The podcast episode titled “Revolutionizing Technology Leadership: The Customer-Centric Approach with Beena Jacob” explores the significance of adopting a customer-centric approach in the field of technology leadership. Beena Jacob, the Chief Technology Officer at Denoma, shares her journey and insights into how prioritizing customer needs and expectations has led to successful product launches and increased customer satisfaction.
Beena’s customer-centric approach is influenced by her early experiences as a software engineer, where she observed the disconnect between technology solutions and real-world customer requirements. She was inspired by industry leaders who demonstrated that aligning technology with customer needs not only results in better products but also fosters stronger customer relationships.
One key aspect of Beena’s approach is effective communication between technical teams and business stakeholders, ensuring a clear understanding of both customer needs and technical capabilities. She emphasizes empathy, active listening, and prioritizing customer problems as the foundation of successful tech initiatives.
Beena also highlights the importance of adaptability and agility in technology leadership, enabling teams to evolve with changing customer needs. She shares an example from her experience where her team addressed a customer request for audio message transcriptions and iteratively improved the feature based on user feedback, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, Beena emphasizes the significance of creating a feedback loop to continually gather customer input and iteratively improve products. Regular meetings and cross-functional collaboration play a vital role in evaluating and enhancing customer-centric features.
From a key performance indicator (KPI) perspective, Beena suggests tracking customer satisfaction and customer retention rates to measure the success of customer-centric initiatives. These metrics contribute to the customer lifetime value, demonstrating the long-term impact of customer-focused strategies.
In her current role as CTO of Denoma, Beena manages both B2B and B2C ventures, focusing on compliance, archiving, and multilingual chat applications. She encourages engineering managers and tech leaders to stay focused on solving customer problems rather than merely chasing technological trends.
Beena’s final advice for engineering managers aiming for customer-centric success is to listen to customers, understand their challenges, and let customer needs guide innovation in the fast-paced world of technology.
Transcript Excerpt Analysis:
The podcast transcript features a conversation between Beena Jacob and Steven Tedjamulia, where they discuss Beena’s journey and her customer-centric approach in technology leadership.
- Inspiration for Customer-Centric Approach: Beena’s customer-centric approach is rooted in her early career experiences, where she recognized the gap between technology solutions and customer expectations. She also drew inspiration from successful industry leaders who demonstrated the value of prioritizing the customer perspective in technology innovations.
- Implementing a Customer-Centric Organization: Beena emphasizes the importance of effective communication, empathy, and active listening to align technical teams with business objectives and customer needs. She also stresses the need for adaptability and agility in responding to changing customer requirements.
- Example of Iterative Improvement: Beena shares an example of how her team addressed a customer request for audio message transcriptions. They implemented an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and iteratively improved the feature based on customer feedback, demonstrating the practical application of a customer-centric approach.
- Creating a Feedback Loop: Beena discusses the importance of maintaining a feedback loop with customers and stakeholders to continually evaluate and enhance customer-centric features. Regular meetings and cross-functional collaboration are key components of this feedback loop.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Beena suggests tracking customer satisfaction and customer retention rates as KPIs to measure the success of customer-centric initiatives. These metrics contribute to the overall customer lifetime value.
- Beena’s Current Role: Beena serves as the CTO of Denoma and manages both B2B and B2C ventures, including a multilingual chat application. She encourages engineering managers to stay focused on solving customer problems and applying innovation to address real-world challenges.
Overall, the transcript provides valuable insights into the importance of customer-centricity in technology leadership and offers practical advice for engineering managers looking to adopt a customer-focused approach.
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References
Revolutionizing Technology Leadership: The Customer-Centric Approach with Beena Jacob
Revolutionizing Technology Leadership: The Customer-Centric Approach
Transcript
Steven Tedjamulia (00:01.875) Welcome to the Engineering Manager podcast. I’m Stephen Tijamulia. Today we’re joined by Bina Jacob, an innovation leader who’s redefined technology leadership with a customer-centric approach. Bina, it’s great to have you on the show today.
Beena Jacob (00:19.606) Thank you, Srivind. I’m excited to be here.
Steven Tedjamulia (00:23.643) Yes, and we’re super excited about this topic. This is one dear to my heart. And let’s just start right off talking about what inspired your customer centric approach and technology as a leader.
