DevTools Brew #43: Datadog Journey: From Underdog to Cloud Monitoring Champion
Hey folks, welcome to DevTools Brew #43!
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If you're new here, my name is Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and every Saturday, I share the stories, strategies, and insights behind the most successful devtool companies.
In this Issue #43:
📈 Datadog Journey: From Underdog to Cloud Monitoring Champion
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
I hope you will enjoy this new edition.
Let's dive in!
📈 Datadog Journey: From Underdog to Cloud Monitoring Champion
For the first issue of 2024, let’s uncover the pivotal insights shared by Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, about valuable insights on building and maintaining a customer-centric company culture. Olivier shared his experiences and strategies for staying customer-focused even as a company scales.👇
Origins of Datadog
DataDog was founded in 2010 in NYC by two French alumni of Ecole Centrale (Paris). The two founders (Olivier Pomel, CEO - Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO) understood that cloud computing was going to be a reference in the following years.
The company stemmed from their shared experience of bridging the gap between dev and ops teams, aiming to align their viewpoints and solve joint problems. They develop a platform to help companies monitor cloud computing.
Datadog Today
The company went through an IPO in 2019 and was evaluated at close to $37B.
The company has over 4.000 employees today and a major R&D center in Paris.
Its customers include major firms across different businesses like Samsung, AirBnB, Bose or Deloitte.
Early-stage Focus on Customer Needs
Engaging with Potential Customers: Olivier emphasizes the significance of spending initial months engaging with potential customers before writing a single line of code. This approach allowed them to understand customer pain points deeply.
Learning from Customer Problems: Engaging with customers without a product to sell allowed them to gain candid feedback about problems faced by potential users. This insight was invaluable for shaping their product.
Customer-Centric Mindset
Balancing Sales and Engineering Focus: Olivier highlights that companies often tend to be either sales-driven or engineering-driven. To be customer-centric, one needs to avoid extremes and consistently steer the organization's focus towards customer needs.
The Role of Product Managers: Olivier emphasizes that product managers play a crucial role in ensuring customer-centricity. Their responsibility is not only to develop products but to gather insights from customers and ensure that the product aligns with their needs.
Continuous Feedback Loop
Embracing Customer Complaints: Olivier discusses his practice of personally reviewing customer complaints and support emails. While he may not respond directly, this practice helps him understand customer perceptions and identify recurring issues.
Learning from Customer Interactions: Olivier emphasizes the importance of valuing customer interactions as opportunities for improvement. Treating customer feedback as valuable data enables the company to continuously enhance its offerings.
Cultivating Empathy
Involvement of Engineering Team: Olivier reveals how their engineering team participates in support rotations, engaging directly with customers to understand their challenges. This strategy builds empathy and enables engineers to see the impact of their work from a user's perspective.
Event Marketing and Customer Demos: The company's engineers are involved in event marketing, conducting demos for potential customers. This hands-on interaction helps engineers better comprehend customer needs and fosters a closer connection.
Value-Centric Pricing
Aligning with Customer Values: Olivier advocates for a shared understanding with customers that focuses on high-value products rather than a race to the lowest price. This approach encourages both parties to collaborate for long-term success and innovation.
Customer's Interest in Success: A customer who values a company's product is interested in the company's growth and success. By providing value, companies can foster a partnership where both sides want each other to thrive.
Scaling Culture
The culture, centered on being customer-centric, was sustained through meticulous hiring, firing, and promotions aligned with this ethos.
Encouraging attention to customer complaints at all levels, fostering a culture of pattern recognition and customer empathy.
Acquisitions and Cultural Alignment
Evaluating Cultural Compatibility: When acquiring companies, Olivier advises evaluating whether the acquired team's culture aligns with the existing company's values. Cultural fit is crucial for long-term integration and successful collaboration.
Prioritizing Talent and Products: Datadog's acquisitions are primarily driven by the potential for tech platform enhancement and talent enrichment. Acquisitions are evaluated based on how the acquired teams can contribute to the company's overall goals.
Advice for Founders
Seeking Unpleasant Feedback: Olivier's advice is to actively seek out bad news rather than avoiding it. Addressing customer issues promptly fosters transparency, builds trust, and ultimately leads to better solutions.
Challenges as Growth Opportunities: Facing challenges head-on and discussing issues openly drives improvement. The willingness to address problems demonstrates a commitment to growth and an unwavering focus on customer satisfaction.
These insights from Olivierunderscore the criticality of maintaining a customer-centric approach, not just in product development but ingraining it within the company's cultural fabric, fostering empathy and a relentless pursuit of learning and adaptation.
—> To explore more, watch the full video here - published initially by Saastr
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
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Thanks for reading,
Morgan
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Loved it, Morgan.
Happy new year Morgan !
Very happy to read this one as 2024´s first publication