Confluent Champion: Devising Real-World Solutions for Customers

Three years ago—after more than a decade of working in hands-on tech delivery roles—Tejal Bhatt was ready for a new opportunity. She joined Confluent as a Solution Engineer and started to help customers solve bigger problems and innovative use cases. Learn how her time at Confluent has helped her advance her skills and career.

How have you grown or changed since joining Confluent?

Before joining Confluent in 2022, I spent about 14 years in tech delivery roles and leading delivery teams for customers. Confluent gave me the opportunity to change my path and contribute to customer enablement in a pre-sales tech role.

Making this change—transitioning from delivery person to pre-sales solution engineer and from team lead to individual contributor—has been challenging but rewarding. This experience has helped me grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined three years ago. I’ve not only expanded my tech skills but also developed soft skills as I’ve helped customers get started on their data streaming journeys.

What’s the best part about interacting with customers in your experience?

Every prospective customer has a unique setup with its own challenges to solve. My role gives me the opportunity to constantly explore new use cases and be part of the customer’s path to success with data streaming.

The best part of interacting with customers is learning about business challenges and ways of improving designs and understanding how businesses operate in competitive environments. It also boils down to shifting the narrative from “data at rest”’ to “data in motion.” Every person I interact with has unique expectations that I need to address, such as technology capabilities, the short- and long-term costs, and return on investment. These are exactly the issues that make up the “sales + technology” conversations my team and I have with customers every day.

As part of the Dedicated Solution Engineering team, I get to reach out to and converse with a wide variety of personas, from developers to the C-suite. Each person’s contribution to and vision for the business is different. That’s what makes my team’s ability to map business vision to technical solutions so crucial. Having to explain the what, how, and why of each use case to meet the needs of each person I engage with in the customer organization has brought me the most learning and growth, personally and professionally.

What skills or technologies have you learned since joining? What motivates you to excel in your role, and how does Confluent support your ambitions?

When I joined Confluent, I knew the basics of Apache Kafka®. Today, I’m able to talk to customers about so much more, including all the technologies that make up the data streaming platform and how they help customers realize their business goals. And with Confluent Cloud, I started to learn about cloud technologies, networking, and the competitive landscape.

The success stories of customer use cases going live motivates me to always keep learning so that I can excel in my role. Providing the right education and guidance for a prospect in adopting the data streaming platform lays the foundation for success. I enjoy building long-lasting relationships with customers and seeing a planned use case through to fruition. It’s really driven home the impact of Kafka for solving real-world problems. Confluent offers me the opportunity to connect with so many people in different roles and industries, giving me the tools to learn the business considerations and the tech skills to build valuable solutions to mission-critical use cases for our customers.  

What's unique about Confluent's company culture? What’s one question you would tell people to ask during their interviews?

Right now, Confluent is evolving to solve bigger customer challenges with new strategies. The unique thing about Confluent’s culture is our #oneteam attitude: We all play a critical role in contributing to what the company can do for its customers.

The leaders believe in creating more leaders and providing opportunities to lead from the front. I love this advice that Erica Shultz, President of Field Operations, gives to the sales and customer success teams: “Respect the opportunity.” And when it comes to serving customers, I’ve seen how each person on my team goes above and beyond to help them understand the best way to leverage data streaming for their specific use case and business requirements.

Rapid-fire questions: 

1. What job did you want when you were a child?

   1. Teacher.

2. What’s the best decision you made in your career?

   1. Working on niche technology, be it TIBCO at one point or Confluent today.

3. What’s your work-from-home must-have?

   1. Noise-canceling headphones.

4. If you could have your team off-site anywhere in the world, where would it be?

   1. Bhutan.

5. What’s your favorite way to unwind after work or on the weekends?

   1. Writing poems, spending time with my daughter, social service to my community.