With the start of the new year, we welcome Taggart Matthiesen as the company’s new Chief Product Officer (CPO). Taggart will oversee all aspects of product strategy for us, including product management, user experience (UX) and data science.
Taggart joins LogicMonitor from Lyft, where he was Vice President of Product, building out Lyft’s autonomous driving initiatives. Prior to Lyft, Matthiesen served as a Group Product Manager at Twitter, where he created and led the company’s Data Product Group. Before Twitter, he was Senior Director of Product at Salesforce, where he led the teams responsible for Salesforce’s developer and analytics platform.
Recently, we spoke with Taggart to welcome him to the role and to allow him to share his thoughts on the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Welcome, Taggart! Can you tell us what made you decide to join the LogicMonitor team?
Well, my initial interest begins with the space and data observability in general. I see great growth potential in the observability space and LogicMonitor is in a unique position within it. The world has gone digital or mobile, however, you prefer to describe it, and the constant factor is the increase in the volume of data. The sheer amount that’s flowing in and out of systems is staggering. I think one of the most critical ways you can differentiate as a company is to provide the best customer experience and, for us, that means providing business-changing, decision-driving data observability – the ability to see into systems and see how they are operating.
When you’re talking about things like mean time to detection or mean time to resolution if you’re running a highly optimized organization and infrastructure, you want to ensure that you can iterate and improve your systems as fast as possible. In the past, the industry talked about observability as a “pane of glass”, but I think we want to change that narrative to one where we focus on becoming more efficient in finding the signals in the data noise. Identifying the signals and providing a path to the resolution of true problems increases efficiencies and improves outcomes in a cost-effective manner.
Another very important factor that brought me here is the people. I’ve had an opportunity to work with a number of individuals on the C-suite, like Christina and Ryan and Alyene and Julie, at Salesforce and in other roles. I am astonished at the level of talent here and I’m excited about the opportunity to work closely with the whole team.
How do you see yourself helping LogicMonitor understand and enable success for customers?
I would start with my experience from my past. I spent a number of years at Salesforce and Twitter building products and solutions for a broad spectrum of companies and verticals. I learned firsthand the complexities of shipping products in the enterprise space and working closely with Sales and Customer Success throughout the customer journey. And even before my time in product, I spent years on the consulting and implementation side – customizing and configuring enterprise products – I’m excited to leverage my experience here.
And as it relates to observability, I leveraged a number of homegrown and 3rd party tools to monitor and keep tabs on our application delivery and core features. And it spanned most of my feature work – from keeping tabs on our payment processing to flagging suspicious events, to even helping evaluate the efficacy of our self-driving systems. In essence, I was the customer, and I have empathy for those who know that data is the heartbeat of their company and access to this data is absolutely critical.
Combining empathy for the customer experience with the knowledge of how you can deliver what they need, that’s how you improve your service and keep your customers happy. Make sure you really understand the needs of your customer and, equally important, understand how your customers are using your product. You want to be able to start thinking ahead of your customers, based on your knowledge of the industry and the industry trends, to build them a roadmap forward that accurately reflects what their needs really are.
Any other thoughts you’d like to share about your new role?
Yes, definitely. I really like the personality, the culture, the values, and the types of individuals that have flocked to LogicMonitor. It’s a great company, in a very special vertical, at the right time. I’m excited to help LogicMonitor accelerate our business, our product, and our vision.