PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada on Boosting Developer Productivity with AI: Time Out
It’s been a challenging stretch for companies whose products are designed to help software developers do their jobs more efficiently. Today Jon takes time out with a so-called devops company CEO who’s used to having to carve out her own path.
Jennifer Tejada is CEO of PagerDuty, whose software promises to alert companies to glitches in their data centers and then help mitigate before the problems spiral. She grew up in working class communities in the Midwest, part of a big family where you had to fight for your spot.
"So there was a little bit of Darwinism sort of fight for survival in our family," she told me when we first talked in a Fortt Knox 1:1 back in 2020. "If you were late to dinner, there might not be any. If you didn't grab dinner from the table, you might still get stabbed by a fork, but you had a really good chance of eating. We were all expected to contribute. I think every kid in my family had a job before we were ten, whether it was paper route or babysitting, and we all were also expected to give back to our community, whether it was by singing in the choir in church, or participating in a bikeathon, or raising money through selling cookies for the Girl Scouts like you name it. We were doing that all the time."
Today PagerDuty is using automation and generative AI technologies to keep customers’ developers focused on the most critical tasks, and help them gets things like documentation done faster.
"Despite the economic environment that we've been in, we still have a significant talent shortage as it relates to software developers," she said when I spoke with her last month. "And so anything that our customers can do to reduce the time that software developers spend on non value-added activities and get them back to building and innovating, they see that time as money. And so when I talk to C-level executives like CIOs and CTOs, they want to know how do I reduce the level of toil that my software developers face on a day to day basis? How do I get them to spend more hours of their day doing deep work, writing code, committing new products and services into production, and less time dealing with unplanned, unstructured work that comes their way, but requires their subject matter expertise."
The Time Out takeaway here: DEVOPS WILL PAY. I'm not saying that every devops company stock is going to rise. But from technologies like Microsoft’s Github Copilot that speed up the coding process to security platforms like Crowdstrike and Zscaler that make it easier for I.T. departments to deploy and monitor cyber defense, there’s a new gear in the drive for engineer efficiency. It reminds me of when hardware vendors pushed into services 15-20 years ago, to grow their share of wallet. I’ll be watching out for this effect when PagerDuty reports earnings next week.
