Kevin Wang
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Kevin: [00:00:00] If you miss the wrong trend, that is something that is legitimately jeopardizing to your career. And so we've been very cognizant of all of these things.

Right. Right. Sorts of vocations and modalities that are all coming together, but it's in service of the actual core business school. That means that you also see teams that are moving faster,

Jeff: welcome to launch pod, the show from log rocket, where we sit down with top digital and product leaders. Today, our guest is Kevin Wang, chief product officer at braise,

a platform that enables businesses to build meaningful, personalized relationships with customers across multiple channels. In this episode, Kevin talks about

how you compare high velocity market innovation with a long term vision for your product to beat competitors year after year. Why you should build durable teams over agile org structures to drive long term success and a process to partner with early adopters to get the best market insights for your product. So here's our conversation with Kevin Wang.



Jeff: Hey, Kevin, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on.

Kevin: Yeah, really great to be here. Good to chat with you, Jeff.

Jeff: I'm excited. Now, Braze is one of those companies, you know, I've been in marketing for a long time. [00:01:00] I'm well aware of you, but you know, probably not aware as long as you've been because you, you were employee number five and you've been there forever at this

Kevin: Yeah, I was in the first 10 folks just crossed my 13 year anniversary just a few days ago, actually, which is crazy, like your tenure at a company and stuff like that. Yeah, no, seriously. And it's like a teenager's worth of a tenure at one company is quite a lot. It's been cool.

It's been an adventure, as you could probably imagine when you started something that's, It's very small, before product market fit, end up scaling it up. It feels like many different jobs in succession, so it doesn't get boring. It doesn't feel like, seeing the movie 13 times,

Jeff: Yeah, no, I,

Kevin: times.

Jeff: I hear you. I've been, I've been here at log rocket for a six and a half years now. And I was, I think the 10th person here and it's the same idea, right? It feels like we've gone through already three or four different companies at this

Kevin: Yeah, I can imagine.

Jeff: But you didn't start in product now. So you're the CPO now, but you started in engineering, which not a completely weird path, but definitely you started as like one of the [00:02:00] first engineers and now.

You know, you started product over there, right? So

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. It's been an interesting journey overall. So when I started with an engineer, as we were building out the initial versions of the product on that road to product market fit and then once product market fit was Achieved, I would say, especially as we were getting towards that that like 1 million ARR mark, we start, you start to grow and you start to expand out the team and the operations of what everybody's doing.

And at that point, I actually stepped over to engineering management. And I guess, technically, even before then, I'm running tech recruiting for a number of years. And so That kind of gave a bit of an interesting perspective around what it really takes to build the product, what it takes to build out a product and engineering teams before hopping into sort of the product management journey full time later on.

Jeff: you're cheating a little bit that actually has been like three or four different jobs. 

Kevin: Yeah, it was literally different things. I have been through like the whole journey like calling up universities to book [00:03:00] meeting rooms that you could interview like students for summer internships, got to see the entire journey, at least in a micro version of that recruiting adventure, especially.

Jeff: Nice. Now, one thing, cause we talked a little bit before this. And one thing I think that you mentioned that I, as a marketer of 20 years really identified with is, is this consistency around who you were building for, but it's marketers, but you had a really interesting way of looking at it and you, I never thought of it and you said it and I haven't been able to get out of my head since.

So. I'll let you go on this, but I think it's just a fun concept. I want to make sure we dig into here.

Kevin: Yeah, so I think to tee this up. Braze is a customer engagement platform. So we help brands like Canva, Intuit, The Guardian, HBO Max, Headspace, some of the really great brand consumer brands out there to build deeper relationships with their customers through very personalized communication. on that journey, I would say that the most common sort of persona of [00:04:00] our buyer is a marketer.

But what has been, I think, really interesting on the way to product market fit and continue to solidify our product market fit and continue to expand that the overall market to which we're selling has been this idea that in a lot of ways, marketing is is a unique. Sort of buyer because they are always in these very competitive marketplaces where they're in direct competition with one another, and they get traumatized by major rounds of technology change.

If you are a CMO today and you're say, 50 years old. You have seen the rise of mobile. You are currently living through the rise of AI. You saw the rise of the consumer internet. You saw the rise of let's call it more like the business internet. You saw the rise of the cloud. All of these different transitions that happened and at every single one all of your competitors were using all of the different tools that were available to them and they were using them to try to eat your lunch because that's the nature of marketing.

[00:05:00] If you are If you're in e commerce shoe store, everyone in the world only has two feet. And so you are in direct competition for the budget of shoes that people are going to be buying. And these brands reach one another or contact one another at the level of their marketing.

And so because of that, what I think has been really interesting for us to see is that there's this very rapid and exciting evolution in the market where Marketing teams are really always looking to the future and thinking, What can I do to gain a new advantage? What can I do to really surprise and delight my customers or my market in a novel way?

