In this episode, Pratima Arora, Chief Product and Technology Officer @ Smartsheet, dives into what it means to be a modern builder as product, design, and engineering roles converge into today’s post-AI world. She and Jerry discuss why the modern builder model is disrupting traditional engineering processes / responsibilities as individuals embrace a breadth of skills while maintaining individual expertise. They cover how to encourage “cross-pollination” of roles, maintaining product quality while improving iteration speed, facilitating bottom-up contributions, creating context / knowledge graphs to inform agents, examples of good product builders, and what this means for hiring.
Pratima Arora is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Smartsheet. In this position, she is responsible for the company’s product management, product marketing, user experience, pricing and packaging, and digital and product partnerships.
An accomplished technology executive, Pratima has more than 20 years of experience as a product and technology leader with a passion for building innovative tools that solve real problems.
She has held senior product leadership roles at Atlassian and Salesforce, working on some of the companies’ highest-revenue products. Most recently, she was Chief Product and Technology Officer at Chainalysis, where she led the global R&D organization for one of the world’s top blockchain data platforms.
She holds a B.S. in Physics, an M.S. in Computer Science, and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
The CAFE(S) framework is a research-backed definition of context quality for AI agents.
DX collaborated with researchers at Capital One, Google, and UVic to give teams a shared standard for reviewing agent context by breaking it into five properties: clarity, actionability, fidelity, efficiency, and security.
Your agent is only as good as its context and the CAFE(S) framework establishes a shared language around context to help you better understand how & why agents go wrong.
SHOW NOTES:
- Introducing Pratima & her role @ Smartsheet (1:21)
- Pratima’s insights on the CPTO role / the modern builder (3:11)
- How the modern builder idea is disrupting traditional processes (4:52)
- Maintaining product quality while improving building speed (6:48)
- Understanding boundaries / designated roles as builder role expands (9:19)
- Reward your teams & develop a mindset of cross-pollinating roles (11:32)
- Benefits of a flexible modern builder role within teams (14:02)
- The relationship between modern builders & skill development (17:28)
- Strategies for facilitating bottom-up contributions across roles (19:44)
- Defining the chief AI officer’s responsibilities / team roles (21:30)
- What internal launches / adoption techniques look like @ Snapsheet (24:29)
- Creating & maintaining the knowledge graph that informs agents (26:05)
- The role of experts / specialities within the modern builder framework (29:28)
- What the modern builder role means for the org chart (32:17)
- Examples of modern builder archetypes (34:06)
- Skills that make a good product builder (35:07)
- Hiring insights when it comes to bringing in new modern builder talent (36:08)
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Jerry Li - Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ 
