Bright skies and fall breezes welcomed over 2,000 people to Pendomonium 2024—our biggest product festival yet! With attendees hailing from as far as Japan and New Zealand, there was an incredible amount of energy and excitement surrounding this year’s festival.
Many took advantage of our hands-on training workshops, impromptu meetups, and the opportunity to wear copious amounts of pink.
Todd Olson, Pendo CEO & Co-founder, opened the event with some exciting updates for attendees:
- 13,000 companies across 161 countries use Pendo
- 50,000 active users log into Pendo One every month, giving us 20+ billion events per day
- 807 Pendo advocates attended Pendomonium 2024
- 52 ProductTank organizers and user group leaders are in attendance—a first for Pendomonium!
The magic of product intersections
The Pendo keynote emphasized a powerful component of the Pendo One platform: magical intersections. What do we mean by “magical intersections?” It’s the power of integrated product tools—from product analytics and customer feedback to session replays and in-app guides.
Our goal is to help customers unlock more value through those magical intersections. From AI to personalization and even the mighty Cronut (perhaps the most delicious culinary intersection 🍩), intersections are where the magic happens.
AI in 2024: From code to avocados
AI is everywhere. Even Chipotle has joined the AI bandwagon by using robots and AI to cut up avocados and build burrito bowls. Olson’s keynote referenced speedy guac as just one more example of how we’re seeing AI and automation proliferate in our daily lives.
“We’ve seen AI dominate parts of the global economy,” he said. Pendo is no different. With a third of Pendo’s customers using our AI capabilities, our goal is to help the other two-thirds leverage these tools and create more powerful results.
With Pendo’s acquisition of Zelta, we’re bringing even more AI-powered tools focused on personalization, product discovery, and product-led outcomes to Pendo One.
One way we’re doing this? With Zelta, Pendo Listen can sort and analyze qualitative feedback from 150 new data sources—like Gong calls and customer review sites—to get a 360-degree view of customer sentiment.
Zelta CEO Pierce Healy joined Olson on the stage to talk about Pendo Listen’s new AI-powered capabilities. Soon, customers can automate win-loss analysis from sales calls and run customer persona generation from feedback data.
“AI is a choose-your-own-adventure. I have no doubt that we’ll be highlighting all the innovative use cases you’ll find at Pendomonium 2025,” Healy said on stage.
The product community is our North Star
We also announced the acquisition of the Product Collective community, so Pendo can reach and connect with more product people around the world. The Product Collective is a group of software product managers 50,000+ strong. This emphasizes Pendo’s commitment to bolstering the product community and advancing the field of product management.
“Real change is all about changing human behavior. It’s why we invest so heavily in community,” Olson said.
New and notable: Pendo Orchestrate, Insights, and beyond
Pendo Chief Product Officer Trisha Price joined Olson on stage to talk about the evolution of product management, how Pendo supports product teams, and the exciting launches happening today, including:
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- Pendo Orchestrate blends in-app guides, email, and AI-powered product data to help personalize and automate messaging journeys both inside and out of an app. Read about Orchestrate.
- AI-powered Insights takes the grunt work out of analysis, spots trends, and uncovers patterns to improve retention and your bottom line. Read about Insights.
- Pendo Listen is evolving. Integrations with third-party tools like Gong and Zendesk, enhancements to our AI-driven triage, and an out-of-this-world conversational interface are coming soon.
- Identity mapping within Pendo Analytics gives teams visibility into customer journeys by connecting unknown website users to authenticated, logged-in users.
- Embedded content allows you to customize the product experience for different user segments in minutes with no-code personalization.
At Pendo, we are pointedly and passionately focused on our customers. It’s what drives our innovation and decision making to evolve the Pendo platform into a tool that helps create more magical intersections.
Midday meetups and afternoon knowledge drops
With five food trucks to choose from and Boba tea galore, we made sure our attendees were well-fed and happily hydrated. During the break, many attendees took the opportunity to meet others in the product community by joining ProductTank meetups and speed networking.
We had ProductTank groups from New York and Atlanta gather during lunch. Attendees also joined a book signing with Radhika Dutt, author of Radical Product Thinking. After lunch, the crowds dispersed for the 20 sessions happening across five stages indoors and outside. While we can’t pick favorites, here are a couple highlights of the afternoon:
Describe your product with data
Kyle Strickland, Senior VP of Product at NBC Universal, discussed how the companyl uses data to build a better technology ecosystem with Pendo. He talked about the importance of encouraging teams to use data, start small, and stay specific. Also, why tracking that data early is critical, saying, “Most user journeys start with search.”
Free up internal resources to enhance the customer experience
Lending some advice for new Pendo users, Andrew Harrison and Gunnar Mlsna from United Airlines walk the crowd through how they leveraged data and in-app guidance to drive their workforce forward. Their three key takeaways were:
- Lead with analytics
- Empower your employees digitally
- Done is better than perfect
They also announced a partnership between United Airlines and Starlink so United can offer free wifi on all flights. (Keep that in mind next time you’re booking a trip!)
Driving digital transformation in new ways with generative AI
Miku Jha, Director of Partner Engineering at Google, gave a session around accelerating generative AI adoption: From PoC to production at scale. She tested the audience’s generative AI knowledge with in-depth details around the rapid-fire changes happening in generative AI. With Google Gemini, she also emphasized the importance of both AI models and agents working together.
Product-level initiatives that support business goals
Kat Noreen, Pendo Senior Value Consultant, sat with three Pendo customers for a discussion about how users can align their Pendo program to positive business impact. Some hot takes from the discussion:
- Caroline Oles from Cox Automotive used Pendo to maintain consistency as a brand and take ownership of governance.
- Thomas Sander from Thomson Reuters used Pendo to create greater product awareness and increase NPS scores by targeting specific personas.
- Gina Frazee from UserTesting used Pendo to target and segment their audience, increasing a key event’s adoption up to 54% from 6%. Go, Gina!
AI from the inside out
Product leader Oji Edezue talked about the importance of building products with AI at the core. “It’s time to think native,” said Udezue, and center learning language models (LLMs) inside applications. He also cautioned against ignoring original KPIs. AI is a new tool, so it’s important to remember that your original KPIs were there for a reason.
Embracing the AI revolution
In the closing keynote for the day, Ethan Mollick, Associate Professor at The Wharton School and author of Co-Intelligence discussed how to embrace the AI revolution. He shared some AI tests with the audience, and pointed out, “the real way to use AI is to work with it. Use it like you would an expert and split up the work.”
Mollick ended with four guiding thoughts for how we use and integrate our systems with AI now and moving forward:
- Invite AI to everything
- Be the human in the loop
- Tell it who it is and treat it like a person
- This is the worst AI you will see because the system is always changing. We have at least another four years of rapid change.
Data, personalization, and finding your North Star
Pendomonium day 1 covered A LOT. The three biggest things that will stay with us are:
- Data matters. Pendo keeps your data safe and secure, and teams can (and should) be responsible for and accountable to data. Remember to build data champions outside of your product team.
- Personalization is the only way forward. Users expect it and AI can help you deliver.
- Users should be your North Star. Remember that the user experience begins early. What we make must ultimately serve a true purpose.
Today is another full day of Pendomonium, with more keynotes, more breakout sessions, and, of course, Pendopalooza featuring RevRun. 🥳
Stay tuned for more about Pendomonium 2024!
