Ep.71 Dynatrace: From On-Prem to Cloud with Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace

Joe Toste [00:00:00]: Hey, what's up, everybody?

Joe Toste [00:00:00]: This is Joe Toste from Techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIOs, CISOs and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top lead ears are seen today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.

Joe Toste [00:00:34]: I want to welcome my next guest, Steve Tack, VP of product at Dynatrace and most recently, his son's lacrosse coach and daughter soccer coach, which I love because high school basketball coach. Welcome to Tech table, Steve.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:00:46]: Hey, Joe, thanks for having me.

Joe Toste [00:00:47]: So, for those who don't know about Dynatrace, maybe you could just give one or two liner for those who are not familiar with Dynatrace.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:00:55]: Sure. Dynatrace is in the business of helping our customers transform digitally, and I know that's a very big and ambitious statement. But really, as companies harness new enterprise, cloud technologies go Cloud native, we're there to make sure all the teams that are working together, whether it's the DevOps teams, the SRE teams, development teams, are able to successfully adapt and adopt these new technologies and make sure that their projects are successful as they look to do things like go from storefronts to buy online, pickup in store, and more. So it's all about increasing the speed and successful adoption of these new technologies. If you're in the software supermarket and looking through the aisles, we show up in the observability aisle. That's the category that we participate in.

Joe Toste [00:01:38]: Oh, that's great. In our podcast intro call, you had mentioned that everyone at Dynatrace is a player coach, and I love that. And so I was curious what similarities you have noticed between coaching athletics and then how that translates over when you're coaching the product team at Dynatrace.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:01:54]: Yeah, this is one of my favorite areas because we do have a lot of coaches, a lot of former athletes on the team, and a lot of people who still compete in their own right today. Maybe not in the same way, but the first similarity is that everyone really is engaged as a student of the game. And you hear that phrase sometimes in terms of just, like, knowing the space. And I attribute it really to more of a culture side of really putting the customer first. I know that's a mantra that gets used a lot, but especially in the software world, if you're really going to make a difference, you have to understand the problems that you're solving for your customer, and you really have to have empathy for what they're going through, and that's not going to come through, and you're not going to have that perspective if you're not engaged firsthand with customers. And so that's probably one of the big things. Don't live your life through spreadsheets. Don't live your life through just the high level management technique.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:02:48]: Obviously those are needed. But jump in and back to the athletic and competition side. We're extremely competitive as well. And the competitiveness kind of manifests in two ways. One is we're a software company, we're looking to grow. We are growing. And so there's a competitiveness just through the sales cycle with our competition. But the next one is a meaningful one, is that we help our customers compete.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:03:12]: It's a super competitive environment in any industry, whether you cut across retail banking, even the government agencies are competing with the expectations of what people get from other services. And so helping our customers compete is also super rewarding. And both of those competitive angles are rewarding in their own ways. And maybe one more, I think going back to this concept of being a player coach is that you really have to have a bias towards action and looking to make an impact. And you might appreciate this as a basketball coach, but I had a coach in college who would say there's really two types of players. When the game's on the line, there's one guy out there, one girl that wants the ball coming to them or the ball coming their way, and then there's the other type of player who hopes that it comes nowhere near them. And you really want to be that person who wants the ball, wants the play running their way, and really about having that bias towards action for making an impact. And so I think that's why you see a lot of people who have that competitive background, who maintain a competitiveness.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:04:10]: And of course, I love to also look at that through the worlds of my kids and instill some of those same life lessons into them as they go.

Joe Toste [00:04:18]: Yeah, no, I love that. I think as a coach, you figure out, especially at the high school level where you're competing against crosstown rivals, it can get really heated. And I learned early on, you trust probably your top seven players and that's it. Everyone else after that, when the game is closed, they're not playing. It's just one of those things as a coach where you're like, I trust these guys. And in practice I learned also there's practice kids and there's kids who come ready for game time and not everyone's ready for game time. And so take that away because you're competitive and you're actually competing. That was something as a coach that I personally learned.

