and three represents enterprises the central theme in moving from one to two to three is value. Are you delivering value into the market, into your user base, that they're willing to pay for, at the same time making sure that your free offering is not so generous that nobody ever wants to upgrade Right? So we've taken those two things into account when rolling out our commercial offerings. So we'll first try it out with early access, followed by preview, then eventually GA having a generous free tier. But for those people who see value in our products, there will be an easy path for them to then do a commercial transaction with us. 

26:38
The open source ORM will always remain open source. I would not touch that user base. We do not want to lose their trust by saying, guess what? More than a million of you are using us. We're not going to charge you. Nope, that doesn't work. That's a good exit strategy for an open source product. 

26:56 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yep, certainly Trust is earned in drops, lost in buckets. You all and correct me if I'm wrong, you all are based in Germany. 

27:04 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
The company was conceived in London. Then the two founders they had some friends over in Berlin. They were hanging out Okay, where do we go? London is not a cup of tea, as they say. So they moved over to Berlin, hung out with some friends, slept on some couches, conceived some ideas and ended up then incorporating the company in Berlin. The CEO of the company is actually Danish, he's not German. Then, of course, we incorporated in America as well, but we officially the office is in Berlin. It's a lovely office. I always admire Soren's, the CEO's, Danish sensibility around setting up offices. It's like a home. I love it Fantastic. 

27:49 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Now let's talk about the impact of regulation, though. How is being based in Germany, with its stringent data privacy laws? How has that impacted Prisma's operation and global growth strategy? 

28:03 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
So the German entity for Prisma is actually a sister entity to our American, so it's a subsidiary to the American corporation. So from all legal perspectives we are an American company. So the German entity does enjoy certain benefits from the German government. We are very strict about adhering to all GDPR rules, being a European entity, but the primary entity is still an American entity, got it? 

28:32 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Okay, I see. Thanks for that clarification. One of the questions I think most of us have asked ourselves, since generative AI has really advanced to something that we can use every single day in our life, is what does this mean for my business, and do we have to rethink everything now? Prisma strikes me as one that's I don't want to say safe, I don't think anyone's safe, but nonetheless I don't think it strikes me as something where you didn't wake up in a cold sweat and go oh crap. 

29:02
Can you tell me a little bit about that? 

29:04 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yep, we absolutely didn't go all crap when LLMs were everywhere. In fact, we see a fantastic opportunity for us to have a very interesting play in that space. We, as I told you before, we sit between the user and the database. What is an LLM? It is a database. It is a specific type of database called a vector database, and so, without revealing a lot, we are working on something that will sit between the user and a vector database in the future. Right, making things easier. So that's one thing that is in our favor. 

29:48
Our vast experience in working with databases allows us to get very creative here. The second thing is products like chat, gpt, that really understand code structures. We can actually use them to our advantage and help our users understand what we are doing under the hood. So using Prisma then becomes not only ease of use with the database, but also becomes a built-in learning tool. It was one of our hackathon projects. I was blown away by what the team did in two days. I can't wait to get this out there into our users, so I am excited. It's not a direct impact to us, but we are able to take advantage of the trend in the industry today. 

30:34 - Michael Koenig (Host)
The thing that is interesting that we just came back to is the hackathon. When you free people from the daily grind, the daily work of what project they are working on every single day, and give them the space and give them the freedom to just, hey, wouldn't it be cool if have that moment? Look what happens. That's incredible. 

30:56 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
One of our ambitions before we even started for the hackathon was that a certain percentage of the projects we see in life post the hackathon. I think we're going to hit 100% on that. All of them are so incredibly amazing. I think they're going to go live past the hackathon for sure. 

31:14 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about sales. Complex product probably, I'm assuming, high switching costs and enterprise deal probably fairly long sales cycle. How do you all approach something like this? Is it a bottom up? I mentioned 250,000 developers. Is this something that they're using and then spreading? How have you structured this and how do you think about it? 

31:42 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yeah, it is going to be a bottoms up introduction into the enterprise. I was to live in Silicon Valley. I live in France now. I used to live in the valley and I remember seeing this billboard where Twilio, goask your Developers about us. It was a billboard on the 101 and it was marketing genius Whoever came up with that. 

