Wisper U Interview with Shane Eleniak

So, Shane, you know, lots of balls, lots of Es and Is and As. I'm fortunate to be the senior executive responsible for products at Calix. So I've got product management, product strategy for the company, and then development, solution tasks, and cloud operations for all of our premises and cloud products. I've been doing this since 1990, so we've been doing it for a little while now. I've been in the industry since 1990, and I've been with Calix for about six and a half years now.

Yeah, so my initial... I started off doing software when I was in engineering. Some of my first jobs, I graduated from electrical engineering actually before there were computer engineering courses. I've been a hardware and software guy. I started doing programming, and then I went to work for a service provider. I actually went to work for Telus. So I'm Canadian. It's an exciting time. They were, you know, Sonet was brand new, vibrant networks. We were looking at high-speed internet services, over-the-top TV services. The internet was brand new, DSL was brand new. Through all that, I really got bitten by the bug of the technology and what you could do for customers. This idea that ultimately communications is just an incredible enabler for communities. I grew up in Alberta, and we've got a couple of larger cities like Calgary, but then we've got a lot of rural communities, farm communities, oil and gas, lumber. You can take some remote places and make a really huge difference by delivering communication services into those communities. That was probably the biggest thing for me, just watching the change and what you could do, how you could take a community that in many ways was isolated, may not even have a hospital or doctors, limited education, and just watch it over time. Now they're connected to the top universities, some of the top cancer and heart doctors, and what would normally be big cities. I've been in California now for 20 years, and you see it all the time. I live in the Bay Area, so you have access to incredible resources. You get out into other parts of Central California and small towns, and communications is everything. All of a sudden you're taking a world finance course or an AI machine learning course, you're talking to a top medical person in their field, and you're doing it from your home or from your community. It's incredibly flattening the world. For me, it's people like yourselves that are bringing those types of services to these types of communities. You see firsthand what that does and how it changes the equation for so many communities.

I think it's the classic thing you talk about: change takes longer than you thought it would, but the impact is greater than what you thought it would be. It's balancing those two points. I think sometimes it's easy to get disheartened and say, 'Well, maybe it isn't going to be as disruptive,' and when you look back, it's incredibly disruptive. Some disruptions were just huge, but they take a little longer. When they do, I'm a big tipping point fan. I'm a big believer that you can feel when things tip, and when they tip, it really accelerates. You have to look for that tip, and you can start to feel when something's starting to tip. It takes longer than you'd like, but when it does tip, it happens fast and it's just incredible to watch.

I think transforming a company is always challenging. We've done a number of transformations. We went from being a classic systems company. When I joined the company, it was 15 years old, really well established, great set of customers, and we wanted to become a software and services company, a software platform company, both on the back of the network OS, on the premises OS, and on a cloud-based infrastructure. I really like our cloud infrastructure. We collect about twelve terabytes of data a week and really bring that into insights for people like yourself on what's really going on, what is the subscriber experience. I'm really proud of what that allows a service provider to do: getting an insight into what is the customer's experience, what is the user experience, and then how do you make that optimum. What I'm excited about is we've talked about trying to measure it, NPS scores, a lot of different things, and it's never been really easy to say, 'I know what's going on in my network. How do I correlate that to a real customer experience?' I'm starting to feel like we're putting the standards in place, the objects, the telemetry, the analytics to actually be able to say, 'No, this is a really good experience. The subscriber with his computer doing Zoom, this is the real experience.' What I'm most proud about is just what that allows you to do. I think describing your experience is everything. We all strive in the industry to get subscribers a great experience, and I think we're starting to get the telemetry, the instrumentation, the analytics to do that in real time. We've all looked at data in the warehouse and lots of data and tried to look back to say, 'Okay, what should we be looking at? What gauges?' I think we're finally getting to a point now where you can start to look at that in real time, and that's going to really change how you deliver services, how you monitor them, and how you react to changing customer needs. I use a couple test cases with my data science people: if you're a grandparent and your grandkids move back in your house, is the system smart enough to tell me that? Something like COVID unfortunately happens, and now all of a sudden it becomes your office and your school. Is the system smart enough to tell me that those types of changing needs? I love the grandparent example. You see that all the time. Someone's kids and their grandkids move back in, their needs change dramatically. Would we proactively see that, be able to talk to them and say, 'Hey, I think you'd benefit from a higher speed package, you'd benefit from some of the other things we do.' How do you get a system smart enough to say, 'I think this subscriber has changing needs'?

We talk a lot about actionable data. That's the key part: is it actionable? Am I collecting it? Am I correlating? Am I turning it into insights? And then, is it clear what actions to take? Is it actionable? Because I think the challenge we've always had in the industry is we've collected a lot of data, but it was really hard to make it actionable. It wasn't clear what to do with it or how to tie it into actions.