And as a result, they are very novelty seeking, which, as a product person, is a really exciting thing to build for because you have this this Customer base that's very excited to partner with you at every step of the journey all the way from idea conception for a given product out to, let's actually launch this.

Let's get this deployed. And so that's been really exciting on our journey.

Jeff: Everything you said, I just found myself kind of nodding along and, and, you know, first time. And then the second [00:06:00] time again, still going like, yeah, that makes sense. Cause I mean, I remember you know, much earlier when my career first started, they just, a company I worked for an early startup just hired a digital.

And it was to run all the internet things. 

It was just, you know, Hey, we have a blog. You should run it. Hey, you're going to do email marketing was a new thing. And it was, you know, I think it ended up being a company that is now a giant, you know, purveyor of marketing automation.

The person who was our CSM went on to be our CPO years later. That's how early this was, but

Kevin: cool.

Jeff: But it was, it's just always, you know, it is always the new thing. And, and, but you look 20 years later and now as a, you know, VP of marketing here at log rocket have an entire team of digital marketers and the entire, you know, singular role is 20 things.

And I think it was Andrew Chen who kind of coined the phrase, the law of shitty click throughs and it's, you know, but I think you can kind of expand upon that more, which is beyond just growth tactics in general and marketing You are always hungry to kind of move on to the next thing because it's things only work for [00:07:00] so long and you need to always be pushing the boundary and early adopting or else you're not, you know, you're going to be less effective.

So you put it this way in just a way that like, yeah, it is. I never thought about it as traumatic. I always thought about just as in like, we're going fast and go, go, go. But. It's a really I think a true way to look at it.

Kevin: Yeah, I think it's been really important for us to always keep this in mind because due to the fact that there can be Such a sort of scary moment. If you miss the wrong trend, like if you are that marketing team or that customer engagement group that completely missed mobile or completely missed the Internet or presumably will completely miss some other or social for that matter, some other consumer paradigm that's about to happen that we don't even realize because it's going to happen so quickly that it will be impossible to predict that is something that like is legitimately jeopardizing to your career.

You, you can't be that person that misses the trends. And so as a result, what I think is really interesting is that the buyer behaviors and the buyer desires that we see just change so, so [00:08:00] quickly. And now on the positive side I think The rapid change is positive. But another positive that I see is that over time, marketing is a field also then has to become much, much closer to core business ROI.

So that's been a really big transition that we've been very cognizant of have tried to push more for and really try to surf the wave of, seeing kind of Bye. Bye. The mother say the rise of the modern growth team, where rather than like you said, digital marketer, undifferentiated set of goals, just anything that has to do with the Internet where we're defining you by your domain.

Now we see these growth teams that are defined by their outputs or more specifically, often defined by their goals. So like you are the retention team or you're the CRM team. If you're the retention team, your goal is retention is increasing CLTV and you start to see that. The roles that go into that really evolve over time as well.

So rather than just five digital marketers, the retention team where the growth team starts to look like, three [00:09:00] engineers, product manager, a lead marketer, another marketer that's focused around, say, like acquisition marketing, maybe some data, maybe even some design, all of these different things.

Tor sorts of vocations and modalities that are all coming together, but it's in service of the actual core business school. And since the business school matters, you also see more resources pouring in. That means that you also see teams that are moving faster, where everyone's sharper, creates a really exciting virtuous cycle, I think, in terms of how they can deploy our product and also the role that they're playing within these larger organizations.

Jeff: So I was gonna ask, I identify with the concept, but how does this impact, you know, braids? And I think you kind of pre answered that right there, which is great. so is it that speed and the speed of the, of the group or of the, you know, persona, I guess, is that, something that you guys have been able to latch onto?

If you look at the last 20 years, it's such an increasing footprint. That's an amazing place. If you are selling into customer engagement, marketing purposes, you know, what was this big? Is that like your, you know, chance for like NRR and all sorts of stuff just goes through the [00:10:00] roof with net retention capability.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that's really true in terms of the speed, but also the skill sets, so it makes a huge difference if we're comparing, say, a team that has ambitions of leveling up their career. Email and mobile marketing communication versus a team that has those ambitions and also can say, all right, and this is our partner product and engineering team.

This is our partner data team, and they're all on board with us. We're all aimed at the same goal. And as a result, we can rally so many more resources internally. We can reshape our product if we really want to. And it's even one step further. If all of those different groups are directly embedded and working together with one another, because then it's like we're effectively working with a full team.

vertically integrated start up that can work with our product, be our partner and go out there and hit a bunch of those really key goals that they have. And once we start to see, especially those latter two categories, one of the things that's really exciting for us from a product point of view is figuring out ways that we can actually [00:11:00] expand out our business.

For example, one of the really exciting things that we've managed to do over time is that we have continued to add more and more ways that our customers can reach their customers. Adding more platforms like say the Flutter mobile framework, adding more channels like landing pages and feature flags and, A line messenger and what's that messenger and all these different ways that you can reach new geographies or new customers.

