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Sep 27, 2021

Abnormal Engineering Stories, Episode #5: Customer-Focused Product Development with 3x Co-Founder

Many companies aspire to be customer-centric, but few find a way to operationalize customer-centricity into their team’s culture. As a 3x SaaS startup founder, most recently at Orum, and a veteran of Facebook and Palantir, Ayush Sood...

Key Insights

Ayush Sood applied MEDDIC, a sales framework, within engineering teams at Orum to drive customer-focused prioritization.

Engineering teams that deeply understand customer needs can move faster and deliver greater impact than those that don't.

Operationalizing customer-centricity into team culture remains rare despite being a common aspiration among companies.

Building rapport with economic buyers and champions was a key outcome of adapting MEDDIC for engineering use.

Many companies aspire to be customer-centric, but few find a way to operationalize customer-centricity into their team’s culture. As a 3x SaaS startup founder, most recently at Orum, and a veteran of Facebook and Palantir, Ayush Sood has seen this first hand. He knows that an engineering team that deeply understands customer needs and takes action to effectively solve them can move much faster and have much greater impact than others.

In this episode of Abnormal Engineering Stories, Ayush shares how he intentionally injected customer-driven prioritization into his companies via MEDDIC, and the positive impact it had for his customers and team. While MEDDIC is typically utilized as an Enterprise Sales process, adopting it within Orum’s engineering teams had great impact and effect. Ayush and I will discuss:

  • Real-world examples of how MEDDIC focused his teams on building customer value,
  • Identifying and building rapport with economic buyers and champions, and
  • How he re-interpreted the MEDDIC framework as Orum grew.

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