MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dev Ittycheria : Right. Thanks, Sanjit. I just want to make the point that it was actually pre-pandemic that we decided to make it much more easy for customers to engage with us by both changing sales compensation incentives as well as making it easier for customers to commercially engage with us. And obviously, that paid, to your point, paid huge dividends for us during the pandemic. What I will tell you is that it’s really more of the same. We’re really hyper focused on acquiring new customers and adding more workloads from existing customers, and that’s across the board, across every channel, every industry and every customer segment. So that is something that we care a lot about. And we’re seeing that now and expand in terms of getting customers now to adopt some of the new capabilities we’ve rolled out to the marketplace.

So as I talked about in my prepared remarks, we’re seeing a lot of customers embrace the full suite of the platform. So that drives incremental workloads that we would not have gotten in the past. And so we feel really good about that, and that’s our real focus. It’s all about acquiring new workloads and getting more and more people to build apps on MongoDB.

Sanjit Singh : And then just one quick follow-up for Michael. You referred to the sort of ROI framework and what sort of alluding to like a higher bar, given the current environment. Could you give us a sense of like what the team is prioritizing more and what may be following kind of below the line or being deprioritized as you think about driving both sustaining growth, but also extracting more efficiencies in the business?

Michael Gordon : Yes. I’ll do my best to try and kind of walk you through it. I mean I think you kind of have to run sort of type of investment versus type of investment. And obviously, ultimately, we look across the entirety of the portfolio, whether it’s go to market or R&D or things like that. But it’s probably easiest to think about within the different buckets and flavors as it relates today as sort of those teams effectively compete for capital. And so within the go-to-market, we obviously are looking at the returns that we’re generating. We are continuing to invest. We are continuing to hire and grow within the teams, but we’re backing the areas that are having the most success and delivering us the highest returns. Go-to-market is a little bit easier to measure quantitatively and on a short-term basis.

On the R&D side, things take a little bit longer to play out. And you’ve got a little bit of a lag between when you make the investment and when you see the payback. But we certainly have conversations at a fairly detailed and granular level, even within the R&D side about where do we think we’re seeing the most success and the most traction in which areas do we want to incrementally lean into versus which areas do you maybe want to deprioritize relative to the areas generating the highest returns.

Dev Ittycheria : Yes. If I can just add, it’s like, for example, like in the marketing side of these digital programs, we were — we do a lot of experimentation of what’s working. So we have a certain return thresholds. And so if we don’t see those programs working, we’ll shut them down. Similarly, in the sales organization, there are certain teams that are outperforming, we’ll invest more. In other teams, they are not and will potentially slow down. So we’re just really doing more of the same and just being very rigorous about that.

Operator: One moment for our next question. And it comes from the line of Phil Winslow with Credit Suisse.

Phil Winslow : Congrats on a great quarter. A question for you Michael and a follow-up for Dev. When you think about just new workloads, new application go-lives and the trends that you’re seeing there, wondering if you can cross that with what you’ve maybe seen in previous quarters, or maybe even last year? Obviously, you talked about just overall consumption, but curious about the new apps, the go-lives and the ramp of those. In terms of what you can control in go-to-market, Dev, how do you feel about sales productivity relative to the sort of these new apps, those go lives, new customer wins, et cetera?

Dev Ittycheria : Yes. I mean I think what we’re really seeing in terms of these new workloads and sales productivity is that our customer base is very diversified both in terms of the types of customers as well as the types of use cases. That’s the benefit of having a general-purpose platform. So clearly, we have start-ups who are building potentially new industries or disrupting existing ones. And then we have large companies moving quickly to transform different parts of their business. So it really varies. So clearly, with the platform play now, we’re seeing a lot more interest in search, in search workloads and consolidating search workloads on top of MongoDB. We’re seeing a lot of interest in time series, being able to again have one unified developer experience.