And from a product point of view, it's really great because it serves multiple goals at once. One is that it is just like a revenue expansion mechanism. And so if you're looking at things from an NRR lens, this is a way that you get a degree of very organic expansion built into sort of the DNA of your company because you're in a market that is expanding.

So that's really neat. And then another side of it that's really exciting for us is that as we expand across channels, that increases our differentiation because as long as we've got everything really consolidated together, it's just as easy to send an SMS message or a [00:12:00] message on WhatsApp or.

Or an email or a mobile push. Then we're essentially training our users to be self expanding or training our customer and training our customers to be self expanding entities while they're realizing more value at the same time. And what's even more exciting beyond that is that when you have a lot of depth of sophistication So you're adding AI or adding more workflow automation and all these different other powerful sorts of features Any new channel that we launch gets to benefit from all of the prior investment that we've made So you get this naturally expanding naturally compounding engine Which puts us into what we think is a really exciting place and a lot of our product efforts Go into making sure that we're at the leading edge of that compounding process

Jeff: Yeah. Now, I mean, there is a benefit here to having a persona you sell into that is always kind of pushing boundaries and very early adopter in that cycle, which is if you can keep up and you can build quick enough and you can stay at that, like you said, you have a. Buyer set that kind of goes from [00:13:00] like, you know, one to two to four to eight potentially.

But the, the risk is you have to build really fast to keep up with that. Like their entire marketing teams, you know, growing and selling you have, you know, what was one function is now two is now four. And they're just getting more detailed. How did you guys look at that over time? Right. I know you didn't start with the breadth of platform you have now.

So how do you keep up with that and kind of keep up with that really fast moving group and stay pushing the envelope with them?

Kevin: In terms of thinking through how to keep up the pace. I think you're completely correct. And, for our market, but really for, frankly, I think for any sort of SAS market, any sort of b2b market, that sort of velocity becomes very key. Maybe if we're talking about a social network, or if we're talking about Craigslist famously, it's like what, like three people who work there or something like that.

And at a certain point,

Jeff: thing as it was in like 1998.

Kevin: Exactly. So it's like at some point in those businesses, I guess the virality becomes some sort of moat. But in sass, you almost never don't have the same sort of deep sort of classical virality. And as a result, it's really about your ability to stay [00:14:00] ahead of the market and your ability to push the envelope.

So in terms of how we thought about this, there's a bunch of different sort of Ways from the most lofty strategic all the way to the most tactical. I'll just give like a grab bag of a few ideas that I think are really important. One of the biggest ones is about focus on having a really clear product vision.

Like for us, we have a number of things that we believe must be true for customer engagement To be effective and to be best in class at the highest levels like we think that you need to be a real time streaming platform that can be immediately responsive so you can be more personalized. We think you need to be very wide across channels, reach customers everywhere.

We think that you need to be very flexible from a data perspective. There's a few other examples, but these are just things that we believe, and we believe them for since the founding of the company. And as a result, it allows you to just have fewer foot faults where you're just going down some sort of angle, exploring some sort of product ideas that maybe a [00:15:00] few customers asked you about, but they don't really align with your vision.

And so I think that having that sort of clear set of beliefs around what it is that your product needs, allows you to stay more focused, allows you to attempt fewer things that you can do. do those things better. The other things that I think have really helped us, and we can talk about this a bit more later, is having , very technical teams that are very focused over the long term.

Because when you have a dynamic environment where the technology is changing under you, where the market is changing around you, this obviously is very relevant to many companies in the time of AI. What's really important is that you want experts, but you don't just want experts in this particular problem that I decided to solve.

this Tuesday, you want experts in an entire sort of slice of the market. This is the technology that we run on. This is the overall customer landscape and the way that our particular buyer, our particular part of the user journey is evolving. And you want them to have that long term buy in.

And you also really want them to have the long term incentive to, to be excellent. So for example, if [00:16:00] a team is running on a suboptimal database, maybe they actually just need to spend six months and fix it. And if they know that they'll be on that team 24 months from now, you're a lot more incentivized to actually fix that root cause problem and allow you to have a step function improvement than if it's just in three sprints, I'll be rotated off onto some other sort of product line.

And then who cares? And this shitty database is, somebody else's problem. And so that has really helped us a lot to have the right long term incentives, but also the Urgent voice in your head saying you got to move faster in a lot of teams heads.

Jeff: So how do you balance that kind of thing where, you know, one end is, is this database that you say is kind of crap and, and needs to be upgraded. And that's not necessarily going to, it might be a heavy project, but it's not necessarily going to show in feature increase or, or like you said, a wider breadth of product, but it's something, you know, you need to do versus, you know, the alternate time portion that might be to launch something new or, or, you know, add a new platform or something that you guys can work with.

How do you kind of work to ensure that the teams are making those calls with the right balance of [00:17:00] decision making?

