About Me

Andy Woods

I helped scale CockroachDB from pre-revenue to $100M+ ARR and category leadership. As Director of Product for Application and Database Ecosystem, I lead cross-functional teams of 50+ people driving our evolution into the AI-powered application ecosystem. My teams are building AI-powered customer support and automated database migrations, while I've personally built intelligent tools for product management and product marketing operations. I oversee product strategy, engineering execution, and go-to-market initiatives across our developer platform and ecosystem.

I built a production AI system leveraging multiple models (i.e., Opus 4.1, Sonnet 4.5, GPT-4) and Claude Code that analyzes 5,000+ monthly signals for product intelligence. I lead the company's first AI product initiative, evaluating partnerships with model providers and AI infrastructure companies to deliver a roadmap for LLM-powered database features. My mission: making complex technology accessible to developers, whether it's distributed systems or generative AI.

Current Role

As Director of Product Management at Cockroach Labs, I own CockroachDB's integration with the broader application ecosystem, including observability, disaster recovery, change data capture (CDC), streaming, and migration workflows across hybrid and cloud environments. I also lead our pricing and packaging strategy, aligning product value with business outcomes through a data-driven, iterative approach to product-market-price fit.

Background

My background combines 10+ years of hands-on product development with a Kellogg MBA (analytics, finance, marketing) and consulting-grade rigor. I specialize in turning ambiguity into scalable, margin-enhancing products that users love and businesses trust.

Subject Matter Expertise

  • Enterprise B2B user journeys across SaaS, open-core, and enterprise licensing models
  • Go-to-Market (GTM): product-led growth (PLG/PLS), sales-assisted motions, and field sales enablement
  • Distributed infrastructure and databases, including CSP integrations (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • AI/ML infrastructure: LLMs, RAG architectures, vector databases, and production deployment

Technical & Strategic Skills

  • People leadership: hiring, coaching, and performance management across functions
  • Product strategy: investment planning, ROI analysis, budgeting, and analytics
  • End-to-end product development: from discovery and design to docs and delivery
  • Analytics & Financial Modeling: SQL/Looker fluency, revenue forecasting, NRR/NDR, gross margin optimization, LTV:CAC, Rule of 40
  • Pricing & monetization: strategy informed by data science, customer research, and business modeling
  • Technical: Python, SQL, LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Vertex AI), RAG, Vector Databases, Prompt Engineering

Let's Connect

Always up to explore the intersection of AI and infrastructure, or debate the perfect burger. Reach out on X or LinkedIn.

About This Site

This website was built using Claude Code and Astro. The entire development process—from architecture decisions to implementation—was completed in under 4 hours using AI-native development practices.

Blog post hero images are AI-generated using Stable Diffusion to create custom artwork that complements each article's theme.