Do one thing, do it well

The smell of freshly baked bread is in the air as you walk into the restaurant. “I hope you enjoy your meal”, says the ma?tre d’ after showing you to your table. The interior has a dimly lit modern feel to it and you can hear the faint melody of Coltrane as you pull your chair to sit down. You order a glass of red wine while opening the app to pick from the cuisine and food choices. 

It’s like any normal restaurant, with only one difference - this is a kitchenless-restaurant. 

We are already very comfortable with food delivery services. The world is actively experimenting with Ghost kitchens - kitchens built to only serve online clients through delivery services - 

The next part of this disaggregation-movement is kitchenless restaurants. A place where customers can relax in an exceptional environment, unlike any normal restaurant, while ordering gourmet meals from 5 different ghost kitchens for a party of 5.

This may sound like another pointless way for investors and entrepreneurs to break things and rebuild them so they can make more money. But this process of disaggregation is necessary and powerful because:

• Ghost kitchens are more efficient because they can operate in warehouses away from expensive locations, can cook multiple cuisines during different times/seasons, aggregate and optimize their supply chains, and can carry multiple virtual personas at the same time. Cooks and chefs are the stars of these shows.
• Kitchenless-restaurants focus on delivering unparalleled customer service and atmosphere without spending space and energy on producing food, all while providing virtually unlimited choices to customers
• Food delivery services will compete to innovate on the packaging, and delivery to get an edge on quality, freshness, and timeliness in how they deliver. 

Every organization is picking one thing to excel at and collaborate to deliver an exceptional customer experience. The customer wins. 

Raison d'être

I believe that in the world of startups, more companies die out of indigestion than starvation. They suffer by biting off more than they can chew, keeping them from executing the key idea that gives them meaning in the market to its fullest and most delightful conclusion.

But knowing that doesn’t help much as a company gets pulled in by a hundred different directions in its process of growing up. 

This pressure comes from all sides. It’s from customers asking for features that aren’t in your original vision, amplified by a sales team trying to close a deal in that quarter, architects trying to build a platform without realizing the scope creep that inevitably happens along the way, while the technical debt keeps accumulating, adding viscosity to everything the company does. 

Stack selling is passé

As customers are moving away from owning and operating data centers to cloud computing for everything, they’re also realizing they no longer need to be beholden to any single application vendor. Customers know that they won't operate the services and can shop around and pick the best vendors for a certain application, or even a capability.

Why choose one vendor that’s decent at everything when it’s becoming increasingly easy to choose exceptional vendors for each thing and build them into a custom stack? 

Lessons for ThoughtSpot

Imagine a company like Uber Eats. They have at least 3 groups of customers they need to serve; the restaurateurs who prepare the food, the drivers who transport the food, and the consumer who will pay for it. They have to overlay needs for these groups, each with varying priorities, over a landscape of changing consumer tastes based on the weather, day of the week, or season. 

Doing anything, whether it’s running a promotional campaign, setting a pricing policy, or launching a new subscription program, requires access to information as quickly as this world around them changes. Looking at a set of dashboards is about as useful as an elephant in a minefield.

Our customers agree that BI as we know is no longer enough. They believe that:

• Every business user in the company should access data insights when they need them, irrespective of their title or skills. 
• Frontline workers, where customer interactions happen, want to have the power to not just ask questions and get instant answers, but they also should be able to customize their actions based on the insights. According to new research, we did with Harvard Business Review, 87% of organizations say they will be more successful when employees can make data-driven decisions autonomously, yet only 20% of companies have done so.
• As data size and complexity of questions are increasing, Artificial Intelligence should play a role in augmenting human experience. We don’t want people to look for patterns hiding inside massive mountains of data when machine learning models can surface them for creative interpretation with relative ease.

Our job is to make our product experience delightfully better than anything else available in the market for enterprise data through search and AI. The way to accomplish that goal is to stay focused on what makes us an important partner for our customers and avoid distractions.

Empathy is the Product Manager

Staying focused on what we do that truly brings value to our customers is difficult. The only way we can achieve this precision is by acting on behalf of our customers, helping everyone on their team get access to timely insights and make decisions, and innovating on our core offering that empowers them to do business differently. 

It takes humility to see the big picture, yet recognize that one company alone cannot redraw it in its entirety.

Our commitment: Understand the role ThoughtSpot plays in this big picture for our customers, and deliver the product experience required to make a targeted, meaningful change where we excel. Not glory or industry recognition, but empathy for our customers, who need different means to make decisions with data, will guide our product decisions every step of the way.