Host Chad Solomonson and Netlify’s Head of Value Engineering, Varun Nehra, discuss composability’s four pillars for digital transformation and maximizing business value and ROI.
Resources
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Transcript
Chad Solomonson:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Composable Roadmap podcast, where we explore the cutting edge strategies and technologies that are transforming the business landscape. In this series, we’re diving deep into the realities of building a composable roadmap. Whether you’re a business leader, a tech enthusiast, or someone simply eager to stay ahead of the curve, this podcast is for you. We’ll be featuring interviews with industry experts, digging into real world case studies, and offering actionable insights to help you implement these strategies. So get ready to unleash your potential and navigate the complexities of today’s digital world with confidence. I’m your host, Chad Solomonson, and today we have an exciting episode lined up for you. Let’s go. Today’s show is sponsored by Netlify. Netlify is the most popular way to build, deploy, and scale modern web applications. Developers love Netlify for its powerful yet simple workflows, which makes it easy to integrate their choice of tools and collaborate with their team to deliver the best online experiences faster. Now home to millions of developers and thousands of enterprises, Netlify is the platform of choice for running modern JAMstack web applications in production, from global corporate sites to complex e-commerce and SaaS applications. Founded in 2014, Netlify is a venture-backed software company headquartered in San Francisco with a global team. Join leaders October 2nd and 3rd to unlock the power of the web together. Netlify’s annual Compose event is the conference for developers and digital leaders shaping the future of web experiences. Today, I am very excited to have Varun Nara join the show. As head of value engineering at Netlify, Varun drives the development of composable solutions that deliver measurable business value through innovative, scalable digital experiences. He leverages his expertise in composable architectures to help organizations maximize agility, efficiency, and growth. Previously, as Chief Digital Officer at Altudo, a top 300 company in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, he led growth initiatives, expanded service offerings, and established a strategic client advisory practice. His expertise includes customer experience, digital transformation, and enterprise technology solutions, always emphasizing the value through modern scalable systems. All right. I am so excited to have our guest today, Varun from Netlify, who is the head of value engineering. Brun, I’ve known for quite a while. So Brun, welcome to the show.
Varun Nehra: Thank you, Chad. Great to be here. And congratulations on your book. And, and, you know, we’ve kind of known each other in the circles, always bumped into each other at events. But, you know, we’ve been on, you know, the opposite sides of the fence for a But this is actually great that I get to do this with you. And being at Netlify, I think has opened up a whole new set of possibilities for us to really collaborate and work closely with each other.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been very excited to have this conversation. So, so, well, for our listeners, you know, I want to make sure we, we, we, we learn more about you and your journey before we talk about value engineering today. So can you give a little bit of your background?
Varun Nehra: Certainly, yeah. Actually, I’ll talk a little bit about my previous life and then talk about my current role. So 20 years, I’ve been in the professional services space and started off as a developer and engineer, worked on all sorts of technologies, both Java and Microsoft and kind of had to pick a path, right? And It so happened that the clients and the work that I was coming across, I started to specialize a little bit more in Microsoft. So that sort of became my path, but kind of worked on enterprise solutions. And it so happened that a lot of customer-facing applications that I was starting to build started to really get disrupted by the emergence of CMSs. And I really took to that to where you could really build very engaging experience, very dynamic websites or portals or experiences really, really fast. So then I kind of really ended up specializing in CMSs, worked on a number of those, and then of course, specialized in Sitecore, Sitecore MVP, and it’s a fabulous product, but worked on a ton of CMSs. and e-commerce. So along the way, sort of built practices, specializing in content and commerce, worked at multiple companies, small, large, digital agencies, creative agencies, technology agencies. But for the last five years, I’ve actually, I’ve been at an agency called Altudo. They were recently ranked in the top 300 of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. So we did something right in the five years that I’ve been there. And it’s been an incredible journey taking a business that was so well established and had really good roots in the content space and kind of expanding our portfolio of services in the market and kind of expanding into commerce and then adding strategy, design, data, analytics, and engineering, bringing it all sort of together to be sort of this end-to-end provider of digital transformation. And that’s been sort of the success story. And in that, I joined as an executive, fully sort of focused on growth. And customer success kind of developed the business. And my last role there was I was the chief digital officer of Altudo specializing in composable solutions as a roadmap to tech transformation for some of our largest clients. And it so happens, having done this for 20 years and really having sort of done it all in a way, one of the things that I really was curious about and wanted to make sure I was able to expand my horizon a little bit was to really take a leap into the product space. Or you could have, you know, slightly wider impact working with a broader ecosystem of both, you know, tech partners, vendors, clients, you know, and the one that I found that really resonated with me in this whole composable solutions and transformation journey was Netlify. when I attended their conference last year, Netlify Compose, which is, again, happening soon. First week of October, coming up fast. And I think I’ll see you there, Chad, right? Yes. Yes, we will be there. Our DA is going to be there in full force. And I think you will have a very exciting client that you’ll be taking the stage with.
