Kaldea Culture Guide, Part Four: Be the Customer

This is the fourth and final article in Kaldea’s culture guide. It covers being the customer.

• Part One: Introduction and Collaboration
• Part Two: Be Transparent and Contribute
• Part Three: Inclusivity and High-performance
• Part Four: Customer centricity and Conclusion

Empathy with the customer is a long standard for user-centered products. A lot of what is stated in our values has to do with knowing our customer: know about our customers and our industry, interact with them through customer service and success (rather than relegating that to some customer experience team). Dogfooding is something different - to use our own product before we deliver it to our customers. This, in a sense, is to be the actual customer. And, yes, this is crucial. But empathy calls for something different, too. To have empathy is to recognize the differences between your experience and the customers experience. To imagine you know the customer’s experience exactly is to shut down curiosity and your ability to listen to them. Then, comprehend their experience fully by being constantly curious, listening, reflecting their experience, adjusting constantly - essentially by a real and deep engagement with people. This is where we stand with “being the customer”: go experience as much as you can and also recognize the difference between you and them so you can engage their experience with curiosity and deliver them the best user experience possible.

If you can get excited about holding curiosity for the customers of our product and let this drive your empathetic engagement with them, then check out our Careers page on Notion.

Be the customer

There is no doubt who we built Kaldea for: our customers. We are a team with diverse backgrounds, talents, and R&R. However, we require a few baseline competencies from all Kaldeans in order to be customer centric.

Knowledge about our customers

There are a few documents that you not only have to read, but also know in detail; you should get used to this material so that you aren’t searching for it all the time. Our Ideal customer profile, User profiles, User flows, Demo scenarios, and user interviews are assets that we trust you will take the time to read and absorb. Even if you are a data scientist or analyst, we ask you to refresh your knowledge base, and, better yet, help us improve our knowledge base by keeping it up to date.

Do you need more? Let us know anytime. Let’s create a better knowledge base about our customers together!

Dogfooding Kaldea

The greatest opportunity in Kaldea is that it is a product that, by its nature, everyone in a modern day company can use. Whether you are in engineering, product, data, business, support, or leadership, you need to look at data and understand the state of your business and your scope of work. We are building Kaldea with a diverse set of user profiles in mind. Follow through on our demo and dogfooding scenarios and make sure you know how to use Kaldea., Ensure Kaldea is the first path of action for your needs in most of your data related work. Kaldea is not a perfect product by any means; it is a developing product. The best way to ensure we improve it is to become its users, constantly building to outpace our current and future competition. Dogfooding on a day to day basis will help us understand our customers’ needs in full breadth, instead of imagining it through our customer interviews and product analytics.

Customer support and customer success

Once Kaldea is in the market, we will ask every member to take their turn supporting our customers on the front-line and understanding their pulse. In order to play a part in this queue, you need to know about our customers, about Kaldea, and how to use it. You also need to know what is happening in the industry, and how it drives our new product roadmap and feature requests.

Up-to-date industry knowledge

We are grateful that the market, our timing, and customer’s expressed needs align with Kaldea at the time of launch. This occurred, however, because the industry is constantly evolving. The technical shift towards cloud and mobile, coupled with an unlimited amount of funding for B2B business, is fueling this change. In less time than we want, we will find 1) directly competing solutions that solve the problem just as well as we do; 2) new approaches to solving the problem; 3) a new shift in the problem area of our customers as we begin to solve the existing data workflow problem. How do we adapt? Staying close to our customers is a given. And yet we need to be more prepared. We need to constantly expose ourselves to new trends and stay curious about new tech stacks that take the industry to its next level. We need to watch for and understand in full sources like a16z’s industry report (link), white papers (example) from industry participants, and aggregation data points (example).

But in order to put the puzzle together of what is going on today and tomorrow, we also need to arm ourselves with what has been done so far in the industry. Thankfully, we can refer to one of the best internal resources, our people. To start with, read Max and JP’s industry history review (link).

Going forward

Did you like our culture guide? What did you like about it and what could improve? Do not hesitate to give us your suggestions; when you join our team you’ll be a crucial part of making our culture. No one here expects you to simply follow the guide and fit yourself to it. We need all of us to be comfortable with our culture guide and contribute to it so that we can confront situations in which culture is not being executed according to our agreement. A small part of making our culture is writing it out; the largest part is guarding it from ignorance and executing it to its full potential.

Reach out to us and check our Notion page if you’re excited about joining us!