Last month, fellow Forbes contributor Peter Cohan remarked on application intelligence vendor AppDynamics and their incredible run up to going public, probably later this year. He reported that “on February 17, AppDynamics reported that its bookings for the year ending January 2015 doubled to $150 million — adding 600 customers. The company also increased its employee base during the year from 365 to 600 people today,” according to AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal.
Cohan also quoted Bansal’s comment on their Net Promoter score, a measure of how likely customers will recommend them: “AppDynamics recently increased its Net Promoter Score from 84 to 87 indicating an extraordinarily high likelihood to recommend the company; comparable enterprise software scores sit at 19.”
Such a remarkably favorable opinion on the part of its customers suggests that AppDynamics is doing something right – something that other vendors struggle to match. As AppDynamics is an Intellyx client, I had the opportunity to sit down with Bansal last week and ask him about the secrets to the company’s success.
“We follow a ‘startup within a startup’ model,” Bansal explained. With 600 employees and growing, AppDynamics can’t behave like a scrappy little startup any more – and yet they are still able to leverage many of the practices that give startups greater agility than larger vendors.
Self-organizing teams, in fact, are core to their approach – a best practice I’ve written about before. “We drive innovation with small, fast teams,” Bansal said. “Each team has at most 30-35 people, or smaller for a research and development-focused effort.”
However, the AppDynamics platform is now large and mature enough to be outside the scope of a single team. In fact, so far they have seven such teams working simultaneously – with more in the works.
How, then, do they maintain consistency across the various products? “The user experience is centralized,” Bansal reports. “There is also an underlying platform that handles installs and common data.” In fact, the user experience comes first, part of what Bansal calls “customer-centric engineering.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/03/06/appdynamics-platform-for-growth/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, AppDynamics is an Intellyx customer, but provided no compensation to Intellyx for writing this article. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: AppDynamics.
