Today we are talking to Matt Walker, the CTO and Co-Founder of Simon Data. And we discuss connecting the engineering team back to the customer, building a strong remote culture and removing emotion from mistakes to grow and learn from them.

All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

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Matt Walker is a co-founder and the CTO of Simon Data, the first enterprise customer data platform with a fully integrated marketing cloud. Prior to Simon Data, Matt was the first hire at Adtuitive – a technology platform that automated the entire online advertising process for small retailers – where he was brought on to research domain-specific page-to-product matching algorithms.

Once Adtuitive was acquired by Etsy in December of 2009, Matt worked as a Staff Software Engineer at the online marketplace, where he created an EMR-based analytics platform. From Etsy, Matt joined the Data Science team at Apple, after which he co-founded Simon Data in 2013. Matt holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and a Masters in Computer Sciences from The University of Texas at Austin. He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, four children, and three dogs.

SHOW NOTES:

• What is Simon – Place for retention marketers to collaborate with data team
• Cut his teeth at Etsy, at a company that got acquired by Etsy
• Jason – CEO is an old colleague from Grad School.  
• Customer Data Platforms – accumulate all data about a customer
• What was the inspiration for Simon Data.  Came from experiences at Etsy.  Apply data science to real world problems
• Interface in a variety of ways.  If there is a data engineering team, they bring them in to client services.  If they don’t have it they provide Data Engineers
• Sales at Simon.  Great group of people.
• Moving towards larger and larger companies because they support the scale
• What has the growth been like at Simon?  Been in market for 3 years.  Hire jr. engineers out of bootcamps and pair them up with a sr engineer
• 26 engineers not including integration teams and looking to double in the next year
• Customer Success – TCSM’s technical customer success managers.
• Chief Mistakes.  Not anticipating the scope of the product
• Can be very incremental with how they onboard data.  Bring in the smallest amount of data initially.
• Outcome Driven across the board
• What are some signs of a great engineering culture.  Distributed engineering team. Daily stand-ups amongst teams.  Weekly meetings. Quarterly off sights – Mentorship.
• Highly effective due to the flexibility remote hours allows.  
• Lead by doing kind of guy
• Plans to have less management from the HR perspective.  Keep up the Architecture perspective
• Building a team you can trust
• Do you have a right hand person?  Has a team of team leads, It’s been a very iterative process.  Doubled last year, and will double next year
• Focus is one of the scarcest commodities.  Pick your priorities.
• ntegrates with Segment.  Makes it easy to deploy multiple beacons.
• GitPrime – Goes through git repos and give you real measurable kpi
• Use Asana for project management
• Are there any challenges being remote?  People has hesitancy to jump on the phone or get on a video call.  When to escalate the convo from slack to call to have conversation in real time.  Extremely active in slack
• Haven’t trotted Simon out on the engineering side as much as the marketing side.  Looking to start getting in to the conference circuit
• What are you most excited about today.  Excited about the team. Executing growing the team that he has in mind.  Next round of Tech Problems. Passionate about solving problems.
• Utilizes memcache
• Benefits of living in a big city
• Technical Brown Bags.  Great way for Jr engineers to share over lunch
• Booting up a SR engineer can be more challenging
• Engineering can lose context when it’s separated
• Forgetting – Post Mortem Culture.  Never forget. Lessons learned, don’t do this again
• If an incident occurs they post mortem it – 5 whys – take blame out of it – take ego out of it