Nishant discusses the importance of data-led engineering leadership. Nishant shares several examples of enterprises that have significantly improved development productivity, speed, quality, and security by bringing together data-driven insights and no-code automation. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.
Recorded Voice: This is Digital Anarchist.
Alan Shimel: Hey everyone. Welcome to another Techstrong TV segment. My guest for this segment is Nishant Doshi. Nishant is with a company called “Propelo.” Nishant welcome to Techstrong TV.
Nishant Doshi: Thank Alan, thank you for having us.
Alan Shimel: Oh it’s a pleasure to have you on. Nishant, you know let’s assume our audience doesn’t know Propelo, not familiar with you, so I think that’s the place to start. Why don’t you give us a little background of both your own personal history, as well as as the company.
Nishant Doshi: Absolutely Alan. So first of all thank you everyone for joining, really appreciate it. My name is Nishant Doshi. I am the CEO and founder of Propelo.
Propelo is a Series A startup based in the valley. What we are doing is we’re building an engineering excellence platform. My own sort of background is I sort of straddle between entrepreneurship and, and engineering leadership. Prior to this I was a VP of Engineering at Palo Alto Networks where I essentially helped them with, with all of their cloud security product lines and, and saw a tremendous growth within four years, from like zero to all the way like three-digit run rates.
So I’ve had a lot of experience sort of like actually scaling themes, scaling processes, integrating acquisitions and realized that as an engineering leader I was making a lot of decisions and those decisions were not really based or backed by data. They were more gut-driven and you know there was a lot of different bottlenecks, a lot of different challenges where we really needed that data. We needed some automation and there just wasn’t a great tool or a great product to do that.
So that, that sort of led me to start Propelo and sort of like bring you know data-driven insights and, and actionable sort of automation to the engineering to the world and that’s, that’s our mission.
A little bit about Propelo. We help a lot of different engineering teams of all sizes, shapes, and varieties across a lot of different verticals. We have Fortune 100 customers, Fortune 500 customers, we have startups, unicons. We have customers all over, you know all over the world.
You know I see very consistent theme across all of these different companies and, and what we see is that you know all these themes need to sort of run faster. They need to sort of like shift faster, they need to you know deliver you know quality sort of products in order to compete in order to sort of like capture their own individual markets.
You know when you have, when you have this challenge of shipping you know faster with great velocity one of the challenges that you sort of grow and, and is that you know you have multiple personas, you have multiple tools, you have different processes within the company, within an organization that sort of need to come together to be able to ship this software, to be able to build and release the software.
And often this results in a lot of different bottlenecks and friction points and those bottlenecks sort of keep shifting and it becomes a really big challenge to identify where the bottlenecks are. Sort of like you know you’ve got to understand how do you automate some of those bottlenecks or solve for those bottlenecks? How do you bring automation? And that’s really sort of like you know the common theme that we’ve seen is the lack of intelligence, the lack of sort of actionable intelligence across these different teams.
So that’s, that’s the mission we are on. We are helping a lot of different companies with that sort of like mission to sort of improve productivity of their engineering teams by optimizing you know everything from processes to their tools across the entire software lifecycle.
Alan Shimel: You know Nishant someone sitting here listening to this it sounds simple. It sounds you know very clear, very well enunciated. This is really a case of the devil is in the details though, right? I mean when we’re, when we’re talking about you know I mean it’s classic kind of Phoenix Project, the gold, the book, the goal before that, right? Because what happens is as you find them or clear a bottleneck or a constraint you, you very often expose the one that was behind it and then you know and it’s become it’s like a treasure map where you, you know you’re going around from one bottleneck and one resource constraint or one you know trouble spot to the next. And you know it, it’s, it’s also usually a kind of never-ending story, right, because there’s always something else to improve, something else to do better, something else that popped up, something that’s changed that now needs improvement, right? It’s almost like by the time you get done you know to the end you got to come back to the beginning, because things have changed perhaps. It’s a tough problem to tackle, you know it’s a tough challenge. Let’s talk about how Propelo does that though if you don’t mind.
Nishant Doshi: Yeah absolutely. So it is a tough challenge but something that we believe definitely you know it’s, it’s worth start taking a step in that journey and that’s why we call it an excellence solution. It’s never done, right, it’s never you know, it’s a continuous improvement process.
Now the way sort of you know I sort of guiding principles, right, coming into this is we, we really build a solution around flexibility and adaptability. The reason is you know almost every organization and even within the organization we’ve seen that they operate in sort of slightly different ways. And as a solution if you have to sort of succeed and sort of moving the needle any solution it needs to be flexible and adaptable. Someone might be actually releasing code manually, someone might be actually using GitHub, someone might be using a CI and CD system like Jenkins. So deployment sort of like might be you know following in a different process, right? As a product you need to be able to sort of like have the ability to be flexible and adaptable and that, that’s sort of like you know one of the guiding principles we have.
The other guiding principle we have it’s sort of like really talks to some of the, you know some of the challenges you spoke about is really being wholistic. You know I’ve seen companies some of the products take the stance like, “We’re just going to look at this one problem.” But as you accurately pointed out it’s a treasure map. So you need to look at different facets not only within the engineering organization, but also how other stakeholder teams sort of like in track with engineering, right? What is the handoffs? What is that sort of process look like? Are there any deficiencies there between security and engineering, between product and engineering?