Joe Toste [00:04:50]: But there's two other things. One, you're actually at a customer site right now. So I love that we're doing this podcast right now and they set you up in a room and so you've got a room and you're doing the podcast, you're committed. I love it. It was fantastic. And then you talked about empathy, which I love, and I love always the example of Jeff Bezos when he was the CEO of Amazon, he would keep an empty chair in his boardroom as a reminder that there's always the customer there, always thinking about the customer. And I think that's just like such a fascinating actual piece of empathy you can execute on to always have that perspective of, hey, you know what, we're competing and what matters most is understanding the customer problems, understanding how we're serving the customer. And having a chair there as a reminder, I think is absolutely fantastic.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:05:38]: Actually, the point you made around having the trust in your teammates, that's a great one. It didn't come top of mind when I was thinking about it, but that is really the only way you can scale as well. And the dynamics of a team and trying to push as much autonomy down in the organization as possible too, so that they can make decisions and take those. I thought that was a great ad.

Joe Toste [00:05:56]: Thank you. No, I appreciate that from my jv 16 year old guys. So we know cloud, the cloud marketplace is growing at an exponential rate. Anytime you open up the Wall Street Journal or anything, every quarter, there's just robust demand for cloud infrastructure services from Azure, AWS, cloud. And how are you helping your customers deploy faster and with more agility today in a multi cloud environment?

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:06:20]: Good question. And you're right about the increasing complexity. And this is one of those topics where it doesn't resonate. You hear about the adoption of kubernetes and you hear the adoption of the hyperscalers. And when you actually come into a customer environment and you see how they're taking advantage of those technologies, it really is about speed. Today, specifically, one of the topics and conversations I just stepped out of was around how do we move faster in the cloud, ensuring that it's performing well, that it's reliable, but it's also secure. And I think that's some of the most interesting things that are going on in the space today. It's not just about the new technology, but it's how it changes the people and the process, and how people collaborate to deliver new capabilities, to innovate, to bring new topics to market.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:07:11]: And so earlier I referenced that we would be found in the observability category. That's really a concept that's been around. It's been energized a little bit more, though, in cloud native environments because of the complexity, because of the multi cloud environments. And our goal is to make sure that not only are we providing them with the telemetry data to understand if things are performing, if they're reliable or not, but really to give them the answers that they can take action on. And so for a long time we've had a mantra within the R D team, which is give the customer answers, just don't provide more data. So how do we embed expertise into those different areas? Because we're always on the new projects, we're always, as they're adopting new technologies, as they're putting that in car experience or the buy online pickup store experience, our belief is that we fulfill the role of helping them have confidence that they can move fast, that they can go to daily releases, the weekly major pushes of new production, and that they're still going to satisfy the business experience or that customer, the consumer, the partner at the edge. Because as an industry, we sometimes get a little too focused on what's happening on the back end, what's the hyperscaler service or Kubernetes or these other areas where all of that investment is really for that experience, that digital experience that someone has. And so if we can ensure and give our customers confidence that they understand what's happening with that experience at the edge, then we're helping them to optimize, helping them to improve, helping them to experiment.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:08:44]: And that's really the value that we provide in helping them deploy faster.

Joe Toste [00:08:48]: Oh, that's fantastic. And what are two to three lessons that you've learned? And maybe you've got two, three lessons you're sharing on site right now that you've had from that on prem to cloud that you're sharing with customers today.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:09:01]: So the first one might be a little bit odd from a software vendor, but there's a lot of truth in that. It's really the people in the process and not the technology. You can have some of the best technology in place, and if you don't really adapt the organization, you're going to get pennies on the dollar. And that's something that we experienced as we went from, through our own journey. So about five years back, we transitioned from on premises software, two major releases a year, of course, bug fixes and things like that in between to now, we push to our SaaS environment a major release every other week, many experiments and updates, even in between the course of those two weeks. But we really had to change our collaborative model. We had to give the feedback loops from a production environment to the dev teams, to the product managers, are those new features that we just invested in time being used, and you can get really real time feedback. Now, if you properly instrument, say, a SaaS application or that environment, and having that real time feedback loop with, then what are you measuring and what are those critical success factors that can really change the way a team works together? That would be the first one that I'd get into, and I'll pause there to see if there's anything I should clarify, Joe, or if that made sense.