Kevin: lot of different elements that Bolster making the right sorts of Wise long term investments and of course these questions are really nuanced and so I'll give you very tactical techniques that anybody can use.

But how do you make better decisions? I don't know, be born smarter, right? That's not super actionable. I've been working on it.

Hasn't worked yet. One of the biggest ones for us is that we have a very strong Writing culture and so it is my I think many people have talked about having a great writing culture We really try to emulate in many ways Amazon's right famous writing culture I think Putting things into a document lets people call you stupid in a very polite, thoughtful way where you are forced to respond.

And I think as a result, it is harder to drive the car off the cliff when somebody can say hey, that's a cliff. Your foot's on the accelerator. You need to not do that. Another thing that I think has helped us a lot is that we just had a lot of senior, very tenured technical leadership.

And as time has gone [00:18:00] on, one of the cool things, snowball rolls downhill, it gets bigger, is that you actually accumulate even more senior technical leaders who really know what they're doing. And so that has helped a great deal. We also I would say just, I think at a certain point, it just takes, you need to have a culture where you can have the courage to just say I will put my stamp on this or I will sign on the dotted line and underwrite that I'm okay with this team not shipping anything new for three months, four months, five months, because that's what we need to do.

And I think a lot of that comes from trying to have a culture of very high integrity and also a culture that isn't about Blame because once you're in a blame culture, then everyone's just a little bit hesitating to ever sign their name to that because what if something goes wrong? What if we turn a big customer because we didn't keep our foot on the gas?

And so what we've really tried to do is remain really open minded. And the writing culture has helped for that. But when you've got very technical people and that writing culture and you're open minded and not blaming, it becomes easier, I think, to at least have the full discussion. And maybe you decide right, [00:19:00] maybe you decide wrong, but at least you thought about everything.

Jeff: Right. I mean, I love that, you know, kind of the way you guys look at how do you keep up with this, you know, buyer persona that you have, which is almost not just willing to take risk, but is incentivized to be at the, at the very forefront of risk taking right. And, you know, some industries that's not true.

And if you're building like accounting software you know, innovation and accounting is often how you go to jail. Innovation and marketing is how you don't get fired. So you know, you have this, this audience that is pushing in and oftentimes has things that they probably try that fails. And I love that the view is like, how do we keep up with that is let's, let's push and let's be innovative, but let's also have a view of, what is RP, you know, where this is going and, and have a vision for the future allows you to be more flexible enough to do what needs to be done both in long term bets and short term bets.

And how do you make good decisions there, but also how do you move quickly and. You know, do the right things quickly. It needs you to expand and fill with these people in need. It's, you know, I think a very nuanced thing. We could probably have two or three episodes just diving into your decision making structure over [00:20:00] at raise.

But I love the kind of thoughtfulness behind it. And as I said, I kind of love the idea of the traumatized marketer. I feel like we should get t shirts made or something there. Oh, this would be so

Kevin: It's like you can have the tour dates of all the different platform shifts that happened under your watch and what you did about them. Another thing on that front that I think has been really helpful for how we've thought about this I guess two things. One is to try to identify the customers that we think have the best eye for where the market is going and then partner with them really closely over time.

That has been really helpful because in marketing, the whole market can shift in the course of 18 months. And so it's if you think of that, You're crossing the chasm sort of concept of the early adopters out to the, late majority or what have you in marketing. You could go through the majority of those different stages in 18 months.

And as a result, if you are building for the early adopters, the rest of market catches up to you pretty quickly. Whereas Yeah, again, accounting software. The rest of the market, like you might be out of business by the time the rest of the market [00:21:00] catches up. So that's a very different dynamic. The other thing we've thought about a lot is just try not to fight gravity.

Like sometimes things happen and there's like a bunch of regulatory changes and we'll actually look at them very carefully and think about is this a regulatory change that seems like a total flash in the pan? Or is this something like, say broader digital like broader data privacy concerns?

Which is You know, clearly continuing and when GDPR first was announced, we were looking at oh, wow, this is really heavyweight. This is gonna be a big thing for us to deal with. What do we do about it? But pretty quickly we just started to think, this is pretty obviously the way the world's going to go.

So we should just assume that the world will look like a three steps down the line, journey from whatever GDPR is right now. And that's the way that the universe will be. And rather than trying to fight gravity or argue against it, let's just lean in on what we think is actually going to happen.

And that's served us well. We've done that a few different times.

Jeff: Yeah. And that's great. Cause you can have maybe a, kind of the hurricane zone view of where it's going to [00:22:00] go. Right. Like, you know, the, the width is that big, but you can narrow it down from the entire world to that, you know, you have a much better ability to fill in the gaps when they, when they happen.

So I am curious on this is like. Right now, you know where you guys are in the customer engagement marketing world is you're incredibly wide. You're, you know, you're well known and, you know, a stalwart in the tech stack there and people be, you know, crazy to not, you know, have you were something very close.

