California, United States |  EVP of Technical Product Management, Trilogy

Badri Varadarajan

I get to be CTO of 150 different products. I can measure my impact and it is much higher here than it would be anywhere else in Silicon Valley.
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What does a Technical Product Manager do?

At Trilogy, the Technical Product Management team basically own the product architecture of 150 products. What that means really is that you're sort of making the important decisions that a CTO makes and separating them from two different things that you would have to do if you were a CTO at a startup. You would have to go and fundraise, that'll take a lot of your time. And the other thing is you'd have to babysit engineering teams as they do their thing. Here, you can focus on building long-lived technically sound decisions unconstrained by finances or by some of the corporate constraints. When you focus on this, you make much better decisions. And that is why you get to be CTO of multiple different products.

What did you do before this?

I relocated my family to Silicon Valley for a Corporate R&D role, then ultimately created my own startup using cameras and AI to deliver insights on customer interactions with retail displays. In 2019, I discovered Trilogy and the rest is history. Now, I'm one of the only people at DevFactory who actually does live in Silicon Valley… but family roots are planted.

What's different about Trilogy?

It's like speed chess. My colleagues are some of the smartest people who you've probably met in your career. So you learn a lot. We let architects be architects, let them build the best products they can think of. We specifically ask them to not worry about costs, not make a cost driven decisions. And then we take the sum total of what they've built, usually products that our customers love. And then we figure out how to op to operate it efficiently. What we've done is we've taken all our insights and sort of taken to market a product that lets our customers reduce costs on their AWS infrastructure. we do work on different problems, uh, on a week by week basis. So any given week you're solving, um, the problems and setting the roadmap of one product, and then the next week you're looking at a completely different set of problems.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm working on a CRM platform that short-circuits 10 years of salesforce innovations and gets straight to the heart of what’s possible today with the latest AWS technologies.

Badri

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