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Engineering FoundersAuthor: The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
The show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company! Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Management Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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CEO as Experiment Officer, Design Partner Personas & Rebranding w/ Sha Ma @ Topogy
Episode 54
Thursday, 11 December, 2025
Sha Ma (CEO & Founder @ Topogy) deconstructs the concept of CEO as the “chief experiment officer” / “chief everything officer,” detailing how she personally tests, onboards and scales out AI tools to accelerate her team. Plus we cover how they identified the right customer personas, found design partners, and navigated a full startup rebrand. ABOUT SHA MA & TOPOGYTopogy is an AI-native cost optimization platform designed to turn infrastructure complexity into clear, actionable insights for finance and engineering teams. Topology turns the unseen connections within your infrastructure into clear, data-driven actions — helping engineering teams optimize cloud cost, performance, and focus.Before founding Topogy, Sha was CTO @ Catalyst.io, an industry leading Customer Success Platform, VP of Engineering @ GitHub where she was responsible for Core Platform and Ecosystem. And was part of the leadership team that took SendGrid public. SHOW NOTES:CEO as Chief Experiment Officer: Sha’s approach to launch and scale experiments at Topogy (1:55)How to initiate and onboard successful experiments with the team (6:25)Using AI as a creative partner to amplify a designer's human touch (10:27)The origin story of Topogy & Sha’s transition from VPE to founder (13:51)The 2023 shift: from "growth at all costs" to "efficient growth" (15:56)Building an AI-first product to manage infrastructure spend (21:49)The persona journey: Starting with growth-stage companies (28:19)How Topogy intentionally selected three diverse design partners (34:27)The story behind Topogy's rebrand (39:15)Frameworks for coming up with the right brand name & when to do so (42:08)The "renovating a house" analogy: Why you must "live in" your startup before branding it (48:45)Rapid fire questions (49:43) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah 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/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
