Smartsheet’s Praerit Garg on Customer-Centric Innovation
New episode from Six Five Media at Smartsheet ENGAGE! David Nicholson spent some time talking with Praerit Garg, President of Product and Innovation at Smartsheet, about the company’s vision and game-changing approach to innovation.
Praerit shared how Smartsheet empowers teams and individuals to work smarter and the crucial role that customer feedback plays in shaping the platform’s evolution.
Their discussion covers:
- Smartsheet’s unique vision for transforming work management
- Innovative strategies that set Smartsheet apart from the competition
- The power of customer insights in addressing challenges and driving product development
- Future directions and growth for Smartsheet
- Praerit’s go-to Smartsheet feature and why it stands out
Don’t miss this conversation! Learn more at Smartsheet.
Transcript
David Nicholson: Welcome to ENGAGE, Smartsheet’s Conference here in Seattle, Washington. I’m Dave Nicholson with Six Five Media On the Road, and I’ve got a very special guest. We’re going to be talking about all things related to innovation, Praerit Garg, president of not only product but-
Praerit Garg: Innovation.
David Nicholson: … innovation. Welcome. Good to see you.
Praerit Garg: Thanks, David.
David Nicholson: So, I’d like to get your philosophy and perspective on how you stay ahead of disruptors in an industry to make sure that your customers are delighted, and then how do you see past where things are today to innovate? Let’s start with that. What’s your overall philosophy?
Praerit Garg: That’s a great question, David. I think the way you should think about is ultimately, innovation is for people, for our customers. So, you have to stay very focused on our customers and what they are trying to achieve, and what do therefore need for that. Often, you find technology organizations fall in love with technology. Technology exists to serve human beings, our customers. So, one of my big pieces of philosophy is let’s stay focused on our customers. Let’s focus on what are they trying to achieve and therefore what tools and technology we bring to bear to help them make that happen. I love technology. I’m a technologist. So when disruption happens, when cloud computing happened last decade, or when we see generative AI come into, I do backflips in my head because those are opportunities to leverage technology to solve even more customer problems and do them faster, make their experiences better. See, it is this convergence thing. You take technology, but ultimately the point is, what is the value you’re actually creating for our customers?
David Nicholson: So you’re talking about empowering people instead of replacing them, would that be fair to say?
Praerit Garg: Absolutely. That is what it is about.
David Nicholson: I’d like to disassociate myself from those thoughts just in case the AI in the sky is looking at that with skepticism? Let’s double click on that. How do you do that? How do you foster innovation with customer feedback? Really, the other side of the equation is how do you do that internally? How do you incent people at Smartsheet to open themselves up to contribute to the innovation process that you do?
Praerit Garg: I think very interesting things to look at from both sides. So, let’s look from a customer standpoint. So I’ll give you a very concrete example, so it actually makes it very real for you. So when we look at our customers, Smartsheet is all about business users, empowering business users because they are the closest to the organization’s mission and whatever problems that organization is trying to solve. I often talk about the reason I’m at Smartsheet is because I read this book several years ago called Sapiens. One of the things the book talked about is that we as human beings, one of the things that makes us unique is how we band together to go pursue a mission. That’s what an organization is. That’s what a team is. Smartsheet’s entire mission is to help all these missions. So it’s like what a place to be from a technologist perspective to go help all the missions of organizations out there. So, we take that very seriously.
An example of that would be business users using Smartsheet, trying to drive a project or a program. To be able to drive a program of hundreds of thousands of projects happening around the globe, they need to be able to build reports. They need to be able to build dashboards to share with their executives, and that requires doing formula calculations or doing data analysis. So when generative AI really came into the forefront, and after four decades of maturation, we get super excited because nobody wants to write formulas. That’s not what an average business user wants to spend their time doing. You need to do that to be able to present the right information aggregated at the right level.
So now, we added the capability into our experience where you can just in natural language ask, I want to compute this value. I want to compute risk, or I want to compute budget. We generate the formula for them. It’s like thousands of hours saved and reduction of cognitive load. Same thing with analyzing data, nobody wants to be a data scientist. An average businessman is not waking up every morning wanting to be a data scientist. So now they can just ask a question, tell me all my projects at risk organized by region and we’ll generate the dashboard for them. So, such powerful things for our users. So, that’s customer.
You ask the question also about the team. So, one of the things we do at Smartsheet is called Hack the Sheet. It’s our annual hackathon. Engineers are always looking to solve problems. Good engineers are wired to go find gnarly problems and go work at that. Once a year, we have a one-week hackathon. Basically, it’s a very organic process in the organization. Teams come up with problems they want to go solve, and they literally create these projects. Organically, teams form around those things. They work on those things for four days. On Friday, we have what we call a demo day.
