Catchpoint values: Great teams build great products

To celebrate Catchpoint’s 10th birthday, we’re publishing a series of blogs about our culture, vision, and experiences.

This post is about our company values and how I’ve seen them in action—whether internally, through the product, or with customers.

Deciding our values

Since I’ve only been on board for a few months, I caught up with Eva (VP of People Operations) about how our values took shape over the last ten years.

In the early days, our co-founders decided upon a few values. Over the years that process evolved to include Eva, and then a committee. Then, the marketing team was included to align the values with our brand. From the start, Mehdi (co-founder and CEO) and Eva wanted the values to be as simple as possible.

Last year, the exec team came together and modeled our current values after Catchpoint employees. Over the last year, our values have been vital in retaining employees, hiring new ones, and consistently delivering a great product.

Performance is the 5th P

Competing on customer experience is the key to success in the digital business era, and performance —speed, availability, and reliability—is a principal differentiator.

Performance monitoring is generally considered a technical term, something that your engineering team is familiar with, the rest of your organization, not so much.

At Catchpoint, we know that’s changing. Marketers and business management teams are becoming increasingly familiar with performance. Why? Because it is an essential truth — it’s what users are experiencing.

What we mean by that is, performance monitoring is the only way you really know what’s going on with your customers AND it’s the only way you can prevent a problem before it happens.

Price, Product, Placement, and Promotion—most are familiar with the 4 Ps of marketing. But, what most don’t know is that Performance, web performance to be exact, is emerging as the 5th P. And, in our customer-centric economy, it’s the most significant P.

Seeking truth

Every challenge has a single source of truth. Finding it is our passion.

At Catchpoint, challenges represent opportunities. And at the root of all challenges, there’s a single source of truth.

Sure, we help our users seek out true user experience through real user monitoring (RUM). But, there’s more to this “truth” thing than monitoring data.

Without truth, there is no opportunity. If you can’t get to the true source of your problem, then you can’t fix it. A problem without a source is forever a source of pain.

Taylor, a designer here at Catchpoint, told me this morning about her design process. She works backward until she’s got the best user flow. Then, she builds from there.

She narrows her work down so she can eliminate any problems that might get buried in the depths of her design. She removes potential sources of pain before they can become problems.

Details matter

Solving data challenges requires “little” data – the more granular and immediate, the better.

You get a splinter, you break out the tweezers, do you only want to tweeze one half out? Painful as it may be—if you’re going to seek out the truth, you don’t just seek out half of it. You need the whole, tiny splinter.

When it comes to finding a small kernel of truth in a large stack of data, you need the nitty-gritty. We keep three years of customer data; we support both RUM and synthetic monitoring. We believe in monitoring each piece of infrastructure–whether you control it, or a third party does. Whether in the cloud or a data center, we don’t want any detail undetected.

Details matter internally too. For example, Drit (co-founder and CPO) sits with me when we work on certain blog pieces. We go over each paragraph, making sure that our points are clear and that we’re covering the information that matters most to our audience.

Innovators at heart

We love building solutions that harness data into power.

Businesses are more customer-centric than ever. And it’s no surprise as when you improve customer experience you improve profit.

So, we’re on a mission to help our customers deliver excellent experiences to their users. And, we know that the foundation of good experience is good data. We don’t make blind decisions, and we don’t want our customers to make blind decisions either.

This value isn’t merely part of the way we think about our product. It’s part of everything we do. For example, our Product Marketing team just got a new tool for digging into content marketing data. We want to know what our readers want to read. We want empirical evidence to drive our decisions.

Partnership first

We succeed by listening to our customers’ challenges and working together to find solutions.

The nature of our product is one of partnership – our purpose is to help our customers improve digital experiences for their customers. So, we’re on a joint mission to provide our customers’ customers with a flawless experience.

At work, we collaborate on most projects—big and small. Product launches aren’t the only time that our team is highly collaborative.

Our blog is a great example of our collaborative culture. Anyone at Catchpoint on our team can write a blog post (we actually encourage blog writing with Amazon gift cards). A blog post might require the efforts of an engineer, an editor, a marketing campaign manager, a product manager, and an executive, all working together.

Personal humility

We unabashedly favor humility over egoism while respecting the individual talents of our people and fostering their success.

Our customers are always right. We own up to our mistakes. But, humility doesn’t stop with our customer interactions. We’re humble in the workplace.

Catchpoint seeks out humble people, from the very start. During my second round of interviews, Mehdi, co-founder and CEO, asked me “what kind of work is beneath you?” I told him about my first job. I worked as a personal assistant, running for Starbucks and cleaning up after a Yorkipoo.

During my first week at Catchpoint, I was pleasantly surprised by our office manager’s email, “Kitchen Duty Schedule.” Each Catchpointer takes a turn on kitchen duty. We clean each other’s dirty dishes and wipe away crumbs from each other’s everything bagels.

Final thoughts

My days here are few, I’m actually just hitting my 90-day mark. But, 90 days is more than enough time for me to recognize how true Catchpointers are to these values. Over ten years, these values have helped build a great team that builds a great product.