I think that just sets the right connotation for me. That's probably the most exciting. Whether you look at TR-396, TR-369, data elements, or the elements 2.00, I think we're starting to see an industry and an ecosystem forming that says we're all going to be able to look at subscriber experience and be able to actually make it actionable. I think that's exciting for the communications industry.

We talk a lot about this idea of DV for us, which is disruptive value. Really what we're trying to figure out is, is it disruptive? I look for sustainable disruption, but is there value? I think if you start on the value side of it, I'm a huge fan and a big believer: go look for the value, talk to your customers, and figure out where the value is to them. Where's the high value? Where's the pain point? If you start on that axis, then you can start to bring smart engineers into it to look at disruption and innovation and say, 'Hey, we could do this differently.' If that's the problem they're having, but I think if you start on the value side, because I think too many people start on the disruptive innovation side of it trying to look for problems to solve. I always start with value and problems and pain points. If you figure out where your customer's pain points are and their highest value, then you can start to look at innovative ways to solve it.

If you work with your customers to understand their business, their business needs, their changing business needs, where their pain points are, then you can start to bring different approaches, different innovation, different disruptive innovation and solve the problem differently. A lot of times the people who understand what's possible don't understand the pain point, and the people who really understand and are living in the pain point don't even think to ask because they don't even think it's possible. They think, 'This is just what we've always done.' I was told it took six hours, I got it down to four, why would I do any better? And then you say, 'Oh no, you can get it down to ten minutes.' They say, 'What? Really? How?' And then we look back and go, 'Well, that was incredibly disruptive.'

I think it's never too soon to start to invest in process. Culture is incredibly important. I think we were successful because we recognized that early on. If we were going to keep the customers that we have happy and attract great talent, we needed to have a great culture. But I think, as a technology guy, an engineering guy, it doesn't feel sexy, but very quickly you realize that when you do things at scale, you've got to build the processes behind it as the foundation. For us, that was our AIM process, how we did concepts, validation, lean, agile, our cadence models. I think investing time to go slow to build those processes out and extend them, and recognize that everything we do in a company is really a set of processes with our customers on both sides of it. My ideas and concepts come from working with my customers, and ultimately the success of delivering software and services comes from what our customers can do with it. Recognizing that your customers are really on both sides of that and an extension of your processes, and building your processes to take into account how we work with our customers, how we understand their needs, and then how we work with them to successfully adopt software and services.

I think they have different challenges. The advantages of creating something from scratch, the beauty of it is you don't have any preconceived ideas. You're not dealing with any type of inertia. It's a white sheet of paper. That can be challenging, but it's very liberating. Whereas improving processes, it looks simpler to people because more of the paper is drawn, but I actually think it's harder because now you're fighting inertia and change of human nature that says, 'Well, yeah, but that's not how we do it.' So ultimately, optimizing is harder even though it looks easier.

I found that even if the change is better, even if we make your job easier, there's still a little bit of fear of the unknown or just, 'Oh, I trained myself to do it this way, I forgot something.' I think that's one of the things I keep reminding myself: everybody goes through change and goes through stages of change. Some people do it very quickly, like the early adopters, and I kind of like innovation and change and disruption, just the way I'm wired, but everybody goes through those same stages and processes. Recognizing that that's the way humans are wired, that's the way we deal with change and adopt and synthesize it. I don't think you can oversize and repeat it because it's that repetition and reward for adopting change and behaviors that reinforces that change isn't a bad thing.

I think it's literally, whether you call it product market fit or fit, I pair it down to the smallest possible use case. I really want to get very granular, very fine grained. Even if it's part of a bigger use case or part of a bigger process, I like to tease them apart as small as you can and really go through the detail. Then you can start to build things up and see how they overlap and add these other things. Counter to how we think, it's human nature to want to lay out the whole thing. I think it really pays off starting with just the small use cases, every little step, work through it, understand it, and then figure out where the pain point is, if there's real value, if there's real differentiation. Then you can start to group things, but don't start to group things too early.

It's human nature to start to try to synthesize and stop listening and start solving the problem. I'm a big believer in just teasing apart the problem, understanding the detail, the pain point, and making sure you've got the smallest parts fully fleshed out before you move on to the next one. When you come back and start looking at how disruption and innovation and what to do, there's lots of different ways to solve things. I think we all rush the solution and wanting to solve problems.

This is fantastic. I love talking with you. This is a great opportunity. I'm excited about technology. I feel like I've been saying this every ten years, I'm always excited about what's next, but I think we're in a special time. Smart towns, Zoom towns, whatever you want to call them. It's exciting to watch North America flatten out, what you're able to do at a grassroots level, and what a game changer it is for communities when you bring in those types of services and access to basically everything in the world. The world is flat, we were talking manufacturing at the time, and now it doesn't matter where you live. You can take that MIT course, you can take that Wharton course, you can be a software developer, you can launch a CSP, you can do whatever you want just by what communications technology allows you to do.