Chief Product Officer shares his experience working with us
Hi everyone. My name is Rich Gallagher. I’m the Chief Product Officer at Energage. Energage is a B corporation. In other words, we’re a purpose-driven company, helping organizations turn employee feedback into impactful business intelligence, as well as authentic employer recognition through our top workplaces programs.
There were two real pressing needs for us as we were about to embark upon taking our product portfolio and pivoting a series of applications into an integrated platform experience supported by just the broad spectrum of SaaS, selling and other business processes. And so we had a need one, to be able to start to converge or consolidate some of our critical legacy applications into what would be considered a state of the art front end engineered experience. And secondly, we had to dramatically improve our overall approach to quality assurance and institutionalize that across our broad portfolio of engineering teams and technologies.
In part, it was stabilizing our cloud first approach, right? So we really needed to be committed to achieving that a hundred percent because that would be the only way for us to truly support the operating scale demanded by our SaaS based model. In addition to that, it was about embracing a comprehensive approach to DevOps. We really needed to make sure that we were executing against best practices, both technologies and techniques, and to ensure that we could support our customers through their complex 24 by seven lifecycle support.
Apexon provided a number of engagement services for us. One, they took direct command of assessing basically, and then moving us forward in terms of our whole practice for quality assurance. They established the quality assurance practice that exists today at the company. And then we’ve continued to sustain that as they initially set it up. In addition to that, we’ve significantly upgraded our Azure based Dev Operations around all of our platform delivery to ensure that our continuous integration and deployment is, again, adhering not just the best practices, but is leveraging on the advances that we had made in quality assurance.
In addition to that, Energage also had benefited by Apexon’s expertise in mobility solutions. And so they helped us understand or assess the strategic opportunities for us related to mobility applications and other responsive design of our overall platform experience. And that really was possible because of their diverse experience across a number of industries, a number of different technology spheres. We were able to draw on those for those relevant areas for our business.
A combination of things. One, Apexon just continues for us to be that right size, right style, and right level of sophistication for us. They while deeply experienced, are not too big to be considered to be inflexible. So they’re incredibly adaptive to our interests and our needs. So most of the conversations start with a sincere interest in the problems that we’re trying to solve as opposed to the solutions or the approaches that Apexon is trying to sell. And that for me is beyond refreshing, has been the most efficient or effective way of connecting us on real work to do that has real impact to our business.
Adaptable. And primarily because many times, we start solving a problem one way and then we end up understanding that together we have to change our approach, right? And so we could be perhaps set on a particular strategy that we feel is relevant, all of a sudden find out that market conditions have changed and all of a sudden we have to make a complete U-turn or a 90 degree turn. And now all of a sudden, we’re applying a different set of solutions, a different set of capabilities in order to do that. And again, so many companies in this space, and service providers in this space, are just not set up to be that flexible in both time and application of services to be able to just respond to our needs. And so every plan has its complexities and we’ve just been fortunate in our work with Apexon to be able to not just move quickly onto new opportunities, but adjust along the way as those opportunities perhaps change shape, size, or even priority.