Chad Solomonson: Is that right? Excited to share some of the best practices and successes working with Netlify. and just kind of sharing how that deployment was very efficient and fast. And I think that’s why we both love composable technology, because our clients love it.
Varun Nehra: I couldn’t agree more. And I’m super excited for what you’re going to share there. But to kind of just wrap it up to where, you know, what I’m doing at Netlify now is I’m the head of value engineering. And what that means is, how do we position Netlify as a platform, not a product, but a platform that helps drive business value for our clients throughout the product lifecycle of what Netlify has to offer. So if you’re not familiar with Netlify, Netlify is the sort of the founder in the space of front-end clouds. And in their most recent acquisition, they acquired a company called StackBid that really is a powerful page builder. And they also have acquired Gatsby that came with a powerful integration layer that really pulls together the composable tech stack to really build those solutions really fast and take them to market and then deploy them at scale and really be able to harness the value through faster deployments and improving the whole developer workflow. But in what I’m charged with doing, that’s the part that I get super excited about, is how do we really listen and understand our customers’ needs, and then tailor our solutions to make sure that we’re helping our customers hit their objectives? through Netlify as a platform, through Netlify as a composable platform. And I’m sure we’ll talk a lot more about Ali Engineering here today.
Chad Solomonson: Absolutely. Well, you know, I can’t imagine a better role for you. You’re bringing all of this knowledge of customer needs and in different types of environments, both ones that are still figuring out how to really bring digital experiences to market, but some that also have been pretty mature. So the fact that you’re bringing a lot of that customer perspective to the platform is really powerful. And I think I think there’s a lot of good things for you to tackle going forward. So I’m excited for you.
Varun Nehra: Thank you. And I think that’s going to be really my North Star there, right? Is how do we really talk about solutions and be more solution-led than even being product-led? Because the product is phenomenal. It works. It’s great, right? And people who understand the product are going to really unlock the value from it. But for business leaders and for non-technologists who may not fully understand what Netlify has to offer, The solution led approach, I think, is the way to really understand and apply the best of what Netlify has to offer.
Chad Solomonson: Let’s dig into that because, you know, we both know that composable technology is, is, is fastly emerging with our clients. You’re seeing a lot of value in the flexibility and adaptability inside of their, kind of their, their investments into different types of technologies that fits content management to, to commerce. What are some of the key things that you’re seeing? where composable is really enhancing those current products or those investments?