A what I've gathered here is I should try and have you on this periodically, even if we don't actually publish it, just so I can learn what you think about marketing, because you are very close to the market and I should just use that to stay ahead of everyone. But but B I have to assume you guys did not start.

You know, as wide and big as you are. And there, there must've been some, level of how do you dial into the first thing that's going to work and, and that kind of piece of journey to product market fit. And I don't, I don't want to spend forever on this. I know you guys have talked about this ad nauseum and you and your CEO have publicly discussed this, but for people who maybe aren't familiar, like you started somewhere and you kind [00:23:00] of pushed through to get that first hook in.

And from there, then it's, it's been able to go wide.

Kevin: We originally started with much more of a mobile focus. And I would say that while we always were very aware that we were going to need to do all sorts of customer engagement beyond mobile, mobile is like the initial wedge where the product was focused in and in more so than just mobile as a channel or a set of ways of reaching people.

I would say that we were mainly dialed in on To the point of what we were just talking about, the industry changes that were going to happen as a result of mobile. Because mobile is so much more than just your phone. Mobile is also the fact that now your phone is accessible everywhere. It's the fact that there's been so much distribution of mobile phones and accelerating broadband, that the amount of data that's available out there in the world has completely exploded.

So while we were very focused on mobile initially, and What the real art, I think, was as we were getting towards product market fit was to figure out how to build the right functionality that we were going to need in the longer term by starting [00:24:00] with a really strong foundation then that was a little bit narrower that was that could be sold to the initial buyers that we were going after.

So that's really, I would say, where that journey began. Ultimately, though, we did end up building a product that was probably a bit too wide for the This sort of traditional, very specific product niche that say a lean startup method would recommend so Many obviously many startups they start with something that's you know very narrow our product was bigger because we were looking at it like in the future Everyone's going to need to communicate constantly with their customers in real time across all these different modalities so we need to build everything and so then we built it and Nobody was really ready to buy it, and so there was definitely some more nerve wracking months in there as the market was slowly, gradually turning, and we were trying to get those first buyers in the door where we were actually sitting on a product that was, in a way a little bit too robust or a little bit more robust than what they needed, but that ended up serving us, I think, pretty well once the market turned.

Obviously, it's [00:25:00] a little bit scary to be waiting for that.

Jeff: So how did you go about kind of find those first users in context of, I know that there's this idea of like, right, the minimum viable product and the lean startup and all these kinds of things. And I feel like lately we've seen that that's not always true. There is, you know, a ton of companies out there that.

that don't, you know, for instance, in our case, we started with session replay. We very, very quickly realized we had to go much wider than that because, you know, product analytics, for instance, is basically we're ingesting a lot of same data. It's just slightly processing it and ingesting and displaying it a little bit different, but it's the same, you know, you're not going to have two or three collectors.

All getting the same data. So we very quickly realized to win the deals we wanted to win. It wasn't just to be great session replay and great technical depth. It was, we wanted to go wide into analytics and then that level of data you start to see, like there's all this stuff we can surface because we have this, if we can build the right forward looking, you know, maybe AI layer on it.

And so from, you know. I'd say 2017, we were already thinking about [00:26:00] how do we capture this data and process it and start to, you know, set it up. So it's in the right spot for that. So I think there is some value here to, you know, having this wider view of, of product and, and maybe solving more problem. You know, the risk that you said is maybe it's a little harder at first.

People don't fully get on board with your big vision, but there's also the risk of, if you don't do that wide that quickly. You can lose out because someone else does it. And maybe that's when that concept hits. So how did you guys kind of view that? And how'd you go about kind of getting people to push forward and say like, no, this is where the market is going and you are going to want this extra feature that maybe you don't want today, but in a week you will.

Kevin: there's 22 angles to that. So one is that even in the early days of really getting a product market fit, closing our first enterprise customers, something that we started to see within our buyers was that the way that they thought the market was going to go Is the way that we thought the market was going to go.

So for example, the first buyer personas that we were selling to in many cases were actually to your point about digital marketing, we're basically like mobile strategists, people where, who were again, early stages of the market defined by their [00:27:00] domain rather than by sort of their goal or defined by the domain rather than by Essentially, like their vocation or their role within the organization.

But as we talk to these folks who are really mobile focused, what we started to catch was that they were thinking about their jobs and what they were going to do with their team is much, much more expensively because they were as soon as they started to ride the mobile. Wave. They could see that things like email, things like the web, things like in product surface areas that all of these were going to change that they were going to have a really important role to play.

And we thought that was true as well. And so that gave us more confidence again in that vision in that sense of what are the invariance in our market and the invariance in our plan that we need to really follow through on. The other aspect of all of this That I think was really helpful in terms of when we were figuring out like how to best scale the platform out and balance between having a very narrow MVP and having a really wide, suite of [00:28:00] functionality, especially in the early days, is that we were in many ways like computer science purists about a lot of the decisions that we made, and I think that ends up leading to a code base that's frankly, in a lot of ways, probably more convoluted because you end up I in my opinion, I think we overbuilt a lot of aspects of our early technical stack.

