This episode features an interview with Koti Reddy, Chief Technology Officer for Conga.  Conga is the global leader in commercial operations transformation, helping businesses automate the process of creating quotes, contracts and documents.  We talk with Koti about building complex pricing algorithms, smart contracts, and making data-based decisions.

3 Takeaways:

• When making a significant decision, don’t take shortcuts.
• Leverage data to help make the big decisions instead of relying solely on your gut. 
• Sometimes taking a little more time or spending a little more money is worth it to make a thoughtful, data-based decision.

Key Quotes:

• “Especially when you are building a foundational piece like a multi-tenant SaaS solution that is going to be there for the next 10, 12 years or beyond, you need to be really, really careful in taking a shortcut that saves two months. I once went for the timeline-based decision and it took many years for us to dig out of that hole.” 
• “The new customers that are coming into this ecosystem, we want them to be able to make smart decisions about their business and how they are dealing with customers based on data.  Using data, analytics and AI they can build decision support.” 
• “If you want to build a feature, you need to figure out: Is it useful for a hundred of my customers?  Or is it useful for two of my customers?  Maybe you make a call saying, I'm going to do it for these two customers, because I'm going to acquire 200 after that.  We actually take the sales opportunity and help them to close it.  We put together the data, the products, the catalogs and the contracts in our quote-to-cash flow. We are making data-based decisions, not only in our applications, but we are also directing our customers based on data.”

Bio:

Koti Reddy is a technical leader with 20 years of experience in managing enterprise and SaaS product development.  He leads a multi-continental, multi-cultural team of 300 highly skilled engineers to implement world-class, scalable designs.  Before taking on the role of CTO, Koti served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Conga, using his expertise in engineering, R&D and other operations to grow Conga’s business.  Prior to joining Conga, Koti was SVP of CallidusCloud and took charge of all product development and cloud operations.

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