Varun Nehra: A great question. And you know what, I’d love to take maybe a step back before I kind of jump into like how composable solutions are going to really drive value for businesses. Because I really want to make sure everybody understands what composability truly means, right? Where did it come from? And why are you and I so hyped up about it? So I want to spend at least a couple of minutes here to talk about how I see the definition of composable solutions, or composable customer experience, or experience composition, application composition. There are all these things that, depending on who you’re talking to, composability means something different. for that, right? So, after having kind of really studied this for a while, this is at least a couple of years when I still had at Altudo, I was actually very engrossed and kind of really understand like, why is this emergent, right? Gartner came up with this term, why is it so relevant? Is it really relevant? We have microservices, we have Mock Alliance, before Mock, we had Jamstack. And, you know, of course, Netlify founders are the founders of Jamstack, right? And We all understood mock and then they started, you know, gaining traction in this new paradigm. And why do we have to rebuild what we already have? And how do I know that I’m achieving composability and I am on the path or my solution is a composable solution, right? So after talking to like a number of industry stakeholders, you know, talking to Gartner and their analysts, right, I used to spend at least a few hours a week, like for a few months, kind of just talking to Gartner, like, where’s this coming from? And here’s what my understanding is, you tell me if this is what you intend, and this is what you’re seeing in the market, right? Especially with the advent of like the whole SaaS explosion in MarTech. I think a big shift happened where you had this ability for these monoliths that said, you come to us, one vendor, one product, we will build everything for you. And then you just unlock value from what we’re building for you. And you can build the sun and the moon and the stars and all of it with one platform, whether that’s a DXP or an enterprise e-commerce platform that you know, summarizes that it has all the features of a CMS, a PIM, a DAM, an eCommerce engine, it can do promotions for you, it can do marketing automation for you. But invariably, it happens that, you know, your businesses are unable to unlock more than 30% of value from any piece of MarTech, generally speaking. And now they’re left with sort of fully invested in a platform that Now they’re waiting on the roadmap of that vendor to then be able to power their business because they’ve built their business into the platform, not adjacent to the platform. And that’s where I think composability comes in and says, well, to me, how do I help you engineer your business? through technology, but adjacent to these platforms, not directly into the platform, because if it’s in the platform, then you need a specialist to run your business. You need that specialized engineer that knows Adobe, that knows Psycore, that knows Salesforce, and can develop Lightning, that can develop in particular framework, Hydrogen or Shopify, whatever that is, right? And that invariably starts to slow down the business that wants to move at light speed. Right. So for me, composability came down to like four key pillars. And you do a little bit in all of these four pillars, and you may actually do them one after the other. But if you’re doing all four of them, then you’re very much on your path to building composable solutions. But starting across all of this is like the first step to to achieving any form of composability. is decoupling your customer facing experience from the platform, which is the number one pillar for me is to go headless, right? Headless and composable are two different things. We understand it. But the first pillar to me in that is unless you have decoupled the customer experience from the backend platforms, you won’t be able to achieve all the other parts of the promise of composability and unlocking the value. And as you’re decoupling this and going headless, this is also another big thing. And I’m going to take a couple more minutes.
Chad Solomonson: No, this is great. We cover headless a lot on the show, but I love that your perspective on it.
Varun Nehra: Right. So the first piece in going headless is that it’s not enough to say every platform has an API, right? Most platforms have offered some API layer for the last decade or more. Then why aren’t we building headless applications and why should we, right? The big emergence to me was like, API first also kind of loses its norm because then we say, Oh, API first means build everything API first. No, actually API first means that before you build an API, you write the documentation for the API and you mock up the API. So when you’re building the experience, you build it against a mockup and then you go design your API. Right. And even this is sometimes lost in the conversation today. What, what is API first, but going headless basically means any part of the platform that can be configured. through the platform’s UI should now be made available through an API, which means I can actually extend the platform itself through APIs, which is where you have like these pure play headless providers, like a commerce tools or even Cypress order cloud, which doesn’t even have a UI. It is pure play headless to say, well, you can do everything with a platform through an API. Right. And in that you’re focusing at this point, right? The number one reason I call that to the first pillar. Is this the most value you will unlock is by going headless because you’re now going to have that fully immersive, engaged experience, having frictionless experience, where sometimes you see different parts of the UI rendered by different platforms, and your branding is now a little bit out of whack, and you are unable to adhere to your brand guidelines, and you can sense that my emails don’t look like my website, my mobile app doesn’t look like my emails, and the customer is a little confused about, well, I got this email, but I clicked on it, but this website doesn’t look like what I was looking at. But when you’re going headless, and you really kind of nailed your customer experience in your creative design, your brand guidelines, and just one look and feel, you have solved for performance, you have improved your ranking when it comes to like SEO, you have increased engagement, you have now hopefully