Beena Jacob (00:39.022) Well, I have to say my inspiration stemmed from a combination of professional experiences and personal observations. So early in my career, I witnessed how technology solutions often fail to meet the needs of the users. So it became clear to me that technology initiatives, although it’s innovative, were not adequately aligned with real world problems or customer expectations. So… This was further reinforced during my tenure as an engineer, where I saw gaps that existed where what we were developing and what the customers truly needed or expected did not match. And so these experiences instilled in me a strong belief that understanding and prioritizing the customer’s perspective is crucial for success of any tech initiative. And additionally, of course, I was inspired by several industry leaders. Their success stories demonstrated how a customer centric approach not only leads to better products, but also has that stronger relationship with customers. And moreover, with the rapid evolution of technology, right? And the increasing importance of user experience in this digital age. further solidified my conviction that customer centricity should be at the core of technology leadership. It’s not just about the technology itself, but that technology can improve lives, solve problems, and deliver value to the people who use it. So in summary, I would say my approach is a culmination of professional learnings and the recognition that at the heart of all successful technology innovations, There’s a deep and they take understanding of the customer needs and challenges.
Steven Tedjamulia (02:38.247) Yeah, that is a great explanation there. As a leader, engineering manager, now going off what you just said, sometimes it’s really tempting to just move fast and take orders and get things done. But how do you implement organization which can take the time to hear the customer out and do the things that will really benefit the customer? How do you inst- How do you set this organization up? What is your strategy to ensure that you get, you know, those core values that you’ve set, implemented in your organization?
Beena Jacob (03:19.554) So I would say one is effective communication so that the technical teams understand the business objectives and the business stakeholders have an understanding of the technical limitations and capabilities, and also providing a clear vision and direction. So first is about a deep understanding of the customer needs. There has to be empathy. There has to be active listening as to what is the problem that we are trying to solve. And also giving a clear direction and establishing those priorities in your roadmap, in your discussions, in your cross team collaborations. All that has to be centered around what is the customer problem and what are we trying to solve. Also, when you come to the tech stack, being adaptable, right? You have to stay adaptable to customer needs, being agile, and having your tech stack being modular and scalable. So that when you have the customer needs and you want to evolve with the customer needs, it has to align with those needs so that you can be adaptable. And provide solutions based on their changing needs.
Steven Tedjamulia (04:50.483) And from a CTO perspective, and having managed many engineering teams, what are some examples that you could share with us of how you’ve been able to provide a process, right? That has worked well to have, you know, cross team collaboration to get better understanding of the customer’s needs and to build products around customers. Do you have any examples to share, especially for the engineering managers who are like, oh, how do I do it? You seem like you know what you’re doing, but how do I do it? I mean, what worked for you? Because right now it doesn’t look like we’re building products that customers want. We built a lot of features. There’s a lot of code in there, but we’re not making any money. So what examples you have or what can they…
Beena Jacob (05:24.097) Mm-hmm.
Steven Tedjamulia (05:46.615) implement to get this thing started and going in the right direction.
Beena Jacob (05:51.598) So as a tech leader, and if you look at tech teams, the focus is more on what’s emerging trends and what things are happening on the technological side, and how can we add that into our product. So it’s a change in your cultural mindset, instead of thinking that way, it’s about, okay, what are the problems that our customer is facing? So how do you understand those problems, right? First you have to, it’s not the technical team that has that information. You have to work with your marketing team, sales team, customer service team, the frontline teams that’s getting that information, right? So it’s that cross functional collaboration that has to happen first in understanding all this data that we are getting from customers, whether it’s real time feedback or through chats or through a customer service session, right? how are you getting that information that has to be discussed as to what is the real problem and how are you going to solve it? And that’s where innovation comes in, right? So how do you take this problem, a customer problem, and how do you want to solve it? And that’s where innovation comes in. So if I have to take an example, we had an application which not have, we still have, we have an application where we deliver audio messages as an email to the customers. And so the problem is with that is it’s just an attachment the user will have to open up, listen to the audio as to what the message is. And so the request came in as to, can we have that transcribed as text so that it is an email, we can just read it. So when that came in, so we took that, we discussed internally as to How do we solve this? We can solve it different ways. We can build up like an AI team, run all the AI models, and have transcription engines, and have these messages transcribed, right? Instead, we were looking at how can we give the solution to the customer as soon as possible? It’s always about how can we do it at the earliest, meet the request of the customer.