32:03
I think products like Twilio, like Prisma, they are introduced into the company by the developer who sees a certain benefit to utilizing our offering and then build around it. The sales cycle eventually will, and we are redoing a lot of our pricing. We are redoing a lot of our offering. But we're keeping all of that in mind because we have experienced selling to enterprises. We do understand how procurement works, how new vendor introductions go and how enterprises really when they purchase software. It's all about compliance, risk mitigation to a large extent. How do you offer and package all that so that the sales cycle is compressed as much as possible? 

32:55
It goes back to the same idea that I mentioned earlier is value. Are you demonstrating enough value? One example, straightforward, if you're using the ORM is you're not hiring that many database experts. Are we making tools available that justify value? Absolutely, the sales team is not going to just rely on stories. We actually have calculators that we can use that will show a particular interested party on how certain things will help. In fact, a lot of these analytics should show up within the product itself. You can see that if you're using our CDN product how fast are your queries? Now that automatically translates to value for you. If you can have that across your entire app stack, why not Absolutely approaching this in a very systematic and methodical way? 

33:55
Right now, most of our customer acquisition is self-serve. We haven't really built out the sales function yet. I anticipate we'll hit that mark in the next about eight months, where we'll need a full-on sales staff. But for now, I'm handling these conversations wearing multiple hats, as you mentioned earlier. What I'm hearing from our enterprise customers is along the lines of yep, we see value, we want to do more of this. Let's continue ensuring that Prisma's offerings are in alignment with enterprise needs. 

34:28 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It's a good spot to be in. 

34:30 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
It is. 

34:31 - Michael Koenig (Host)
We've already discussed some pretty interesting operational details and elements from hackathons from a psychologist on staff is still blowing me away. I'm going to be thinking about that for a while. You all have a pretty novel way of thinking about things, but also pursuing and enacting. How else have you gone about this to make Prisma such a unique company? 

34:54 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
I think one of the really great things that we've achieved as a company is to align everybody around what we are focused on. We built a hybrid KPI and OKR-based metrics methodology. At the company level, we have seven core metrics. At a team level, we ask for the teams to create OKRs on a quarterly basis and then we ask for each objective to be directly aligned with the company KPI. Therefore, you could stop anybody in the company any point in time and say, hey, can you help me understand whatever project you're working on? How does it help the company? They can draw a line backwards to a company level KPI within 10 seconds. What this ensures is that there is nobody on the Prisma team today that doesn't understand how their work is valuable in pushing the company forward. So all these metrics, all these KPIs, they're public within the company. 

36:01
We have a dashboard we call MTM Metrics that Matter. It is a pinned tab on pretty much everybody's browser Because we update it like religion. We meet once a week, as a business review happens on a Friday. So people are eagerly awaiting to see hey, how are we progressing? What are the areas that are not making progress? So therefore, we can have focus on them. So I think this has been a really great operational execution, because without this alignment you have what typically happens is teams make their own opinions, they are doing stuff, they're busy, but it's not moving the company forward together. So for us it's very clear here are the seven things that the company cares at a top level, and then you, as team member, are contributing in such and such a way to achieving that. 

36:56 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Now does the company have top level OKR, how are you aligning a team to a specific KPI? How are you helping them think about this and make the right decisions? Because oftentimes, and just for comparison, oftentimes a company will have company wide OKR which will then inform downstream and cascade to other teams OKRs. Now you have just KPI. Walk us through that. 

37:22 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Yeah, no, it's been a very specific decision that we made that KPI's at the company level will be annual. They will not change quarter to quarter. So an example of a KPI would be ARR annual recurring revenue. Second example would be employee NPS ENPS, which basically is an employee well-being score internally. A third example could be a customer churn. These numbers are annualized numbers. We computed what the end state of these numbers needs to be when we started 2023. So they become annual KPIs. 

