Products vs. projects: a mindset shift

In this episode, Markus Zirn and Stephen Franchetti discuss the evolution of IT from traditional roles to innovative business technology practices. Stephen shares insights from his time at Workday, Slack, and Samsara, highlighting the importance of strong architecture, the shift to a product mindset, and the role of automation and AI in driving efficiency and growth. They also delve into the cultural changes needed to foster a growth mindset and the critical role of experimentation in embracing new technologies.

Timestamps

00:00 Episode Start 

03:23 Stephen's career journey

09:55 Importance of architecture to scale IT

13:45 Overcoming traditional mindsets with your customers

15:00 Customer success stories at Samsara

18:35 Fostering a growth mindset for innovation

24:00 Strategies for scaling across business and IT

28:35 IT leaders and the shift to a business technology focus

31:30 Challenges with outsourcing

37:20 AI vs. automation

41:40 Embracing the AI revolution

Episode Key Takeaways

• Embrace a product mindset: Transform your IT operations from rigid project-based work to a dynamic, product-oriented approach. This agility will sustain your growth and keep you ahead of the curve.
• Harness the power of AI: Dive into AI-driven automation to eliminate repetitive tasks and uncover intelligent business insights. Start experimenting today to unlock your organization’s full potential.
• Master your data: Invest in top-notch data management systems to ensure your AI initiatives are built on a solid foundation. Remember, quality data management is the key to meaningful, actionable insights.
• Cultivate an Innovative Culture: Foster a growth mindset and an environment that encourages experimentation. By supporting innovation, you’ll pave the way for groundbreaking improvements and operational excellence.

Top Quote

To do AI well, you really have to have enterprise-grade data. And so you can think about it almost like a garbage in, garbage out problem. Whereas if you have crappy data, you don't have enterprise-grade data, you have quality issues, you don't have the ability to kind of integrate that full picture of your data and your business. You can expect to have crappy outcomes when it comes to AI as you're training these models. You can't expect to have high-quality outcomes as a result of this. So to me, data management and your data strategy and AI really go hand in hand for organizations.”

Guest Bio

Stephen is the CIO at Samsara. He oversees all aspects of the company’s Information Technology including, business applications, data & analytics, information security, IT service management, and all core IT services.

Before joining Samsara, Stephen was the CIO at Slack, and then previously the Vice President IT, Enterprise Applications at Workday. He also held positions at Cisco in a range of e-commerce, employee services and IT roles.

Stephen has a track record of creating best in class IT organizations that focus on automation engineering and enabling companies to scale and remain agile as they grow.

He earned his bachelor of science, with honors, in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.