CXO Conversation
“Not uptime — evidence of uptime, in a format a regulator will accept.”
Chief Technology Officer, Kavach Cloud
Kavach Cloud’s CTO on discovering that compliance evidence was the product, why half her engineers work on observability, and what circulating unedited postmortems does to an engineering culture.
Transcript
- ClubCXO
- You say evidence is the product.
- Priya Raghavan
- We lost two deals on documentation before I understood that. Our platform was fine. Our benchmarks were fine. Procurement could not assemble an audit file from what we gave them, and no amount of performance fixes a missing artefact.
- ClubCXO
- Half your engineers work on that?
- Priya Raghavan
- Roughly. It reads badly in a board deck because it looks like overhead. It is the reason the other half has customers.
- ClubCXO
- Unredacted postmortems. Why not summarise for the board?
- Priya Raghavan
- Because the useful part of a postmortem is the sentence someone was slightly embarrassed to write. Edit for an audience and that sentence goes first. Then you have a document that describes an incident and teaches nothing.