even increased conversion and CSAT, right? Because your application is agnostic to the platforms that power that experience. That to me is like the most critical pillar and is the fastest step to realizing value, right? The second step is to me, then about coupling, having what I call basically achieving modularity, which is everything is a self-contained module. And there’s no single point of failure that is, hey, my DXP goes down. My business goes down. Or this particular platform goes down. My search goes down. Now my website goes down. Not anymore. The point is now everything is a service. cart as a service, search as a service, content syndication. But all of this still has to come together and work together. And the most important piece of all of this is eliminating data silos. Each platform eventually wants to capture its analytics and then put it all together. And What Edge modularity says well, no single point of failure, I have API’s for everything basically you’re, you’re now you have like a iPad layer or microservices layer, right. And what this ensures is that zero downtime in terms of unlocking value, high resilience. information accuracy, as in the most relevant information, and the most real information is making the customer in the most real time, as in, if you are truly modular, that means you can offer real time pricing, you can offer real time inventory, right? Your everything talks to everything else. But it also is not the single point of failure. And Another big portion of value engineering and unlocking value is going to be automation. What have you automated that would have otherwise been manual? Because now the systems can actually talk to each other. Achieving modularity, going headless and achieving modularity. Now, this, I think, encompasses like the biggest portion of, or the biggest build portion of going composable. But the third pillar is the, to me, slightly the harder part, but I think the most critical part, because without this, I think you have addressed the needs of your customers, but you haven’t addressed the needs of your organization. The third, the third pillar to me is enabling business tooling, right? I call it business tooling, you can call it, you know, business operations, but really imagine a portal or an agent experience, or an admin experience, where just as your customers go to one domain to get all their questions answered, whether they want to look up their previous orders, they want to access their profile, whether they want to browse, or create, or add the card, or whatever is your point of conversion, your customers are able to do it. But now your employees should be able to power those experiences seamlessly. And so let me give you an example. Imagine an agent experience. In a B2B scenario, somebody’s browsing the website and the customer portal, but invariably they pick up the phone and want to talk to an agent because that’s their rep and they’re going to be more effective in helping the customer and the agent picks up the phone. And they’re trying to answer a query, right? Let’s say somebody wants to repeat an order, right? But they want something delivered to a very particular location. And the agent now has to possibly go through an order management system to look up the existing order, switch over to a CRM to find out where the customer is coming from, what are their locations, who are the contacts, maybe some contact details. Maybe then they have to do swap back to their customer service portal to look up or lock their tickets. It becomes very jarring for like an agent to be very effective in answering all those questions. Now imagine that the same customer then picks up the phone and wants to talk to sales. Now sales is going to have to log into their CRM and just to look up pricing or just to tell them whether or not something is available in inventory. So what this does is The third pillar ensures that you’re building one experience for your employees, whether it’s a marketer, whether it’s a merchandiser, whether it’s a customer service agent, whether it’s a salesperson, that they can go to one portal and make certain changes to the enterprise data and content that then powers that customer experience seamlessly. Right? So this is that B2B portal that is like the super admin portal, right? And if you’re building that, and some platforms actually come built in with some of this. Now, that’s just one example of business tooling. Another business tooling could be just an iPaaS layer, right? Where everything gets integrated, and you go to one place to get all your questions answered. Now imagine, you know, with generative AI, right? That takes on a whole new meaning. But that’s the third pillar. The fourth pillar is the final pillar, which really kind of unlocks the business to say, well, I want to run at light speed. So as things happen, how can I pivot my business and be ready for the next evolution? And the fourth pillar is application composition, which is to say, can I build new building blocks of my application without having to write code? have I arrived at a place where I can actually build my business but not have to consistently write code, which is taking parts of your existing application and composing new applications. So here you can see a lot of low-code, no-code vendors come in and offer that easier ease of integration. But micro front-end architecture is really helping the cause here, both in enabling that business tooling and application composition. And that’s where you really unlock true ROI, you really get to like TCO, like you build ones and use many principle. Yeah, between these four pillars, you see different parts of value being unlocked. And then if you’re doing a little bit of everything, you’re well on your path to being composable. Start with headless, achieve modularity, enable your business tooling, and then make sure you’re you have application composition. Because tomorrow, you know, something like COVID happens, who was able to adopt Bop is, you know, buy, buy online, pick up in store. And some providers showed up, like Buy Now, Pay Later shows up. How fast can you integrate that as a payment method? That’s only going to come through modularity and application composition. And then tomorrow, when you negotiate a new contract with a payment provider, and you want to swap them out, or you want to have three shipping providers, and you want to add a fourth one, does your UI break? Or now, is it a six-month project? Or can you just get it done in like a month? That is a promise of composability, in my mind.