In fact we’ve seen like product teams that actually have great sort of like hygiene around requirements, acceptance criteria. We see that have a huge impact on engineering delivery and software delivery. So I think like there’s a lot of different facets.
And our product the way we’ve sort of architected our product is being able to sort of like use our libraries and our flexible dashboards to actually you know look at different facets, all the way from you know DORA metrics, which is, which is pretty standard nowadays in terms of like measuring overall productivity, but also looking at how teams are collaborating. We’re looking at like how customer success and customer support is sort of flowing into engineering. We look at security, we look at quality. So we’re looking at all these different aspects, because that’s how you stitch a story together, that’s how you understand what’s going on. So it’s really combining that KPIs with those insights and sort of like making it very wholistic.
The third thing that we’ve sort of like really architected into our product is actionability first. We really believe like you know insights are great, but you need to sort of take action. Ours sort of like you know learning very early on was that it’s very interesting that everyone sort of has talks a lot… When, when we talk about sort of automation in the you know the Ops world there’s a lot of great tools, there’s a lot of like automation around the CI/CD, but there’s a huge sort of scope of automation outside of the CI/CD, especially as it relates to handoffs between different teams, nudging, sort of like certain actions, certain workloads, with sort of like all the way from release checklist, to sort of nudging the ______, to kind of checking their PRs, to security, engineering, product security, intakes. There’s a lot of different sort of like workloads that need to be automated or, or you know or semi-automated if there’s a human intervention that’s needed.
So I think like our view is that there are sort of three sort of fundamental things that are needed to solve this huge challenge, flexibility, sort of being wholistic, and actionability. By sort of putting these three elements together we’ve been able to sort of like work with our customers to, to move the needle and get them into that continuous data-driven sort of improvement process and being able to sort of see examples, a lot of different examples of, of success there.
Alan Shimel: I love it, excellent stuff. So it’s a new company Nishant. Give us kind of you know what’s, what’s going on new, what you know, what’s, what’s happening?
Nishant Doshi: Yeah, it’s a new company. We’ve, we’ve grown. Last year was a great year for us, we grew 350 percent year-over-year. So posted some record numbers. In terms of like you know what we’re seeing in the market is as I said you know what was surprising to us was the every company, you know it sounds cliché, but every company is becoming a software company and what we’re seeing is you know a huge demand across the board.
Like so we have you know we recently helped a company you know get sort of like their sprints in order, like you know measuring sprint hygiene. We help companies sort of like you know with a customer success, customer support, through engineering journeys. We’ve helped companies with sort of like triaging their Jenkins failure so that they can shift faster.
So what we’re seeing is common themes, but across different verticals, across different shapes and sizes of the company. And that’s something that, that sort of like we didn’t expect going in, into this, into this, like how, how widespread the demand is.
Engineering leaders more than ever like looking at using data, leveraging data to make decisions. And actually what’s, what’s interesting is with COVID, with remote work what we’re seeing is you know engineers they want to like work in companies that are better organized. They want to work in companies where the processes are flowing smoothly, they’re more productive. They aren’t working on like _____ a lot. And they’re getting sort of like appreciation for the work they’re doing. And that’s something hard to sort of like if you don’t have you know an ______ or it’s hard to recognize that, it’s hard to sort of put that into action.
One of the most popular features that we, we saw last year was a feature of ours called “Kudos” where you can sort of actually give kudos to, to a job well done backed by data. And that was sort of amazing and we’ve had customers telling us that it’s really helped them sort of retain talent to be able to sort of like actually increase employee happiness.
So, so I think like we’re seeing, we’re seeing a sort of inflection point in how engineering is sort of actually, how engineering leadership – the art of and science of engineering leadership evolve and I think data is a way big part of that story.
Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Nishant we’re about out of time, but for people who want to get more information is it propelo.com or?
Nishant Doshi: It’s propelo.ai.
Alan Shimel: Dot AI.
Nishant Doshi: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: And that’s: P-R-O-P-E-L-O?
Nishant Doshi: That’s correct: P-R-O-P-E-L-O.A-I.
Alan Shimel: Okay. Then on the website what’s the best way to engage with you via the site?
Nishant Doshi: Yeah, so we have multiple ways you can engage with us. We have free trials, so there’s you know there’s action, an action button for that. You can also contact us at info@propelo.ai or e-mail, you know e-mail us at or e-mail me at nishant.propelo.ai. So there’s multiple ways to engage. And we do, you know we do work with companies of all shapes and sizes and, and being able to help them sort of actually increase employee happiness and, and be more productive.
Alan Shimel: You know in the age of great resignations that’s an important thing. Hey Nishant thank you for coming for coming on and telling us about Propelo. Best of luck with it and we’ll have you back on again and we’ll check in on you guys.
Nishant Doshi: Thanks a lot Alan and thank you.
Alan Shimel: All right. Nishant Doshi here from Propelo, that’s propelo.ai.
We’re going to take a break on Techstrong TV. We’ll be right back.
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