It’s no secret collaboration paves the way for exciting products and innovations. At SingleStore, we believe that when our team members collaborate and are motivated by a collective goal, the outcome is always great.
Some of our best product features and iterations in SingleStoreDB are the amalgamation of work from groups across product management, solutions engineering (SE), R&D and more. So we decided to put collaboration front and center, hosting our first-ever internal “demothon” across our global SE teams. Spanning from San Francisco to Singapore, these teams were tasked with building a powerful set of demos based around SingleStore 8.1 features — and articulating the critical capabilities and business value of these solutions.
I am incredibly fortunate to be a part of an organization where the rate of innovation outpaces competition — from JSON analytics to generative AI, we are working very hard to help our customers deliver rich, real-time applications.
As the leader of the solutions engineering organization at SingleStore, this poses some unique challenges around making sure our customers and prospects always see the latest and greatest innovations. Demos quickly get outdated and when we are able to add new features to existing demos, customers often end up seeing “Frankenstein” illustrations — rather than clear, comprehensive stories about how we can solve their business problems.
Similar to other growing organizations, we at SingleStore often take the “do unscalable things” approach to solving problems before operationalizing them. So when it came to needing fresh, rich demos showcasing SingleStore 8.1, what did we do? Get the entire field into rooms across the world to build them, of course! Okay… admittedly, there was some structure to it.
Taking some inspiration from our SingleStore Engineering Hackathons, we divided the global organization into localized teams and made a request for submissions. The guiding criteria was that demos had to be relevant to our customers, showcase innovation and of business value. We received 5x the ideas than we could actually build in one Demothon! From here, the teams selected ideas and got together in-person to build.
Collaboration stretched beyond just the SE teams. Our field has clear lines of communication to product and engineering 24/7, which helped them get unblocked when facing challenges with new features. After 48 grueling hours and far too many beers poured from our Raleigh office keg, the teams were ready to present. Check out some of the demos!
- Chatbot for financial analysts, leveraging SingleStore Kai™ and Generative AI
- Transaction fraud detection using real-time vector search
- Leveraging Langchain and SingleStore to enable AI conversations
- Why your data mesh strategy needs SingleStore, featuring SingleStore Kai™
You may be thinking, what happens when SingleStore releases its next set of innovative features? We’ve recently rolled out SingleStore Hands-On Labs, a platform where we can build modular demos with versioning, collaboration and access to an entire tech ecosystem to build from. Our latest demos will reside there for a solution engineer to show you at any time, with just three clicks.
Coming out of this event, we have many new rich capabilities to showcase with our customers. However, just as importantly, we have a renewed sense of collaboration, innovation and excitement from the SE team here at SingleStore. We met in person, built great products and had a tremendous amount of fun. I look forward to announcing the winners of the Demothon soon — look out for a multi-part series showcasing each of these innovative demos!
