I’ve always been a big fan of Simon Sinek and his concept of the “Golden Circle.” For those of you who don’t know, the Golden Circle refers to three concentric circles labeled “Why,” “How,” and “What,” appearing in that order from the inside out. Although it’s counterintuitive in some ways, Sinek argues that the best leaders build their organizations from the inside out—they start by first answering the question of “why.” Why does my organization exist? Why should anyone care?
So, in order to properly explain what Pendo is (which I’ll do in the rest of this post), I want to start with the why.
Improving the world’s experiences with software
As a user, I always got frustrated if I found myself stuck while using a software product—maybe the page is slow to load, or the button isn’t where I expected it to be, or it’s missing a feature that I thought it had. These small moments can have a big impact on the user experience, and as a product person, I want to avoid my users feeling this type of frustration at all costs.
But in order to know how to improve users’ experience with a product, you first need to understand how they’re using it, what they want from it, and which usage patterns lead to success. Not to mention be able to communicate this to them in a way that resonates and empowers customers to use the product to its fullest extent.
This is why Pendo exists. Our goal is to give product teams (large and small, legacy and new) a platform to help them understand how their product is being used, so they can focus on continuously making it better.
Now, let’s move on to the more pressing question: what is Pendo?
Pendo means value
As far as our name goes, Pendo is the latin word for “value.” The goal of any great product is to provide value—people don’t typically spend their time (or money) on things that don’t give them any value. In addition to it being short and easy to spell, we chose the name Pendo because it reminds us of what’s ultimately most important: to provide value to our customers, so that they can provide value to theirs.
The meaning beyond the name
When our friends and family ask, we’d describe Pendo as a software platform that helps product teams and application owners improve users’ experience with their software (whether those users are customers or their fellow employees). Because today, virtually every company is a software company—banks, retailers, and other brick and mortar businesses that have been around for decades are shifting customer interactions to digital spaces, putting the product experience at the center of the business. Not to mention when companies implement new digital tools, HR, IT, information security, and change management leaders need to ensure successful digital adoption of the software.
At Pendo, we want to arm these product-led organizations with the tools they need to understand what their customers and/or employees are doing in (and how they feel about) the product, guide users to success with in-app messages, and collect feedback in order to drive continuous improvement and efficiency. All with no coding required.
Let’s break down each part of that description in more detail:
Powerful insights
Put simply, Pendo helps organizations understand whether the products and features they’re building are being used and if so, by whom. With our product analytics capabilities, you can determine which features users embrace and ignore and how they navigate across your product portfolio. You can also see how product adoption varies based on account, user role, or user sentiment. Our goal is to provide product teams with the information they need to do their jobs better and make day-to-day decisions easier.
The ability to take action
Something that has always made Pendo different is our insistence that product analytics and in-app messaging belong together in one tool. Product analytics are interesting and powerful, but in-app messages give our customers a way to quickly and easily put these insights into action. In the end, this ability to experiment and drive behavior change within your product is truly what can improve your business and create better outcomes for your customers.
Opening and closing the feedback loop
Customer feedback spurs innovation, helps teams identify and understand friction, and provides visibility into where additional opportunity may lie. Collecting feedback at scale, though, can be incredibly challenging and time consuming. Pendo makes it easier to capture and prioritize customer feature requests, so that customers remain at the center of your planning process. We also think it’s important to ensure customers know their feedback was heard, so we’ve built in ways to keep users in the loop about which requests are completed, in-progress, or planned.
Taking the burden off of engineering
In building our analytics, guidance, and feedback capabilities, one requirement has always remained central: reducing the reliance on engineering. Engineers’ time is incredibly important—they build the products that keep our users coming back. Too often in the past, we’ve had to make difficult trade-offs between building features for customers and building internal capabilities.
By eliminating the need for coding analytics, in-app messages, and feedback collection, we save folks from those tough decisions. Use your developers to build features for your users; use Pendo to help increase engagement with those features. We also prioritized created a freemium product, allowing teams to leverage Pendo’s powerful codeless product analytics, behavioral analysis, and in-app guidance features at no cost, and with no commitment or time limits.