Customer Orientation Leads the Way for Client Success

I’ve been working at PolicyStat for about three weeks now. When you start at a new place, you always compare it with places you’ve worked before or how you envisioned it would be – differences in operations, company culture, etc. At first when I started here I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly made it stand out, but after the first couple of weeks it hit me: our business revolves around our clients’ success. Period.

This kind of customer orientation is what shaped our product from the beginning. In the early stages of PolicyStat, the development team had to decide between two different ways of delivering improvements to the policy management software: they could release changes in huge, slow “batches,” or they could use smaller batches more frequently. With large batches, it’s difficult to get feedback from clients, so there’s a lot of guesswork involved. With small batches though, constant feedback from clients is the norm and it’s easier to keep the entire business focused where it should be – making clients happy. We discuss challenges and improvements as they happen, meaning each person’s feedback – whether they are a client or PolicyStat team member – is a valuable part of improving efficiency and quality.

One of the biggest things you notice about this way of working is that we are not focused on developing features just for the fun of it – we are constantly interacting with clients in order to align our priorities with theirs. Using a multidisciplinary approach called Devops , we accomplish this customer orientation when our development and operations teams collaborate and base any and all actions on client needs and feedback. This ensures that the changes we make start with the feature our users want the most. If 20 of our clients say their main concern is for a giant T-Rex to greet them when they log in, that’s what they will get.

PolicyStat is a company built around collaboration all around. So thanks, clients (present and future), for helping to make our product what it is today.

For a geekier explanation of how PolicyStat operates, Wes just posted to our development blog about the advantages of using DevOps at a startup.