Joe Toste [00:10:17]: Yeah, I think just comes to mind. I was thinking about when I started off my career, I worked at a software company called Yardy Systems out here in Santa Barbara, California. And this is like before SaaS and everyone had a different environment. And I'm thinking, I'm just chuckling to myself as I think back through this, of everyone had a different environment. You're deploying hot fixes and all this stuff. That cracks me up now, as you've just seen the cloud take off. And so anyway, that's more of just my own personal reflection than anything else.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:10:46]: Yeah. And that is where technology has served us well. And what you can do either in kind of the public cloud hyperscaler environments, or even as people build out their private clouds with kubernetes or openshift or one of the variants, they can move that much faster, but you don't want to just move fast without learning and the experiments. And so that you're investing your time in the right spot. And that's probably one of the second big lessons that we had at Dynatrace through that journey, was just having the ability to adopt cloud native technology and move quickly, but not learning from those experiments you can be doing. Blue Green Canary releases things along those lines. If you haven't invested in understanding the experience at the edge for your consumer, your partner, your user, you're really missing that whole opportunity to drive decisions that are aligned with what's going to have the most impact. And impact is usage.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:11:41]: It's customer sad, it's whatever that might be on your brand. But the continual feedback loops were really one of the big pieces that we benefited most from. And as part of that, and combined with the first part about reorgan, we essentially had a mantra, which was no operations, which meant, let's not invest in a big operations staff and things along those lines. There's still obviously a production environment, but let's take a very engineering mindset to these problems so that we can automate as much as possible. We can then put all of our time into understanding from an innovation standpoint, what is resonating with customer. What's the customer experience that then ultimately leads to the consumer business results? You can see the cascading impact as you go through, and it's been a really positive experience for us. But I sometimes do see people who are looking at it only through the lens of the technology have they adopted the cool new things. And without putting that consumer experience at the forefront or those results, you're just not getting the same impact out of the investment.

Joe Toste [00:12:41]: That's great. Okay, so this was on prem to cloud. I'm curious, just from a high level, you're on site. Never had someone go on site and the go into a room to record a podcast. This is great. Was this customer already in the cloud? And if they were. No, they were not already in cloud. Okay.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:12:57]: Yeah. It might help to give just one clarifier that dynatrace. Our focus is on the enterprise, so we work with the Fortune 15,000 as like a sweet spot. And we often refer to those companies as digital transformers. And that's more or less shorthand that they've had a rich heritage in it already. And it's everyone that you think about. They're not the single app born in the cloud companies, although they're moving now than due to a different level of complexity. But many of our customers started with on premises, and they still run on premises technology now.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:13:31]: It's just there's the tentacles from the cloud. They added new capabilities for new offerings, new revenue drivers, competitive advantage, and they're still tied back into these very complex transactions that might even rely on customer data on the mainframe. And so the customer that I'm at today, you could consider them a retailer and have a very common in store presence. And one of the things that they're trying to do to compete, and you hear it often, like you referenced Jeff Bezos earlier that Amazon tends to step into different marketplaces, and they knew that they had to respond and react and deliver a better experience within their targeted market. And so they did a combination of Kubernetes adoption, Azure adoption, moved into those different clouds. It allowed them to do more experimentation and innovation, as we were talking about. But their big initiative during the pandemic was buy online pickup in store. Essentially, they wanted to be able to still grow and provide a great experience to their consumers.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:14:31]: Realizing that there was going to be hesitancy about being in crowded stores, realizing that for their own workers, it was the right thing to do, to provide a different level of environment or different type of environment. Everything was new to them in terms of public cloud adoption with Azure, moving to DevOps model, taking a playbook from Google with SRE culture, these are very common things that we see as they go through that journey, as we're discussing.

Joe Toste [00:14:55]: Yeah, I love that. I have a pretty kind of curious mind. I'm just always curious about a bunch of random stuff. As the pandemic was starting and stores are shutting down. You have this, and we'll dive into the question in a second. But the buy online pickup in store. And so we have a pretty big retailer here, actually a mile down the road from our house called deckers. I'm sure you're familiar with them.

Joe Toste [00:15:14]: They have Uggs and all that. So my wife was like, oh, hey, I want a new pair of uggs. Okay. Hey, we're going to go wait in line. So I'm not waiting in line anywhere. I just bought them online. I'm just going to go through and pick them up. And they were pretty fast at turning that around.

