The Space Needle. Pike Place Market. Kerry Park.
Forty million visitors flock to Seattle every year for its space-age icon and spectacle of flying fish, but the city is brimming with hidden gems for those who know where to look.
The same can be said for the city’s tech scene. While tech giants like have propelled Seattle into the spotlight, the city boasts 1,300 tech companies of all sizes. These companies foster a vibrant and innovative ecosystem where engineering leaders play a crucial role in mentoring the next generation of engineers and guiding their teams through the complexities of developing cutting-edge technology.
Take computer software company, Qualtrics, where Executive Vice President of Engineering Anderson Quach leads his engineering team in innovating, building and scaling experience management software. At Qualtrics, Quach’s leadership is pivotal in transforming ideas into powerful solutions.
Built In Seattle sat down with him to learn about his approach to leadership and the work he’s most excited to accomplish.
Qualtrics is a software platform that helps businesses collect, organize and analyze data about customers and employees.
Tell us about yourself. What’s your professional background, and why were you brought on to lead this team?
I’ve been at Qualtrics for nearly eight years and lead our global engineering team. I’m based in Seattle and have over 20 years of experience in tech, with previous engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft. I have extensive experience building software, including developing embedded real-time operating systems, working on Microsoft Windows, writing HTML5 API performance standards and shipping over 30 consumer electronic products at Amazon. These products include e-book readers, Fire Tablets, Fire Phones, Alexa devices and Fire TVs, for which I developed the supporting mobile and distributed systems.
At Qualtrics, I lead our engineering organization, with development hubs in Seattle; Provo, Utah; Reston, Virginia; Mexico City; Dublin and Krakow. Our main focus is on innovating, building and scaling XM software. XM enables organizations to address challenges and opportunities by analyzing experience data, which includes rich human factor information. This helps in understanding emotions, intent, intensity and sentiment across the multiple channels through which customers and employees engage with an organization. We go beyond assessing what happens within an organization to help them understand why trends are emerging. Through insights, we enable organizations to take action to manage their mission-critical experiences.
How would you describe your approach to leadership, and how do you plan on building team culture?
The goal is to empower teams to be autonomous to execute and realize their vision.
QUALTRICS’S TENETS
Qualtrics’s culture is encompassed in its tenets, which guide day-to-day decisions:
- Security First. Qualtrics is trusted with sensitive data. It builds systems, processes and a culture prioritizing security and privacy in all its operations.
- Quality Obsessed. Qualtrics’s products are mission-critical systems for its customers. Features and changes are released only after thorough validation to meet customers’ functional, performance and availability needs.
- One Experience. Qualtrics ensures a consistent experience for all customers, regardless of language, geographical location, ability or device. It uses shared patterns, standards and components across products, so users have a familiar experience and don’t need to learn multiple ways of solving the same problem.
- Platforms Amplify. Qualtrics recognizes that a well-executed platform can drive growth and innovation by leveraging a reinforcing flywheel of use cases and components. When choosing between building a custom solution or a platform abstraction, Quach’s team prioritizes the platform approach, building services, frameworks and APIs that align with their long-term XM strategy.
- Ship, Learn, Improve. Qualtrics’s products deliver value when in the hands of customers, and they understand that customer expectations evolve. They optimize for the speed of learning by shipping, gathering data, learning and iterating. Quach noted launching a new feature is the beginning of the journey, not the end goal.
What initiative are you most excited to tackle next, and what impact will it have on Qualtrics or its customers?
I’m excited about two.
The first is building and realizing XM capabilities for present and future customers. We’re pioneering the XM category with our robust listening engine that engages users across various platforms such as in-app, SMS, chat and social media. Our Qualtrics AI technology, embedded within the XM platform, processes this data in real time, offering tailored action recommendations for different roles and departments. It features low- to no-code automation and an open developer platform for swift integration into existing operational workflows. This high adaptability promotes widespread usage and impactful actions across organizations, driving significant change and positive business outcomes.
The second is investing in the development of our engineering teams through creating sustainable and measurable ways to continually improve our engineering practices and iteration time.