This year, we had 70 demos, five-minute demos. You can just imagine. Mark, myself, we spend the whole day watching these demos. What an energizing thing, the empowerment our engineers feel. Then when those projects get picked, we give them out awards. These awards are mostly just a recognition of some amazing work they’ve done. Then when they take those and make them production ready, that’s when the realization happens. Two of the things that launched, they’ve got announced at keynote today, came right out of our hackathon.
David Nicholson: Oh, that’s fantastic.
Praerit Garg: It’s that value realization that they’re feeling like they’re having an impact. So hopefully, that gives you both from a customer lens.
David Nicholson: So on the team side of things, how do you guide folks to focus on things? You use the phrase solving problems. The assumption is, if you solve customer problems, if you solve business problems, you do two things. You solve those problems, and then you continue the Smartsheet success in the market, right?
Praerit Garg: Right.
David Nicholson: Sometimes engineers are fascinated and enamored by what they can do, what can be done? How do you rein that in? Do you, as part of your innovation hackathon, Hack the Sheet process?
Praerit Garg: Yeah.
David Nicholson: Do you guide them to say, “Look, don’t tell me what you can do. Don’t show me something that’s cool for cool’s sake”? Do you tell them they must map it to a customer need, or are you looking at both of them as possibly sparks for ideas?
Praerit Garg: So in a year of 52 weeks, 51 weeks, they spend focusing on customer problems. We come up with listening to our customers, a product roadmap in there, right?
David Nicholson: Okay.
Praerit Garg: That one week, we actually don’t put any rules and by design. What you find is pretty incredible. We are human beings. We are engrossed in solving customer problems. The way our product development process works, David, is everything starts with the customer problem definition. We call it a CPD. There’s a document written by the product managers on what the customer problem definition is, and we have real customer codes in those documents to energize the teams. We’re solving real problems for our real customers. So, the reality of our engineers are deeply embedded in customer problems, right?
David Nicholson: Okay.
Praerit Garg: So even though we don’t put any rules, a lot of problems they solve are customer problems. That’s why two of the things we released today and announced today, were things that they actually built during Hackathon. At the same time, they also live as engineering teams, the development process, the testing process, the production scale. So, they see other problems which ultimately impact our customers. It may impact us in terms of velocity at which we are able to get things done. So, teams pick whatever they want to pick. What we learn is they’re either solving customer problems, or they’re solving their own problems so that they can improve their productivity. We love both of those things. Why would we not want engineers solving problems that make them produce things faster for our customers? So yeah, we don’t put any rules on that.
David Nicholson: Okay.
Praerit Garg: It’s been incredible over my five and a half years here. This year was the sixth hackathon, Hack the Sheet we did. Every year, I’m just blown away by the innovation that comes out of the team. This year, about half of them were generative AI-based projects.
David Nicholson: Next question, yeah.
Praerit Garg: I gave you examples. Some of the places they’re using generative AI are just mind-bogglingly beautiful, using embedded models in the browser to speed up the experience of the customer. So, all the way from using live language models in the cloud and doing that. So, we see all of that.
David Nicholson: So there’s a sense when you talk about AI that we’re thankfully out of the terrified fear of missing out stage in AI where CIOs and CTOs felt compelled to run in one direction. That direction was, “Apparently, I need to buy a bunch of Nvidia GPUs. I’m not sure why, but apparently I need to go out and do that, otherwise I’m going to fall behind.” I believe that we’re in this more rational, reasonable period of time. Are you seeing customers desperate for AI enhancements for the sake of AI enhancements, or do you think that your customers are in a place now where they’re looking at this more pragmatically in terms of saying, “No, no. So, I don’t care about AI unless it solves a business problem”? Are we at that same point yet?
Praerit Garg: Yeah. So, I would say I think the vast majority of our customers are very much in this, “Hey, what pragmatic business problem is AI going to solve for me?” I would almost say that there is a certain amount of fear and uncertainty because the technology is somewhat magical. The analogy I like to use is, it’s like the 1990s. Internet had just come out and people say, “I would never buy anything on the internet.” Right?
David Nicholson: Right.
Praerit Garg: “I can’t imagine banking on the internet.” Generative AI is similarly fairly magical. Even though it’s based on the same principles of statistics and probability, but people don’t understand it. So, I think there’s still a lot of learning and trust building that is happening. The people who worry about the Nvidia chips, they’re probably much more the cloud infrastructure players and those guys. They should be because that’s where all the compute capacity is going to come from, and to be able to go solve these problems with incredible elegance.