In fact, I don't even think that's controversial because we then later literally deleted the code. Empirically, we were overbuilt, but what that did was that since we had that opinion on things like, we need to be cross channel all of our infrastructure and all of our sort of architecture assumed a cross channel customer engagement marketing world in the long run.

And so when we wanted to build for being cross channel, it was just trivial. It's like you would just build it with that assumption. All of our architecture assumed that we would need to be a real time streaming platform that could respond immediately to new data coming in. And so as a result, we never had to go back and retool everything to make it real time streaming.

It was just real time streaming from the start. Frankly, in the early [00:29:00] days, that was way faster than a lot of our customers needed, and we just paid for that in terms of time and treasure, but as time went on, that ended up being a really beneficial assumption for us because we've never had to actually just rebuild that piece of of the architecture.

Jeff: , it sounds like we've had people on before. We've talked about, you know, maybe the risk of selling too far in the future, right? And you don't, what you don't want to do is if your product is a year behind what you're selling, well, you're going to run into consistently having the problem where people want the thing you're selling, not the thing you have.

But you guys kind of had the inverse of, you know, you were almost building out in the future and then selling a little bit, you know, what the market wanted, but you were ready for, you know, where you're where you guys had a, you know, pretty smart hypothesis and opinion on where it was going, which almost the inverse, right?

The risk of doing it one way is, you know, you're just You, you don't sell anything because people people want the thing you're coming with in the future. But in your guy's case, like you said, the risk is just maybe time, maybe some, you know, maybe some treasure. But you can sell still. [00:30:00] And I guess, how did that end up working through that?

I mean, apparently pretty well in the long run we're here, but. What did that look like?

Kevin: I think it worked well. The way you described it is definitely the idealized form of how that

journey can go,

the problem is that if you build too far in the future versus where the customers are, you end up building suddenly wrong stuff because really you ought to be building in partnership with customers or in partnership with market demand that is going to end up being very specific.

And so the main way that it aided us though, I think is that. Is that again like the overall foundations of what we built didn't need to be retooled in most cases the way I think about it is that If we're in the transportation market we're building things to get people from point A to point B, if you build a bicycle that bicycle will never fly like a 737.

There's no way, there's no way to do it. You will not iterate that bicycle into something that takes flight and flies you to Brazil. And so you have to know that you're building the plane from day one, and maybe it's like a crappy plane, maybe it's got wooden wings, maybe there's [00:31:00] someone in the back pedaling it, it's like got wings.

It's sort of the general shape of what you're going to need. That's the place that we really saw, like the dramatic acceleration. And that's why we're also, I would say, really excited about things like AI, because we think that there's a lot of advantages to our approach, For an AI first world, as we see more power in the computing systems that we're using, and if you would assume that systems were not going to get more powerful, you ended up building a really different product than ours that we think cannot take advantage of AI in the same way.

Jeff: I want to hit that real quick, but I also just want to make sure we don't miss the, I think what is a profoundly really interesting kind of way of thinking about it that you just mentioned. Which is right. Like when you're building into the future, you need to be close to it, close enough to it, to know vaguely what you're building, right?

Like, don't make sure you're not going to build a bicycle when you really need a plane, but you can build a crappy plane. So you can be at the point where, you know, maybe you're building, like you said, a crappy plane with pedals and wooden wings, and it's only going to go, you know, the Wright brothers.

I think what went like 90 feet on their first flight or something. I'm [00:32:00] probably way off, but it's, you know, magnitude, not wrong. But that got us to supersonic jets now, but if they had been, you know, building a bicycle and thinking they were going to get to here. It was never going to happen. So, you know, I guess that's the, I was going to ask you about market timing and how you do that.

But I think that's a great framework. There is, you know, you need to understand, you need to be close enough to it and close enough to timing where you understand the vague shape of it. But you also won't be soon enough where you can start to really iterate faster and do those revs and do the turns faster than other people can.

Kevin: Yeah, and to your point about, you can launch a crappier version of it I've consistently been shocked by, in some cases, just how crappy a version of an MVP can launch, and have people being like, , weirdly excited about it. And in many ways, that's of course like the strongest market signaling that you can get.

The other one being people who are like woefully disappointed with that MVP, where they're saying like, this is crazy, how does it not do this ABC things that of course you've probably already thought of. The way that we think about a lot of that question around market timing is that I will say for one thing now, we're a large company, our [00:33:00] customers are larger.