Joe Toste [00:15:28]: But there was a number of retailers that I guess maybe even like the first three to four months were still scrambling because there's these legacy system. It's a very complex. You think about the number of products that each of these companies are shipping, how you track that skus inventory. Pretty soon you run into a pretty big problem pretty quickly. You can't scale that, and you've got different systems not talking to each other. So that was something that early on in the pandemic I picked up where I was, like, thinking this company might be out of business if they don't turn this around really fast.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:15:58]: Yeah, it's a very good point that people will think of a website and they'll think of that frame that they interact with. Oh, that's a single application. But just to your point, dealing with inventory, thinking about logistics, all the different things that go along with this. We do a lot of business with airlines as well. It's not just the booking, the ticket, it's the manifest, it's the baggage tracking. It's all these different elements where you're keeping the flights in the air. There are so many different systems and that would almost be like the negative way to the second question, that if people can adopt these technologies, they will cease to exist. And so helping customers go through that is always super inspiring.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:16:35]: And I think I told you that just being at a customer and seeing them actually go through that journey is what makes it rewarding. It's also what gives gravity to some of these topics. Because I almost cringe a little bit when I throw out words like digital transformation and innovation. Because at that level it's marketing. But you only have to take one step down or one peeled olive back to see, show one specific customer adopted and know how they were able to change the way they work. And then the technology becomes so much more meaningful. And that's why I'm out here today, to go along that process and a lot of learnings back how we make the offering better and more.

Joe Toste [00:17:08]: Yeah, no, I love that. One of the things I learned when I was at Yardi systems, I was pretty powerful. I worked as a technical account manager. At this point. It might have been ten or twelve years ago, it was a while, but I would often have to look over the shoulder of the end user and to also meet with the executive team on what they would want to do. So I'd have to understand from a high level, okay, here's what they're trying to solve. And then seeing the end user actually use the product and then there's like kind of in the weeds details of dropping SQL packages or whatever, but it moves from, hey, this is just like a random database to, oh, there's actually people who pay rent. And then you start to empathize with the management team and everybody else take more of that.

Joe Toste [00:17:48]: On which I love just you being on the customer site right now, which is so great. Getting your feet wet where the customer is at is super powerful. So let's keep going. So there's a site seeking alpha. It's great. I always love listening to whether it's CEO interviews or just the market in general. And there it was. CEO of Dietrace was there.

Joe Toste [00:18:07]: I was like, oh, this is great. It's one of those things when you were like, oh, I didn't know that this car existed. And then now you start seeing the car everywhere. That's what it's been like for me at Dynatrace. I'm like, wow, I see dietrace everywhere now. And so I saw them on seeking alpha, and there was a testimonial right there around a footwear retailer, and how you guys had helped increase conversions by 25%. Do you just want to tell the story that you saw within Dynatrace? From the start of the pandemic, we were on the. The of brick and mortar retailers having to move to buy online, pick up in store, and the impact that Dynatrace had on innovation and digital experiences.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:18:43]: I'm familiar with that case study and customer, and it is a pretty good pattern for what we saw. And there's been a lot of quotes about the impact the pandemic had on industry. And I think the one that resonates with me is that it really didn't totally change strategies, but really mashed on the gas pedal in terms of accelerating a lot of these different areas, and came with a lot of the online stores, at least if we use them as one kind of pattern, from an innovation initiative to a company imperative, if they couldn't turn that corner, they were going to lose to others that were offering that type of business model. And so how could we jockey for competitive advantage? And with this specific example, there were two themes. One is the theme of automation, and that's a really big word. It can mean a lot of different things. But for us, if we can automate the analysis, if we can automate the understanding of the experience, it basically frees up innovation. And so what pains me is if the best and the brightest in the company are forced doing problem resolutions.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:19:46]: And so maybe in your days as a tan, you're pulling lead development engineers in and things like that, and those people should be focused on customer value. So if we can automate that, and we had one customer say that Dynatrace was their SRE in a box, that we gave them those feedback loops. And so that was a really important element for us. And at that specific customer, this bullet, I'm going off memory. But I think they said we were able to free up like three x, the development capacity in their team by not having them do more of the mundane manual tasks. If you can get the software and the AI to do that, you're now accelerating your innovation factors. And then the other key metric was how much more frequent they could release. And now we're experimenting like, we're pushing more releases to production.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:20:30]: We're learning, we're adapting, we're making changes and we're moving forward. And then that led to the increase in conversions. Of course, you have to have a good product. There's many things that go into a conversion rate, obviously, but the themes I've seen from the pandemic are really around that. Automation and then putting yourself in the user's shoes, just like you said, watching the user do it, that's actually something we do for our customers. We give them that screen capture replay of understanding how a user traverses a site, what steps they take, where they might struggle with the logic or something along those lines. So really, those are the things that were present pre pandemic, but went from. I don't even want to say nice to haves, but to really betting the success of the company on some of these initiatives.