So, I’m looking forward to how that plays out. I think we are finding customers, and the way we are using generative AI in the product is all about the example I gave you. Build your formulas. You don’t have to apply. Software can do it for you, or analyze your data and build your charts and graphs because it’s very pragmatic. It saves me hundreds of hours. We launched these four capabilities over the last year, and we’ve estimated we’ve saved a million hours for our users that they would’ve had to go do. So, that’s where it really becomes real for a lot of our customers.
David Nicholson: A lot of attention. I come from a background where I was very much embedded in the hardware space going back many decades. I was born in 1990, so I don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to the internet thing. I go back to this knuckle dragging hardware mentality. So it’s been refreshing to see a focus on hardware lately, frankly, but you guys are really at the tip of the spear when it comes to legitimate ROI-
Praerit Garg: User experience, yeah.
David Nicholson: … and yet able to demonstrate. You mentioned categorizing this in terms of having the metric of hours saved and productivity. What are some other ways that you see that manifesting itself? You could say a million hours saved, that’s a bit of an abstraction over an organization. From an individual’s perspective, how do you quantify how much more productive you can make an individual? Is it about one individual can do the work of two, or is it one individual is now going to be doing higher level tasks? What does it look like? What’s the future of work with Smartsheet empowering users with a little bit of AI spice added to the mix?
Praerit Garg: I may be controversial in that sense. So let me say, I’m not convinced that, “Oh, one person being able to do two-people work is necessarily the only way to think about productivity.” I think doing higher level work where we are taking the tedious work out of your life, there’s a lot of value to that. I think there’s value to saying, “Oh, well, I spent fewer hours working, but I’m doing more thinking, and I’m imagining a better place for us.” I think humans are great at that level of creativity and imagination. So allowing humans to do what humans are brilliant at while machines can do the things, a lot of the tedious work, it just makes us happier, more productive.
If we can have some hours saved where we can sit and be entertained, that may not be a bad thing, right Dave? If this thing actually succeeds many things play out. We’ll see productivity gains. We’ll see tedious work being done. We’ll see humans being able to potentially work less and still make the same level and probably better quality of life. So, I think we’ll see many of those things play out.
David Nicholson: Final bonus question for you, PG. If you had to tell me something that most people would find surprising about the process of driving innovation that you’ve learned in your many years presiding over fostering and cultivating innovation, what would be something unexpected? Something that people wouldn’t expect about that process that you found to be interesting? That puts you on the spot, what. Any surprises or anecdotes about the innovation process?
Praerit Garg: I think that the most surprising thing I find about the innovation process is that people think innovation happens because, “Oh, I create an innovation lab, and I have people working on innovation.” I think innovation happens in the context of solving customer problems. That’s where the best kind of innovation actually happens is when you’re solving real customer problems, but at the same time giving people who are innovators that freedom to be able to solve the problem that they come up with. So, there’s a certain amount of iteration. I call it, you have to walk down cul-de-sacs to figure out that you walk down a cul-de-sac to be able to walk back and then try again. So, you want to allow for that, right?
David Nicholson: Okay.
Praerit Garg: So, it’s super iterative like generative AI. The first generative AI paper, neural network paper was written in 1983. I was a sixth grader. My memory of 1983 is India winning the World Cup for the first time in cricket. Sixth grader, that’s what I cared about. 40 years hence, it’s taken that level of iteration. It has taken our compute capabilities get to a certain level. You’re a hardware guy, so you’ll relate with this how far we have come in terms of our compute capacity. You wouldn’t have been able to imagine 40 years ago that, oh, we can have millions of computers with this level of parallel processing. That we can run through neural networks where within seconds we can give you a response. So, innovation just is that process. You want to allow for that. It’ll go down cul-de-sacs and allowing for that to return. So, I love that process. Staying focused on what you’re trying to do for customers is where it will actually keep yielding for you.
David Nicholson: So what I take away from that is it sounds like it’s really important for your folks to have an innovation mindset on a daily basis.
Praerit Garg: Absolutely.
David Nicholson: So when they arrive at the Hack the Sheet time of year, it’s not that they’re completely separating from what they’re normally doing. It’s a natural extension of it. So, the mindset over the process sounds-
Praerit Garg: Absolutely. If you’re in the software business, Dave, right?
David Nicholson: Yeah.
Praerit Garg: Not innovating is the definition of death.
David Nicholson: Death.
Praerit Garg: Right?
David Nicholson: Exactly. Well, no death here. Just plenty of rain in Seattle making everything green, including the ENGAGE Conference here with Smartsheet. PG, thank you so much for being with us.
Praerit Garg: Thank you.
David Nicholson: Dave Nicholson here, Six Five Media On the Road, stay tuned for more.