Building Customer-First Products

Siqi Chen (@blader, CEO/CFO @Runwayco), talks about his journey from JPL developer to Founder of a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) startup. We focus on how to build products that customers crave and how a customer-centric view differs from traditional product management. SHOW: 923 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #923 Transcript SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET  CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:  http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SPONSORS:Cut Enterprise IT Support Costs by 30-50% with US Cloud SHOW NOTES:Runway websiteBehind What Seems Like an Overnight Success (video) Topic 1 - Welcome to the show, Siqi. First, your combination of technical and business/financial background is fascinating. How did you go from coding at NASA to Head of Product at Zynga to CEO/CFO for a finance platform startup? Give everyone a quick introduction. Topic 2 - One thing I’ve noticed as a trend in your background is the core concept of building. What has been your philosophy in building products? How do you build products that customers demand? Topic 3 -  Let’s talk about AI and AGI for a moment. We hear all the time how disruptive this will be. What are your thoughts here, and how do we develop both adaptability and resiliency to new technologies? Topic 4 - Let’s talk FP&A (financial planning & analysis). Our core listeners out there tend to skew more towards the tech and infrastructure side, but a core theme of this show is always to be learning as much of the business as possible to apply those concepts. As someone with a background in both worlds, plus now running an FP&A startup, what do you wish folks on the technical side of the house knew more about to make their jobs easier? Topic 5 - We posted a link in the show notes for a video you did on the “overnight success” of Runway. It was a good representation and origin story of how something can go viral with the right mindset and product-market fit. Tell everyone about that as Runway approaches 5 years now.  Topic 6 - What is your biggest challenge in the FP&A space today? Is it AI? We’ve seen a lot of AI disruption in coding, legal, and other areas requiring deep data pool insights. Is this any different? FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netBluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod