How Zoho builds products: Shailesh Kumar Davey

“Our engineering department is like Rahul Dravid -- scores slow but steady. I even call this a Dravidian phase of development, not because we are based in south India -- I dedicate it to Rahul Dravid. The engineering is more tuned towards that approach,’ he says. “All of us agree that making products is like preparing for a movie release. So, out of the ten movies you make, two of them will be superhit and others not so successful. Success of a product is based on how many people pay for it. Each of our service teams across 40 product lines are aware of the monthly revenues.” “At the engineering level, we are now tracking usage. Over past 15 years we have been revenue focused, but now we are looking at feature usage. How many customers are using a product, and within that a particular feature, and so on.” “One of the good things about Zoho is that most of our hires are freshers, and they stay through. More than 90% of our managers are homegrown. Because we have had people working for long terms, we can do knowledge transfer just by sitting next to each other. Working together for long reduces friction.”