Chad Solomonson: That’s fantastic. I love the, I love the pillars and I also love the, the roadmap nature of it.
Chad Solomonson: So for a lot of our customers, a lot of folks that are evaluating composable solutions, that decoupling is that first kind of big decision in your first pillar. How do the business leaders or even probably more so some of the IT stakeholders start to justify that first part of the journey? Where is the ROI to help kind of lead them down this path towards achieving all four pillars?
Varun Nehra: I think that’s a bit of a tough question that, you know, comes up in every sort of opportunity to get in front of a business leader and kind of explain like, why do anything, right? Things are working, why should I change what’s working? I would say, you know, in the last two to three years, certain forms of compute have hit mainstream. And the legacy way of building and working on applications, it’s basically like throwing money out the window, right? For example, there’s a survey sent out about 100,000 respondents, I think, talked about what when they measured the, the compute usage of 100,000 installations across companies of either private or public cloud, they notice that 90% of that compute goes unutilized, which means you’re buying and you’re running these servers that, you know, have all this compute that never gets utilized. So today, you know, we have edge computing, we have CDNs, we have middleware, we have serverless compute, that basically is changing the way these applications run the scale, the resilience, and the cost of it, right. So the number one thing is, well, If you’re not left, and of course, the modern JavaScript frameworks, right, that really are conducive to building componentized solutions to say, well, if I were to build, if I were to break down my experience and build it with these building blocks and have my UI be composable, have my tech stack be composable, and I only pay for what I need, there’s immediate value back to the business in terms of total cost of ownership, high degree of reusability, and never having to worry about scalability and unlocking value from kind of putting together existing features and creating new outcomes.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, there’s so much consumption discussion tied to this when you start to look at, you know, the adoption of cloud and the cloud platforms and how they’re maximizing that spend. And that sometimes gets overlooked when people are jumping at different products. And so I feel like that’s a really important call out. I think there’s, there’s, there’s real savings that, you know, I mean, naturally there’s going to be some kind of in the, in the, in the latter pillars you mentioned, but when you can justify maximizing what you’ve currently are spending now and getting more value, then that’s a great entry point. And it justifies taking action.
