According to Raj Sethuraman, good technology cannot be a successful technology unless it solves customer problems and drives great business outcomes. Raj is currently CTO at Wolters Kluwer and got his start at Intuit. The common thread throughout his career has been establishing customer-centricity to better inform technical decisions.

He is our guest this week on CTO Connection and talked to Peter about a program he likes called “Follow Me Home” in which he and other team members sit down with customers to find out how they use products and what could make them work better. Listen for his insights.

• (01:21) - Transitioning to leadership
• (03:48) - Customer centricity
• (05:16) - Follow me home
• (12:26) - Co-creating value
• (16:57) - Badass: Making Users Awesome
• (18:24) - Achieving quick wins faster
• (22:01) - Appetite for change
• (24:51) - Managing pushback 
• (28:01) - Hiring for culture fit
• (30:30) - Engineer rotation
• (32:29) - Innovation priorities
  
   

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.