5 ways Boomi is becoming product led with Pendo

It’s no secret that product-led strategies—those that put the product at the heart of everything an organization does—are becoming the preferred approach for some of the most successful modern companies. After all, your product is the part of your organization that customers encounter most frequently, and that makes it an ideal engine for driving growth.

Ed Macosky, SVP and head of product at integration platform Boomi, viewed product-led as the right approach for taking the company’s growth to the next level, but his team needed the right tools to make it happen—something that could provide both insight into platform usage at the deepest level and ways to quickly act on that information to help customers succeed.

Enter: Pendo. 

“There were solutions such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Pendo for analytics, and then from the guide perspective, there was WalkMe and some other products like that. Pendo sat, we felt, in the sweet spot of those two objectives that we were interested in accomplishing,” said product manager Brett Henry.

For the Boomi team, the investment went beyond just buying the Pendo product. It was also about knowledge sharing based on Pendo’s own commitment to a product-led culture. “Not only could we learn a lot from using the product, we could learn a lot from developing relationships with Pendo and understanding more about how to be a product-led company,” Henry said.

Here are five ways Boomi has become more product led with Pendo:

A deeper level of insight

From the moment Pendo was installed, Macosky and Henry gained an entirely new level of insight into their product. “We got it implemented really quickly, and instantly we had access to user behavioral data,” Macosky said.

Pendo’s capacity to act on those insights by using them to power targeted in-app guides all within a single platform made it stand out from other solutions the team evaluated; here was an opportunity to implement end-to-end product led strategies.

One of the first big surprises came when Pendo revealed that the most active users on the platform were not the customers that they had been historically sourcing feedback from. “We were paying attention to a whole bunch of folks that may not be successful, or were just the loud ones,” he said. “Pendo showed us that there are a whole set of successful users that don’t talk to us, so we started focusing on them to find out why they were successful.”

The team was then able to use that information to develop product-led tactics to drive users’ success, and prioritize engagement with those avid users to better inform product planning. 

“Pendo gave us a whole bunch of data that we just didn’t know existed, and that has allowed us to quickly make decisions on what features we want to focus on and how we want to drive our product in a more product-led direction,” Macosky said.  “Through the data, I’ve been able to get closer to the customer.”

Optimizing the onboarding experience

Using Pendo data, the Boomi team has been able to develop strategies for ensuring users are successful and find value in the platform from day one, whether they’re paid users or under a trial.

The team’s first project was to create an in-app onboarding process that removed as much friction as possible for those getting started on the platform. The idea was that a customer could install the software, log in, and hit the ground running in an entirely self-serve fashion, delivered exclusively inside the platform.

“We have a product that’s easy to use, but we solve very complex things. It’s always been a challenge for us to onboard people very quickly,” Macosky said.

They’re using Pendo guides to automate and scale the process, building multi-step walkthroughs that take new users through the basics all the way up through building their first integration.

Pendo’s analytics and the ease of building guides have also allowed the team to quickly A/B test different iterations of the onboarding process and see which guides work, without succumbing to lengthy dev cycles or needing any support from engineering.

“It allows us to fail fast,” Macosky said. “If we test a guide, it may not work and we pivot to something else. With Pendo, we just have so much more agility.” Henry added: “If we wanted to try and create some of these things through a typical engineering pipeline and then be able to A/B test, that would have to go on a roadmap and we’d be getting to that maybe, if we’re lucky, next year.”

Driving trial conversions

Pendo’s insight into how Boomi’s platform is being used has also helped reduce the time a typical sales cycle takes for free trial users. 

Prior to Pendo, Henry said, getting any insight into the trial experience to identify the places ripe for optimization required leaning on engineering resources, could take months, and often didn’t provide the level of detail necessary.

Now, the team uses Pendo data to get a deeper look into free trial usage of the AtomSphere platform to figure out where users are getting stuck or running into friction. Then, they use guides to offer proactive support and automatically connect users with customer success representatives who can help them go further.

The result? Time-to-sale is down from three months to just one month—a 66% reduction.

Improving feature adoption

Pendo is helping the team monitor — in real time — whether newly released features are succeeding or failing. Before Pendo, the only way to do that was to have conversations with the customer success team and hear what users had been telling them.

“Now, within a day of releasing a feature, we can see if customers have started interacting with it,” Henry said. “It’s allowed us to become better about understanding and answering questions like, ‘Are people adopting it? Why not? Is there a gap in the feature? How do we drive adoption? Do they just not know how it works?’”

Leveraging Pendo’s API

Recently, the team has started to explore using Pendo’s API to integrate usage data with other systems and create triggered events. “If someone doesn’t log in for a while or someone takes three specific actions in the app, we can send them an email. Or, we could have a Slack notification to notify our teams that a user just moved from step one to step two,” Henry said. 

In short, Boomi is letting their product take the lead in identifying when a user needs a little nudge or raising flags when they need deeper support. 

That’s being truly product-led.