Varun Nehra: I’ll tell you like two good examples of where, you know, the conversation became easier when we understood the client’s roadmap about where is the business looking to be three years from now, right, five years from now. And knowing where the business leaders are focusing their energy and investment really helped me articulate, right, why you want to take on certain pieces and certain projects and change them now and make that hard decision today. So I’ll give you an example of a large luxury CPG sort of retailer. who is doing fairly well, they have tons of traffic, but their ambition is to really scale e commerce, right? And they take a lot of orders, they have a lot of, you know, brick and mortar stores, they they they have a really thriving business. But if they could unlock the potential of e commerce, they could literally have exponential growth, not linear growth by exponential growth. But what’s holding them back is this monolith that is powering their entire business. Because it’s very sort of, you know, back in SAP, you know, oriented. So when we looked at it, and we said, well, if we built this with composability principles in mind, you’ll not only be able to answer the needs of today with your B2C commerce, tomorrow, they want to add B2B commerce, right? And they want to go in a direction where, you know, they want to unlock, let’s say, potential for, you know, these pro customers, right? you will not have to rebuild the pieces and you will be able to leverage them without writing additional core code or more engineering. And another similar example is like in the pet industry. And before I move to that one, I’ll give you an example, right? As we were doing this project, something came up and they said, Hey, by the way, our POS systems, we want, we need to make sure our in-store systems are able to register and pull up profile information of our customers that are placing orders online. And Do we need like a new identity and access management implementation? And we basically told them, Hey, guess what? You know, that service we just built for e-commerce identity access management with, with a single sign on, you can literally have the POS system hook up to that. And the result will be the exact same working with SAP. They literally had immediate ROI because they had already built that as a service and not built it into the platform. solid yeah another example was like a pet industry company who’s like their entire business is like more b2b and they rely on a lot of auto ship style orders and heavy on customer service side and they want to basically rebuild their online presence and again focused on the e-commerce portion of it But as we started to close out that project, they wanted to basically make sure that their customer service agents had and they have a big team there that supports and that’s like the crux of their business in resolving some of the concerns of the customers. They literally were able to build an entire, modernize their entire customer service application without writing any pieces of the backend and only focus on UI, hooking up all of the existing pieces, whether it was account lookup or product search or order lookup or card or shipping and logistics or tax calculation. All of that was built in a way that they could literally modernize, go from this, you know, desktop application to a web like Headless and Next.js and really fast experience that works as good as or better than a desktop application, but reusing their entire backend. Otherwise, these were completely different applications. So to me, that is where I see like having that conversation to say, well, I know where you’re going. But if we do these things today, in like six months, 12 months, 18 months, here’s the value, right? And then how can you not invest? So that conversation becomes a little bit easier.
Chad Solomonson: two pervaded examples of how companies are kind of overcoming some of the challenges of legacy investments that they’re trying to continue to grow value from. You know, when you start thinking about customers that are trying to get started and trying to take that first step. What are some best practices that you’re seeing that you might recommend as some initial ways to think about building this type of innovation into their business?
Varun Nehra: Yes, I think this is where value engineering again, comes in take center stage, right? So value engineering is not just for product companies, it’s not just for agencies, it’s, it’s for every organization that truly wants to derive value from technology. And to get started, right, I would say, you know, of course, there are ways in which, you know, you can do assessments, there are maturity models. One of the things that I personally love that we did in my previous life was we had our business value framework that we could really put in front of a customer and kind of put things in order to say, this is how we will unlock value. And this is how you will start to build value engineering behind the scenes. But To make it a little bit more real, right? For business leaders who really want to unlock the potential from whatever tech stack you have, and maybe you don’t even go composable. How do you extract value from technology, right? Starts with the notion of managing innovation. Innovation is the core to any business. their, their existence, their ability to stay competitive, their ability to navigate the next hurdle. And managing innovation is not the easiest thing. How do you know where innovation is going to come from? Right. And it kind of starts also with articulating what is value creation and what is value capture? What does that mean for your organization? And then understanding the role of technology in that. And as much as organizations, you know, they’re like, I give the example of like a, uh, you know, customer service and sales, um, organization for customers to under for, for business leaders to understand the points of intersection, I think is the key to unlocking value. So if you can create more points of intersection in your organization, I think invariably you will unlock value. And let me give you an example of this. Right. Okay. Everything works really well in its own silo, like finance knows their job, right? Sales knows their job. Every organization is really super good at running their functional unit. But a point of intersection, let’s say, between sales and customer service emerges through an application that they both access because their tech stacks are now connected and they’re sharing information. You are now unlocking value in real-time customer service with faster conversion because a customer that just talked to your salesperson and then talked to your customer service is getting that real-time data. right, that real time channel feedback to say, Well, I see you just, you know, entered this ticket with our customer success, I can really help you in figuring out what that pricing needs to be, or, you know, when you’re going to get that order ship, that is a path to faster conversion, best, better customer success, and retaining your customer. So to me, the value comes from finding those points of intersection, and coupling systems than having disparate and parallel sort of operating systems. So to me, getting started is finding those points of intersection and really building something. Whether it’s a prototype, whether it’s a proof of concept, building something and testing it with the teams, testing it with your customers. And while I’m looking at it internally within the organization, the same applies to the customer too, right? Where can they go to get all their questions answered in one place without having to knock on 12 doors, right?