Beena Jacob (08:14.214) And at the same time, how can we iterate? We are not looking for a perfect solution, right? We give a solution first, get feedback, and iterate further on that. So we looked at what are the translation APIs, engines that’s available that we can make use of and start building something on our own, right? Make something that is already available rather than you build something on your own and you don’t want to spend time on that. So we looked into that. We provided a transcription service. But then if you look at your voice messages that you get on your phone, right, whether it’s iPhone or Android, if you notice that there are, if a message comes in a different language, if it’s not in English, if English is what you have set on your device. it would not transcribe any other messages, right? If it’s in any other language, it will just say you have a voice message and you don’t know the language, you don’t understand what that message is about. So that was our next step as in our iterative release as to, okay, the next step will be give them the feature where regardless of which language the message comes in, it is transcribed first into the original language and then translated to their language. So for example, if a message came in Chinese, right, in Mandarin, then it’s transcribed into Mandarin first and then translated into English. So when the user gets that text message, ultimately it’s in English, right? So the user is not worried about which language that the message came in. And then the next iteration we did was adding the propanity filter. So one of our customer segment, is school systems. So that was critical for them that there should be a profanity filter when these audio messages are transcribed if there are errors and some words are you know not good for the users to read. So the third iteration was adding the profanity filter. So I would say when you are solving a problem right understand the issue first and have an MVP release which is the minimum
Beena Jacob (10:31.314) and then keep it trading on it until you have that feature fully pledged. And it is based on customer feedback, right? You’re trading and getting customer feedback constantly from them, and then trading again and then adding more to it. So ultimately, it’s a feature that all the customers like.
Steven Tedjamulia (10:52.683) That is a great example shared with, so shared, so steps on, let’s talk a couple, break that down just a little bit. Deciding on the right MVP, how much time, what are tips you have for customer problem, they need to solve it, let’s not over design this, let’s create the right MVP, what’s your suggestions for like, what’s the right size of MVP to get it out and solve it for your customer?
Beena Jacob (11:24.182) It depends on, I mean, are you looking at a full-fledged product versus a feature, right? A feature could be a quick release versus a product takes more time. But MVP is more about what is the minimum that you need to release that product or a feature, right? So as you list all the features that you’re thinking of that should be added as part of the release, you have to go through and keep… your customer request and your customer need has to be front and center, right? So does that align with that request? Is it a nice to have feature or is it a core feature that you’re adding? So you have to go through that process with the various teams, discuss through that and come up with your final list as to, okay, this is our MVP, right? And further to that, it’s also about not just deciding on the features. Is it technically possible, right? It has to be based on effort and your technical capabilities. If you came up with a good list of features and then you realize that, OK, this is not technically possible, there’s a limitation. So how do you come up with a creative solution instead of that particular solution that we have outlined? So all that together, you’ve come up with an MVP version based on. What is the minimum that you have to do to solve that problem? What are your technical challenges? What’s the effort for that? Is it even possible in an MVP? And that’s how you come up with an MVP. And then, of course, you’re not stopping just at that MVP. You still have the other features listed in your roadmap. It’s just that you’re going to do that initial release and get customer feedback and then iterate further on the rest of the features.
Steven Tedjamulia (13:17.843) And how would you, what’s worked well for you to create a feedback loop, right? Sometimes we release the MVP, we keep building the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and saying that customer feedback loop is kind of forgotten. How have you and your organization, what have you done to implement a good feedback loop so that’s, we’re receiving good customer feedback as we release different things?
Beena Jacob (13:46.562) It’s more of a constant regular meetings, right? You meet with customers, you meet with your stakeholders, you meet with internal teams, you discuss those, what you have released so far. You have to keep that going on a regular basis. And so if you release something and you move on to the next thing, you’re releasing the next cool feature, next cool feature, you kind of forgotten what you released. before that, right? You gotta have that regular discussion going on so that you are evaluating whatever you have released so far, right? And you are iterating on it further and further rather than just going through your roadmap on and your list of features and you’re just, you know, checking as to, okay, I’m done, I’m done, next thing. Instead of going back and… getting that feedback and also at that point, you’re prioritizing your backlog, right? You’re reprioritizing your backlog based on the feedback you’re getting as to what should be the next release, right? It should be iterating based on the previous MVP that you released or are you going on to the next feature release? So that’s a fine balance that you have to do. You also have technical debt, right, for just the stability of your product. You have to take care of that also. What customer needs and customer, solving customer problems is the high priority one, right? So having to reiterate, getting the customer feedback and reprioritizing our backlog has to be first. Then comes the technical debt.
