Episode 163: A Mold-Breaking IPO and the Power to Redefine CPO & CTO's Role with Tim Armandpour at PagerDuty

In this episode of Product Thinking, Tim Armandpour, Chief Technology Officer at PagerDuty, joins Melissa Perri to explore leadership qualities, product & technology roles, their challenges, and the importance of an overarching company vision. They discuss user-centricity, product-market fit, and aligning teams.

Tim is almost in his ninth year at PagerDuty and has been the CTO since 2022. He’s been working across Product Development his entire career, with particular skills in business operations as well as building and growing stellar teams.

Tim’s career in Product Development spans over 25 years, from being a Senior Director at Paypal to founding Yogurt Bar, he has established himself as an outstanding tech exec and entrepreneur.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

[02:04] - Chris Sacca tweeted that he wished he’d invested in PagerDuty after they’d come on the scene with an IPO that made people sit up and pay attention. Tim says the founders' brilliance in attaching to a problem space with broad applicability had a lot to do with its success. He mentions PagerDuty’s significant product-market fit, as it plugs into anything that speaks over HTTPS. It grew through a natural network when teams started seeing other teams successfully using it. Further, the company was taking aim at user centricity and the notion that it should ‘just work.’

[08:34] - Ensuring clear communication with your team optimizes the product's success. Communication is a balance, and you don’t want to tilt into micromanagement. So, Tim suggests building guardrails and aligning the team with a company’s overarching vision to answer all the important questions. If you have a vision, you’re able to work backwards from your goal and implement what everyone needs to do to make it happen.

[27:05] - Tim’s decision to combine the roles of Chief Product and Chief Technology Officer provides him with the ability to lean into almost all parts of the business. Combining these roles isn't for everyone, but it does have its advantages: one less negotiation cycle and finding new synergies. PagerDuty combines and splits the role numerously; combining the role is about how the business is operating at the time and which role serves the present needs. Ultimately, putting the two critical functions together aids in compressing the decision, delivery, and development cycle time. Even when the role is split, at PagerDuty, they always share a common goal and vision.

[43:28] Preparing to scale the team to support a transition from CPO & CTO to CPTO requires consideration of strategy and support. According to Tim, one thing to follow is the strategy; along with leaders' ability to adapt and while maintaining a clear structure. Additionally, Tim believes in embracing opportunities even when they’re outside of your comfort zones. It broadens perspectives, empathy, and understanding within teams, improving organizational success.

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Previous guests include: Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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