And so the standard for what we launch is much higher than it was in the early days. And I think, it

Jeff: It's got to be now. Right. With your, your level of minimum kind of goes up as you grow.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. But what we try to do is. What we are very willing to do is like in a beta period in an early access period, we will try to get our customers to get their hands on the product in the ugliest sort of most bare bones form possible as early as we possibly can, as long as they're planning to use the product or as long as we can confirm that they're using the product in the way that we intend, because I think the worst thing that can happen is that you launch something super, super early, but then it ends up getting You know people just aren't quite using it the way in a way that Furthers the overall plan that you have for the product vision overall when that happens That's when you can get all sorts of strange dispersion across the product so what we want is for people to at least be solving the goals that we intend or for us to have at least degree of harmony between what we think the product is and what the product means to [00:34:00] them.

But other than that, then, we'll let people try the most heinous early stage products possible.

Jeff: We had a woman named Lauren Creedon on a little while back. She's the head of product over at Goldcast and she does framework of like busy for launches like one, five 50. So early on, it's just like, use it internally. Very small, make sure it kind of validated there, or maybe like one very, very friendly customer.

Get the, you know, kind of gross version up to maybe like five. Who are really friendly and, and again, they know what they're getting and you're really just validating use as much as the UI and stuff like that. But, you know, you kind of get speed out of this and then as you go to less and less friendly, or maybe, you know, less just close to the chest you can go, but you can go wider, but you have to bring the quality of what you're bringing.

And it seems like that probably goes forward. Maybe there's slightly different quality bars that the size braises that now, but that probably still relatively holds true is, is, you know, what you consider releasable, but gross for like maybe a couple of very close alpha customers is very different from even like a, an extended close beta kind of thing.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that's true. And [00:35:00] it's overall, I think it's just a healthy in its own way. It's just a very healthy way to build enterprise software in particular, because one of the things that I think is So important is to really respect your customers. It sounds like a silly thing to say, but there's this line that there's that line about Henry Ford saying if I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

I really don't like that line. I think it's I think it's insulting and like belittling of enterprise buyers. If you go when you talk to people who buy like very expensive enterprise software like These are very smart people. They have a very deep understanding of what they're trying to accomplish.

And, maybe they're a little bit stuck in their ways in some cases, but I also find that increasingly in today's world where everybody has used so much software over time and seen software markets evolve, they really know what they want and they're very creative about how they can get it.

And so showing them a really rough MVP earlier on is that is a really good way to harness the combined. brain power of your customer [00:36:00] base. And that's one of the, these sort of naturally compounding mechanisms that exists in SAS. And every time you find something that compounds, you've got to take advantage of it.

So yeah, that's a lot of why we do this. Yeah.

Jeff: I'm sure at some level you want to understand the benefit. You also understand what they think they want, because if you're too far off of The way they think they want it, what you might end up with is like, sure, you built a car, but no one wanted a car.

No one was ready for it. There's no roads built for it, anything like that. So you kind of, you know, I think back to balance and how far ahead of the market you want to get. Now. This is fantastic. I'm loving kind of understanding how you guys think through this. I do also want to talk a little bit more about org design.

Cause we started to touch on it a second ago. I think we we've had a few people on who've talked about being very like agile with the org design and being able to shift people to where you need them. And, and that's a way to build product and a very like focused on what's most important. You guys at Braze take a slightly different approach, which you touched on is like durable teams with a very long goals and a vision for the future.

I kind of want to just understand like how you how you implement this and what this looks like in in time and in [00:37:00] practice because it's kind of a good counterpoint to some of the other things we've heard in the past.

Kevin: We're very strong believers in durable teams, especially for products like ours that are technical and also where the buyer preference and behavior and in many cases, the technical underpinnings of the product area are all changing because we think that durable teams have a number of advantages.

That will just allow you to just whether a lot of different storms and, cross very or to use another analogy, just like cross very uneven ground where there's a lot of large amount of uncertainty. And so some of the major advantages that we see are one that it incentivizes long term thinking and around like we discussed earlier around making the right technology choices because teams know that they're on the hook over the long run. They also know that they'll reap the benefits of any sort of major investment that they make. The other thing that it builds is it builds really deep expertise, of course, in a buyer, in a market, In all of this.

And so something that we find now is that, for example, if you go and you talk to like our SMS team [00:38:00] about the SMS market, they have an incredibly nuanced view. Like they can go toe to toe with people who work at like telecom companies about the way that their market is shifting. And that's a huge asset in terms of building a product that's going to sell and a product that customers are really going to love and care about over a longer time frame.

The other thing, actually, that I think does not get talked about enough is that it's also very important, in my opinion, to have durable teams for career building purposes, because what we want what you want is you want people on your team to be able to say I built X very large, , complicated, sophisticated, complicated.

High impact system. It's very good for their careers because these folks are going to go out all into the world over the years. And these are people you might want to work with again in the future. But it's also something where when people know that what they're working on is good for their career, and it's compounding in a way that's good for their career, frankly, like they just focus on it more.

And that sort of focus leads to better outcomes as well. It [00:39:00] directly incentivizes the more missionary mentality versus the mercenary mentality. And we think that's all very valuable.

