December 05, 2023

Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models w/ Scott Woody #158

47 minutes

Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate the tension between infrastructure & product eng teams, creating a healthy relationship between finance & eng orgs, and recommendations for strategically considering pivoting business models.

ABOUT SCOTT WOODY

Scott (@l3amm) is currently co-founder and CTO of Metronome, the usage-based billing platform built to help software companies accelerate their revenue. Prior to Metronome, Scott was a Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he led the growth and monetization team. He previously co-founded Foundry Hiring, an ATS system, that was later acquired by Dropbox.

"When we were smaller, we had one giant engineering team. What we realized about nine months ago, especially as we started working with these more public companies, was that the needs of the specific personas were so specific that this concept of engineers being able to fit the entire product and need space in their head was impossible. We had to create those experts and decided to have PMs specialize and embed with these teams to become experts on the workflows.”

- Scott Woody

SHOW NOTES:

The origin story of Metronome & Scott’s transition from Dropbox (3:14)
How Metronome gained & maintained its first customers (5:36)
Metronome’s two products / distinct user personas (7:58)
Challenges from multiple complex stakeholders and users (10:17)
The difficulty in solving & prioritizing user problems (12:23)
Navigating the tension between product eng & infrastructure sides (15:41)
How Metronome created experts in house & built a retainer of consultants (19:29)
Roadmap for going from early-stage engineering to specialized teams (21:10)
Processes for standardizing the knowledge base & communicating the info (23:16)
Using brown bag talks to onboard new hires (26:16)
Implications of a usage-based business model for eng leaders (28:26)
Lessons learned when changing your business model (30:22)
Making the shift to a consumption-based model (32:45)
Strategies for rationalizing which pricing model to follow & knowing when to pivot (36:23)
Developing & testing a value hypothesis (38:19)
Lead with customer value in mind & communicate that value factor (40:59)
Rapid fire questions (42:21)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Elon Musk - From Walter Isaacson, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
Foundation - The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)

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