Understanding Before Being Understood: A Mantra for Leadership

Dave Rhodes, CEO @ Sauce Labs, joins the pod to discuss the value of great digital experiences & how/why quality issues affect companies’ bottom lines, and how to connect bugs to the business! Dave dissects strategies for addressing quality issues, examples connecting quality with the bottom line, best practices for quality testing strategies, and incorporating the philosophy of embracing the impossible within your eng teams. We also cover highlights of Dave’s recent report, “Every Experience Counts” exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. And to set the stage & magnify the stakes, the Crowdstrike & Microsoft outage coincidentally happened the day we hit record.

ABOUT DAVE RHODES

Dave Rhodes is CEO of Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing and software quality solutions to deliver digital confidence to enterprises. He has a proven track record as a strong operational leader with success in building and scaling growth businesses. Previously, Dave held key leadership roles at Unity, where as Chief Revenue Officer he grew the company’s revenue from $160M to $640M (4x growth) and navigated its public market debut in 2020. He then created and oversaw Unity’s AI-powered business, Digital Twins. He has also held leadership roles at Paradigm and Autodesk. Rhodes holds an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of San Diego and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.

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SHOW NOTES:

• The Crowdstrike / Microsoft news & how bugs affect the bottom line (2:31)
• Understanding the stakes & complexity of the Crowdstrike issue (5:05)
• Dave’s perspective on & passion for digital experiences (7:50)
• The impact of cloud computing, high-speed connectivity, AI / ML, and COVID on software innovation (10:10)
• Examples of how digital experiences drive a business’s bottom line (13:45)
• How the quality of a product impacts developer velocity & motivation (17:31)
• Connecting the bottom line with product quality / bugs (20:31)
• Strategies for communicating the business benefits of developing for scale (24:51)
• Addressing quality issues that impact top OKRs, like customer churn (26:48)
• Highlights of the “Every Experience Counts” report (31:51)
• Best practices for eng leaders looking to evolve their current testing strategy (35:13)
• What it means to think about the impossible & reverse engineer it (38:05)
• Frameworks for instilling this mindset into your eng teams (41:18)
• Rapid fire questions (44:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Every Experience Counts - Sauce Labs’ report exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue.
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life - The seven rules to follow to realize your true purpose in life—distilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own journey of ceaseless reinvention and extraordinary achievement, and available for absolutely anyone.

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/