Joe Toste [00:21:14]: Yeah, I love that. Okay, so automate frees up innovation. I don't run a company like Dynatrace, but in my middle media company, automation is like, super powerful. And it frees me up because I understand. Okay, spending time in front of the camera is super important because if I don't produce podcasts, then nothing happens. And so I cannot get bogged down with on the editing. Like, I have team members. But then there's software and stuff, automates.

Joe Toste [00:21:41]: And even in personal life, if you were to take your personal life, there's people that still drop off rent checks and you're like, you could automate that every single month. Like that super simple zapier. Like, just on a very basic level, hooking things up just to make sure you're literally taking the least valuable stuff out. And it's just like being automated and the most important stuff, innovation and keeping that going. How much quality time are they spending on that? So, anyways, I love automation and the. You didn't say this word, but I think it came to mind is like, the velocity to production time, I think, is super powerful. And being able to continuously release and have that production environment to actually deploy that innovation is super powerful.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:22:22]: Absolutely.

Joe Toste [00:22:23]: Okay, so from a high level, we're wrapping this conversation up and this has been super fun. Where do you see Dynatrace heading in the next three to five years? In the product side, just from a high overview level, just what excites you in the space.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:22:34]: Yeah, it's actually a good bridge from the conversation we were just talking about because the industry as a whole is still, I feel like getting their bearings around cloud native technologies. And this whole space that's been defined as observability seems really passive to me. So when we talk about automation, really, I see the opportunity to not just automate, like our continuous delivery pipeline, or automate a problem that's seen in production, but the ability to then automate the business and automate actions and answers that are coming out of the systems. So much data is flowing through these transactions that can be used from a semantic standpoint, a metadata standpoint, et cetera, that can then be applied to really take us to this next level in terms of how we drive companies and whether it's at a retailer or out to a bank. I just see so much potential using the personal examples you gave or to continue to drive more innovation forward. And I realize that's not just a diatrace topic. I think that's the goal of some of the things that the industry is doing. But the difference and the perspective that I sometimes try to remind people of is that we have to go from this mindset of just data collection and humans manually crunching through that to giving precise answers and getting to a point where you can automate with confidence, because that's also a bar to clear.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:23:56]: Sometimes people are not ready for the machines to take that action yet, which is why you hear about things like explainable AI and more. That's a journey. It's never going to be a plant to fly complete type of thing, but I think we're in the steps now. It's early innings, and the next three to five years will be really exciting for the space.

Joe Toste [00:24:14]: Yeah, I'm really excited. I was hearing on the interview with the CEO of Dynatrace how I think he was saying, like, the tam, the total addressable market was like, this just keeps growing, which is. That is great to have. That's exactly what you want. Yeah, but I love that. Okay, so, Steve, where can people find you? Do you hang out online? LinkedIn, Twitter? Do you have a spot?

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:24:34]: My Twitter account is probably woefully ignored. LinkedIn, though. I'm really responsive, too. And then, yeah, then you can also find me if you're a customer, maybe within your four walls, but online, LinkedIn is the best avenue.

Joe Toste [00:24:46]: So if you want to become a dynatrace customer, Steve will come to your four walls and set up, and he will help you. Thank you for coming on tech table, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace [00:24:54]: Thank you, Joe. Had a great time. Thanks for the discussion.

Joe Toste [00:24:56]: Hey, what's up, everybody?

Joe Toste [00:24:57]: This is Joe Tofki from Techtables.com, and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIOs, CISos, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today and to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.