Alex Shootman, CEO of Workfront, is versatile on many fronts. He has traveled more of the world than his tech peers. He has a family with adopted kids which deserves to be profiled in a movie. He is very good with financial numbers. But, to me, most impressively he knows the application landscape at many (most?) of his 3,000+ customers.
Workfront positions itself as the "operational book of record" for work. While many tools like Jira aim to provide visibility and productivity across IT programs and projects, Workfront aims much more broadly across the enterprise.
Alex proudly shows slides of customer application landscapes to investors and anyone else interested. He told me one of his challenges is to keep scaling that customer intimacy culture. For now, the customer-centric gene runs through the organization. As he described in his book Done Right, one of his "laws of leadership” is "What the leader is interested in, people will be fascinated by".
His customers, in turn, say how much they like working with Workfront. Sue Fellows, Chief Customer Officer, interviewed a few of them during the Analyst Day this week that I was invited to. They had stayed on after their Customer Advisory Meeting earlier in the week and joined us for dinner and most of the day. (Next year, I have requested that they consider allowing a few analysts to observe and participate in the entire Advisory meeting.)
Brent Rudewick described how he started in Marketing Operations at Charles Schwab and since has had Risk Management added to his title, and how his group has steadily grown. His Workfront experience has attracted attention of his Investor Relations, Vendor Management and Training groups. Paul Tasker at Sage Software described the role of Workfront as they re-architected and launched a new web site across 25 countries. It involved global, regional and local coordination between Sage teams and those of external agencies. Think of the coordination and quality assurance challenge. Angela Lapovsky of Lincoln Financial described how they go to market with their annuities, life insurance and other products almost entirely through channels like brokers. Workfront helps with that extended ecosystem and complying with the regulatory issues they are subject to. Since all these executives had marketing roles, I asked if that is Workfront's sweet spot. Alex told me if I had been in the Advisory meeting I would have met many more from other disciplines. When I was first introduced to Workfront they told me they had a "Land and Expand" strategy. Most vendors say that, but I have seen that now in many Workfront customers - they start in a pilot area and in a few years have been adopted widely.
I had previously seen Steve ZoBell, the CTO present a case study on new product development. It wove together several creative groups in medical product design and product engineering . In the past, an idea for a bionic knee may have been noted but stayed invisible in the CRM system. Each product area would begin design anew. Workfront has changed that.
These buying centers - Marketing Operations, New Product Development, and various corporate shared services - all are increasingly digitized and tend to have a complex web of projects, and most have a high degree of quality and compliance activities to worry about. These buying centers also don't get much love from large technology vendors.
It's not coincidental that we are also seeing growing interest in categories like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and investments like Salesforce has made in Mulesoft. There are plenty of inefficiencies in enterprise technology "junctions".
Digital tools like email, instant messages and social media tend to distract workers even more in these hubs. In their annual State of Work survey, Workfront reports "Over the six years we have published the State of Work report, we’ve consistently found knowledge workers on average spend just 40% of their work week on the job they were hired to do." Get your own copy - it's well done.
As Alex says in our digital world "seamwork" is even more important than "teamwork". We heard the term "citizen integration' early and often during the day. They are facilitated by over 150 pre-built integrations Workfront delivers.
For now, Workfront has its hands full in white collar work centers to worry about shop floors, emergency rooms and other operational work areas. Plenty of productivity to deliver in white collar work.
I changed planes at Delta’s Atlanta hub 3 times this week (I love that place, not!). The crowds and the weather and other delays at such hubs are a good metaphor for similar work concentration and inefficiencies at the intersections of enterprise applications. Providing visibility and productivity at these hubs is what Workfront excels at.
