What's up? Welcome to build on seeking wisdom. This is Maggie. As always, here to dig up and share the absolute best in secrets in building and scaling products and product teams. And I'm really excited because today I have an absolute OG in the product

world, Pratima Aurora. She's the head of product at Confluence. She spent a bunch of years at

Salesforce, started off and into it, basically someone who has seen a lot happen in the world

of SaaS. So welcome. I'm so excited to have you. Thank you, Maggie. Super pumped to be here. Awesome. So I just want to start quickly with you started as a software engineer back in the day. And now you're the head of products at Confluence. Like, how did you get here? How did you get started? And, what made you switch to product in the first place?

Sure. Yeah, I'll go even a little bit further in my, you know, in my journey. I was,

I grew up as a geek at heart, loved doing math puzzles, started coding very early on. And there was something about solving problems that always resonated with me.

I started my career early as a software engineer,

and Intuit, as you mentioned, was my first job out of college.

And it was fascinating because my first week and one of the onboarding exercises was for us to literally follow me home or follow a customer home.

And I'm going to totally date myself here.

But there used to be a store called Circuit City that existed at that time.

If anybody remembers.

Yep.

And we didn't have SaaS as much. This is, gosh, 18 years ago. And we didn't have SaaS as much.

This is, gosh, 18 years ago.

And it was shrink-wrap software.

So people would buy to store and buy a CD and take it home and install it.

And this is like the pure as you can get to customer discovery.

We would stand behind those boxes of shelves in Circuit City

and then we'll see people come and pick up those boxes. And then once they were ready to check

out, we would literally follow them and say, hey, tap on their shoulder. We saw you were just

going to buy this. Can we come see how you're experiencing it and we'll pay you 100 bucks?

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