Jeff: And one thing, I mean, that I love that this has allowed you guys to do is if you look at, you know, AI and kind of the, some product teams over there relationship to it, you know, you guys took a bet on that in like 2016, I think you said and have had this durable team kind of focusing on it, which.

Maybe, you know, paired with right durable teams paired with the right vision means as these things come ascendant and really get more and more into a wider adoption, you've already built a team that has expertise and knowledge and has looked at, you know, maybe how do you solve a, the core problem, but even B, how do you solve problems outside slightly tangential to your, to your category solution set, even to start to, you know, really look at how you can help your customers be more effective with these tools.

Kevin: I think the A. I. Is a perfect example of a lot of these things around both sort of the product vision and sticking to like the truth about the universe and also the durable teams all come together. So [00:40:00] we started these teams like I mentioned, . 78 years ago somewhere in that range.

And it was actually because we were, I think using like an Amazon Alexa or something, and just starting to realize that the learning techniques that were and different modern AI techniques that of course, like predated predated the transformer architecture, they were like starting to work.

And so once we realized they were starting to work, what we realized was that a huge part of our value out of the product is that we're just adding leverage to our customers. We're giving them more automation, we're giving them the ability to do more, and AI is really a subset of automation. So I actually will admit, I don't love the fact that nowadays people treat AI as like a as so much of a sort of top level category of technology.

Because to me, AI is just the latest and greatest. May was most impressive of a bunch of techniques that are all around just giving human beings like more power to do more stuff with technology, going back to like plows and, 

Jeff: Well, it's the same way. No one, no one says like [00:41:00] Bluetooth was, it's just Bluetooth is just a medium. We used to solve, you know several wireless problems. You know, Bluetooth is not the top level solution set.

Kevin: Exactly. Now, of course, once we realized that Once we realized that these AI products were starting to work and take off, though, we started to decide, All right, this is probably going to end up being very impactful for this market. And so we stood up a whole team that began to launch to build and launch AI products.

And that team built more and more expertise around our customers. They built more and more expertise around our technologies. They built more expertise around the market they were operating in. And so then when, Chat GPT gets launched when you have the sort of transformer driven revolution, and all these different tools and techniques are coming to the fore.

We really had a team that was ready to go and able to jump on all these different products that we've launched and really try to seize the moment in a way that fit very coherently into our overall product offering and our overall product vision. All of that happening because we were both willing to commit to this [00:42:00] team for many years when it was not particularly invoke, but also the fact that we had a place for them to fit into our org structure into our overall product vision, and we were willing to once we felt like we understood What was going on the market, make sure that we were really able to to slot them in there and commit to it.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, it's, it's really interesting to me, the power that this durable team model can have, because I think. On our side, right? Like I said, I joined here in 2018. We already had, you know, the engineer who was working on our AI solution then is still the one leading the team now. It was this view of, I remember being recruited by our CEO very early on to come and work here.

And he laid out this vision of, you know, basically we're building a data set that will You know, ultimately, as as the tech catches up, there's so much more we can do with this, where it's automatically surfacing the problems that you need to solve in your digital experience. It is automatically showing you insights into maybe why a funnel isn't working.

But we can't do that yet because the tech isn't there, but we can get [00:43:00] ready for it. And I remember sitting in like an early customer meeting and showing them some of the early findings we had, we had had that we weren't able to show in the platform yet, but we had, you know, use these methods early version, you know, the, the very early plane near the biplane version of it to leverage some insights and ended up being, they went out and like pulled in several other members of the team to come see, cause we found some like critical issue in their digital experience for customers.

And now it's a huge part of, of what, you know, makes the platform differentiated and solid, but we wouldn't be here without having that view, you know, six, seven, eight years ago to invest in and continue to invest even before the tech was there. So I think it's a great, you know, view that you guys take that you're able to sit there and look and say, Hey, mobile is going to give so much information for AI and there's going to be such a huge opportunity here.

Let's invest here now. And the idea of combining right, like a very fast moving, high iterative persona that you're marketing, you're selling into with durable teams. But the idea of how do you make [00:44:00] the right decisions and prioritize correctly and build right and have a vision for the future, but also kind of adjust that and, you know, not too far out, not too close in.

I mean, explains why Braze is, you know, the size you guys are now. But I could, you know, keep going on this forever here, Kevin I don't want to take too much of your day.

I appreciate so much. You're coming on. This is fantastic. I would love to keep in touch, even just, you know, so much about, you know, marketing where it's going to be deeply informative there, but I feel like there's so much more product stuff to learn from you guys too. But in the meantime, if someone has a follow up question, wants to ask him, just say, thanks for coming on and that they enjoy the show.

Like where's the best place to reach out to you.

Kevin: I'll say you could connect with me on LinkedIn. 

Jeff: Cool. Well, it's great having y'all. Thank you so much for coming on, Kevin.

Kevin: Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeff. Really great to join you and yeah, looking forward to whenever we chat next.

Jeff: Yeah, sounds good.