Good for Utah.
I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.
I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.
Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople.
Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go. Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development.
With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.
They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.