Steven Tedjamulia (15:27.511) And then from an executive perspective, you’ve described well the process of organizing your team, getting feedback, collaborating, starting a VP, getting feedback on that, iterating, building more. What kind of KPIs you put in place so that team members can know the customer-centric expectations are important and that you can track that we are listening to the customers? Are there? and ideas of KPIs you should just to put in place. Beena Jacob (16:02.122) Um, so far for the technical team, I mean, for the entire, for sales and marketing, there are different KPIs that those teams track, right? That’s not what the technical team is looking into. As far as technical team, I would say the KPIs we look at is customer satisfaction. Right. Are the feedback that we have got, are they happy with the features? Which ones did not work out? Which ones worked? Which ones they are really happy with? Right. That’s one. matrix that we look at. The other one is the customer churn rate. Like, what’s the retention rate of the customers? What was the reason for it? And how can we make that better? Those are the two main ones that on the technical side we review. As far as marketing and sales, there are other matrix that they track. But Customer satisfaction and customer retention rate ultimately is tied to the customer lifetime value, right? So it is contributing to that customer lifetime value.
Steven Tedjamulia (17:07.607) Very good. For those that are listening, can you tell us a little bit about what are you doing now? Who are you working with? How can people in our Engineering Manager community collaborate with you? Give us some background because you’ve shared some great insights on creating a customer-centric view, but I think the readers, I mean the listeners love to know a little bit about you. So could you give us that background?
Beena Jacob (17:33.63) Currently, I’m the CTO of Denoma. I have been with the company for a while. I started with Denoma as a software engineer and moved on to becoming the CTO of Denoma. My CEO and president of the company has three other companies. I’m actually the CTO of another startup that we started a couple of years back. So I managed two of those ventures. One is a B2C oriented and the Denoma is mainly B2B. And it’s more around compliance and archiving. That’s our B2B solutions. And the B2C product that we released this year is more about Having a chat application that is multilingual. So if you think about Signal or Telegram, it’s similar to that, but it is multilingual. As in, you don’t have to worry about what language the other person speaks, right? You can chat with any user in any language using your own language. So you don’t have to learn another language. You can chat with any other user. That’s our B2C application that we launched this year.
Steven Tedjamulia (18:57.279) Sounds great. Well, this has been a fabulous podcast. Any final advice you have for engineering managers aiming for a customer-centric success in technology?
Beena Jacob (19:12.366) I would say in today’s fast-paced ever evolving technological landscape, right? Don’t get caught up in the latest trends and evolving technologies. Think about how can you use that technology to apply to a customer problem. And when I know a lot of people think that when you think about customer needs and when you focus on customer problems, the you lose innovation. That is not right. And that’s where innovation happens, right? When you are keeping up with the emerging trends and your emerging technologies, and you’re keeping track of what are the customer problems and real-world scenarios, right? That’s where innovation happens. And that’s where you can actually apply innovation to good use. And I would say it extends to every aspect of leadership, whether it’s… team building or management or strategy and execution, it is more of a culture mindset, customer centric, and this is more extending to the technical team also. So I would say listen to your customers, understand their challenges, and let that guide your innovation.
Steven Tedjamulia (20:31.307) Thank you so much for sharing this valuable insights and experiences with us today, Bina. It’s been very wisdom shared throughout the podcast today. Thank you.
Beena Jacob (20:45.63) Thank you, Sreevan. It was nice.
Steven Tedjamulia (20:47.067) And so that’s a wrap. Oh, you’re welcome.
Beena Jacob (20:53.282) Thank you.
Steven Tedjamulia (20:54.263) Thank you. There’s a little time delay. Go ahead. There’s a little oh, you’re welcome So that’s a wrap for this episode of the engineering manager podcast Don’t forget subscribe for more conversations with thought leaders like Bina Jacob and we thank you for listening Beena
Jacob (20:58.4) I just really, yeah.
Beena Jacob (21:03.799) Thanks.