Chad Solomonson: Yeah. It’s an absolute, like being successful and bringing customer delight, it’s team sport. And it’s across not only the people, but the tech that I feel like you just, you, you frame that very well. So thank you for that. Certainly. All right, so before we wrap up, I always like to ask our guests, especially yourself, that’s a leader in the business and you’re constantly kind of staying ahead of the curve on what the market’s doing. What are some ways that you are staying at the top of your game? What are some recommendations you might give to others that might be aspiring to get to your role and in general, just being a leader in technology? What are some ways you’re staying ahead?
Varun Nehra: A great question. And, you know, this is, you know, I’ll share my method, but, you know, everybody has their own method to kind of figure out, you know, how they’re, they’re staying cutting edge bleeding edge. But I think the number one thing is, for me has been, you know, you have to be really good at your sources of information. and being a voracious reader. And, you know, we all, you know, some love to read more than others. And when I say reading, I don’t mean like you have to read books all the time. But whether you know, it’s articles, whether it’s white papers, whether it’s case studies, but really, how do you stay in market and close to your customers? Being and that to me is like being hands on, right? It doesn’t matter if I was achieved as your officer, and I had hundreds of people reporting to me. When I had a challenging engagement or a customer and something that was truly transformative, I made a point to be hands-on. and be present in the room and listen and engage with business leaders, with stakeholders, with individual contributors, because that’s how I am able to readjust and correct my perceptions of a particular industry or a particular function or a process. So to me, it’s like knowing those sources of information, being hands-on, You want to be at those industry events and talking to others. The more time you spend away from having your head in the computer to actually talking to people, experts, finding them, seeking them out, having conversation like the conversation we’re having right now. The engaged, the dialogue helps me then kind of really understand the perspective from an industry analyst versus a CIO versus a product engineer, right? And building that network. So. When I talk to the head of product at a large agency, or if I talk to a CIO of a large B2B organization, why would they want to engage and have that dialogue with me? It’s also that the knowledge and the value that I bring as, let’s say, a trusted advisor and having that experience and that background, really helps having that exchange of ideas, right? But they really stay on top, right? It’s just get your source of information, be in market, stay close to your customers. And listen, right? I do not tend to preach, I don’t tend to prescribe. I want to learn about the customer being genuinely interested in their business and what they’re trying to achieve, helps me then articulate how technology can be applied to solve the problem.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, fantastic guidance. That was really, really solid. Well, we’re at time. I just want to say thank you, Vroon, for having this conversation. I learned some great things. It’s always good to talk to you. I cannot wait to see you out rocking it at Netlify Compose, October 2nd and 3rd in San Francisco. We’ll have clients there and some just great conversations and just continuing this type of conversation in a in person format is always fantastic. So again, thank you so much for your time today.
Varun Nehra: Thank you so much for having me, Chad, and giving me the opportunity to speak about some of these things. But yeah, Netlify Compose, if you’re in the Bay Area, you should be there. I’m actually going to be hosting a separate breakout, a leadership breakout about everything we just talked about here, but it’s going to be all about listening to the customers and really showcasing their success and talking about the impact on their business. So you’re going to, you’re going to see a lot of good case studies in all things, business value come to the forefront, but yeah. And thank you again for having me. Thank you.