38:04
Now let's take ENPS as an example. We have a target score that we want for NPS. The team the people team in this case now has to do things to help achieve that. So they're going to come up with quarterly OKRs with specific key results for each objective to help move that NPS score towards that target, in fact, for well-being on purpose. I'm going to use this example. The hackathon is one of the projects we're executing as a key result to promote well-being because it eventually helps the ENPS score. So now our ENPS survey is going to be at the end of Q2. 

38:47
It will take the hackathon into account and when we do, the OKR formulation, which usually happens towards the end of the quarter, so when the third month of the quarter starts, there is a series of meetings that are already on calendar kickoff. The first one is a meeting that we basically use to assess what's working and what's not working. So each team gets together and does a self-assessment what's working, what's not working? Basically, what's working, so we continue doing it, and what's not working, so we have to improve it or stop it. This acts as input into planning for next quarter and we take into account what are we carrying forward from the previous quarter that hasn't been finished. 

39:34
So by the time we hit the last week of the quarter, we already have a plan for the next quarter, which is then presented to the whole company in an all hands, which, magically, is also scheduled in the first week of the next quarter. So this entire cadence of meetings, how they connect to each other, this was all established in the beginning of the year and we have these in calendar for the entire year. So nobody's guessing when is the planning meeting? Nobody's guessing when is the evaluation meeting? Nobody's guessing. These are all in place. So people now tend to plan alongside and they are ready for these events to happen, because these are fundamentally important things to make progress for a team as large as ours. 

40:22 - Michael Koenig (Host)
This is a remarkably smooth, well thought out operation and the success you all are experiencing, I think, speaks for itself as to the effectiveness of your operations. This is very cool. Nitin time for my last and favorite question. We've all had those moments, as COO's or other executives, where just something absolutely wild comes up and you're just thinking I never thought I would see this, I never thought I'd come across this. Do you have one you can share with us? 

40:59 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
Absolutely. This was from my previous company, another phenomenal group of people. The company's name is Scandit. Great, great team, great product. I was running partnerships and customer success at Scandit and one of the deals I was doing was with one of the two largest handset manufacturers in the world Mobile Handset so Shell remain nameless, but people can guess and they were going to build a solution using one of Scandit's SDKs and the negotiation took about 10 months. 

41:37
One of my asks that I was told by my boss, the CEO of Scandit, was that there is no way in hell that our logo will be removed from the screen. And you know how people are iffy about other people's logos. And so I'm negotiating with and this is remote because we were in COVID, so I don't have the benefit of going and shaking somebody's hand and building a relationship so we are 100% remote and I'm dealing with a person who has a translator in the middle because they don't speak English properly. And I distinctly remember the first time I said, yep, one of our asks in the terms packages, we want our logo. And then there's a pause and the translator translates and I hear laughter. I literally I hear laughter like ha ha ha. I'm like OK, that's not going to work. 

42:36
But the thing that I thought I would never see in the story I want to share with you is in the end, scandit's logo was on that app. No way, yes, how logic. Stick to making requests that are logical and sensible and you can turn a goliath and make them think that this is not our landish. There is a reason why this company is doing this and make them believe in that reason and they will turn around. So it was a proud moment when that happened, still is live and we love it. But yeah, it taught me to stick to my guns and not get emotional about things and just pursue business relationships first through logic and then convert them into personal relationship. I ended up becoming good friends with that person even remotely. We shared family photos and stuff Never met him till now. I would love the chance to meet him one day, but this was my incredible story. 

43:42 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's wild. I've been in that conversation several times. Mitten, thanks so much for coming on. I love this conversation. Where can people go to keep up with you? And Prisma, prisma is prismaio. 

43:56 - Nitin Gupta (Guest)
I am GnittenG on Twitter, linkedin, et cetera, et cetera, so Nitten is a very common name. I can never grab it, but GnittenG, I managed to. 

44:09 - Michael Koenig (Host)
There you go. It's like Michael, nothing, I have nothing out there. Fantastic. There you have it everyone. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, michael Kanig, and a very special thank you to Nitten Gupta, our guest, for joining us. Tune in next time for our next COO chat on Between Two COOs and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. Just visit betweentwocooscom for more and, if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show so they can get great advice from phenomenal COOs. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. Tune in next time and until then, so long.