CASE STUDY
PagerDuty
Positioning the brand for its next stage of growth
Challenge
Since its founding in 2009, PagerDuty had grown from an on-call management tool for developers to a company-wide platform for real-time operations indispensable to teams in DevOps, IT Ops, Security, and Business and Industrial Ops. The company’s user-centric product innovation, 300+ platform integrations and product leadership in on-call management and incident response had earned it a loyal community of core customers. But as it began to approach the capital markets to help fund its next stage of growth, PagerDuty needed to clarify its corporate positioning in order to establish relevance with enterprise buyers, new technology partners and the analyst community to help “future-proof” the brand as the company innovated in event intelligence, visibility and analytics.
Solutions
Prophet developed a range of hypotheses for PagerDuty’s corporate positioning by considering inputs ranging from traditional sources (competitive audits, product deep dives, category expertise) to sources unique to PagerDuty’s culture and ethos (customer celebrations at its annual Summit). The CEO and leadership team were incredibly engaged in the process because they truly believed that the positioning needed to be anchored not just in the value PagerDuty delivers to customers, but also in the shared interest that the company and its customers have to improving the everyday experiences and lives of people on its platform. Prophet worked with the PagerDuty team to craft a positioning recommendation anchored in both customer insight and company values, and to define a category – Digital Operations Management – that PagerDuty could own, shape and win as it achieved its growth over the coming years.
Results
The corporate positioning was activated in Q2 2019 as a key input to PagerDuty’s S-1 filings and analyst communications prior to its April 2019 IPO. The positioning and has acted as a clear, concise and compelling frame of reference in conversations with new Enterprise buyers and with new teams at existing customer accounts. It has helped favorably expand buyers’ perceptions and understanding of PagerDuty’s core, emerging and planned customer-centric innovations.