Engineering Founders
CEO as Experiment Officer, Design Partner Personas & Rebranding w/ Sha Ma @ Topogy
11 Dec 2025
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How does Sha Ma define the role of a CEO as an experiment officer?
We're doing a special in-episode feature with our friends and sponsor, Span. People have been working for years on quantifying engineering productivity, and the reality is there's no one single metric that you can boil it down to. It's a far too complicated problem space to try to reduce it down to something simple.
So the way we talk about it internally is using multiple different signals for the instigation of inquiry. Stay tuned for later in the episode, Steven Paletto, field CTO at Span, deconstructs the tactics behind how top companies are navigating the AI transformation, navigating new bottlenecks and accelerating work.
We kind of lived with the product, you know, as it evolved and shaped up as we learned more about what features we want to build, what value we're adding from, you know, talking with our design partners and doing validation in the marketplace.
Chapter 2: What strategies does Sha Ma use to onboard AI tools successfully?
It's almost kind of like renovating your house, right? And so whenever you move into a place, you know, I used to kind of tell people, like, don't do the renovations right away because you want to live in the house for a little bit. to understand like, oh, this is kind of my natural habit.
I tend to look out that window and therefore I want something there in the, you know, kind of path that I take from one room to the other.
Chapter 3: How does AI enhance the creative process for designers?
And once you kind of build that, like, you know what you want, you know, kind of, you know, how you live in the house, that's kind of when you start renovating so that everything feels like, okay, this is very custom. This, you know, fits that, right? And so I actually feel like the branding exercise we went through is very similar to that.
Chapter 4: What is the origin story of Topogy and Sha's transition to founder?
Welcome to Engineering Founders, the show for engineering leaders making the daring leap to start their own company. In this episode, Sha Ma, CEO and founder at Topogy, shares her playbook as the chief experiment officer.
Chapter 5: How has the focus shifted from 'growth at all costs' to 'efficient growth' in 2023?
We deconstruct how she tests, onboards, and scales out different experiments with new AI tools to accelerate her entire team. We also explore parts of the founder journey, from identifying the right customer personas and finding design partners, to the full story behind Topogy's rebrand. Let me introduce you to Shaw and Topogy.
Topogy is an AI-native cost optimization platform designed to turn infrastructure complexity into clear, actionable insights for finance and engineering teams. Topogy turns the unseen connections within your infrastructure into clear data-driven actions, helping engineering teams optimize cloud cost, performance, and focus.
Shaw previously was CTO at Catalyst.io, an industry-leading customer success platform. She was VP of Engineering at GitHub, where she was responsible for core platform and ecosystem. It was part of the leadership team that took SendGrid public. Enjoy our conversation with Shaw Ma. Shaw, first off, just want to say welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us on this Thursday.
How are you doing? Good, good.
Chapter 6: What unique challenges do growth-stage companies face in today's market?
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about it. Yeah. So to get right into it, one of the things I was really excited to talk to you about is experimentation and the role that that plays within how you lead the company. I think to start off with a quote that you shared with me is that you see the CEO as the chief everything or the chief experiment officer.
So I wanted to get into that a little bit because I love the way that this shows up into how the company operates.
Chapter 7: How did Topogy choose its design partners and what was the selection process?
So I think maybe bring us in a little bit to what do you mean by that and what does this look like? As a startup CEO, especially in the age of AI, I tell my team there's no better time to be trying something new, doing something new at a time like this. The pace of innovation is so fast and there's so many tools out there available to us. But at the same time, we're a very small team.
There's only seven of us and we want to keep things lean, but also accelerate.
Chapter 8: What insights can be gained from Topogy's rebranding experience?
And so because of all the AI innovation, there's a lot of expectations from everyone that things just move a lot faster. You can do a lot more with smaller teams. And there's like a ton of new tools that are coming out every day, like the rapid pace of evolution in this space, right?
Like there's a new tool you hear about like every other day and you're like, oh my gosh, like how do I not have this be such an overwhelming experience for my team? Because I can't also, you know, have my team trying out all the new tools and we're not getting anywhere from a product development perspective. So that's kind of where I became the chief experimental officer for our startup.
So back in February, when MCP first came out and I was like, oh, this is a really cool tech. Let's see what we can do with this.
And we set up an MCP server and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, this is really great because previously back even just six months ago, I was developing, you know, we were doing rags and we were setting up vector databases, chunking up all the embeddings and feeding it into the thing. And all of a sudden I can have just, you know, an LLM talk to my database and
And, you know, you know, skip all of that. Right. And I have this thing that I can just pass in as context. And this is really cool. So basically introduced that to my team and we started kind of actually building really around the concept of MCPs and how do we actually talk natively behind the scenes to our data. And so, you know, that was one of the introductions.
And then another one is that, you know, again, when we started very small, you know, I was looking at all these new tools coming out and this is early days of Bolt. and lovable. And I experimented, I think it was with Bolt.new at the time. And I told my lead developer, Tom, I'm like, hey, I think we can actually just create our entire onboarding experience with this. Let's take a look.
Let's feed it the UI that we just got from our designer and see where it takes us. Tom was able to get our entire onboarding experience up and running in one afternoon. I think he got us 80% there and he was like, oh, I ran out of free credits on this platform and I'll just do the rest by hand. But it's not bad. You know, it got us 80% there.
So we were able to build our onboarding experience in one afternoon because of that. So really, you know, I've been like, I've been enjoying a lot of the experimenting, having fun with a lot of the tools out there. If I hear something new, I try it out. If it's good or if I see a very specific use for it, I bring it back to the team.
Debbie, one of my other developers, she came from a Ruby on Rails background and we've been primarily developing in Golang in the back end. And so I was like, Debbie, you got to use Cursor because this will help bridge all that gap and you'll be a Golang developer in no time. And that's really helped her adapt to a new language, a new platform.
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