Gartner is a globally recognized technology research and advisory firm that is trusted by executives and technology leaders inside the vast majority of the world’s biggest enterprise companies.
01
The Challenge
Gartner wanted to augment its customer experience and method of delivery beyond PDFs and analyst calls, to include a true self-serve SaaS platform.
Gartner CEO Eugene Hall wanted Gartner to become a technology-led product and services organization, and for this new BuySmart platform to become the objective source of truth for customers’ technology decisions.
The business objective for BuySmart was to significantly increase customer retention with Gartner by offering the platform free of charge alongside existing offerings. They believed that making Gartner insights more accessible via BuySmart would make their other, premium services stickier and more valuable.
The challenge was that while Gartner has tremendous technology expertise – they had never actually built a SaaS product before.
02
The Solution
Gartner had identified that they had a wealth of IP sitting in PDFs, spreadsheets, and the minds of analysts but they needed help converting that IP iontoa product.
Artium provided a product manager and four full-stack software developers, who lead both new Gartner employees and existing IT staff through the initial development of the BuySmart platform.
Over the course of a six-month engagement, the Artium team leveraged an iterative “build, measure, learn” approach to prioritize the feature roadmap, consult on key design and architecture decisions, and deliver high-quality working software week over week to realize the product vision.
We also shared many of our best practices with Gartner’s team, including pair programming, test-driven development and lean product development. This learning and enablement took place not only through building software together shoulder-to-shoulder, but also via interactive workshops led by Artium and provided at no additional cost.
03
The Outcome
Gartner was able to release the BuySmart MVP to Beta customers and subsequently launch it to all of Gartner’s customers. It is currently used by tens of thousands of individuals at thousands of unique customers.
Buysmart gives Gartner’s customers access to valuable Gartner insights to help them make better and faster technology purchasing decisions.
Those customers who have adopted it have been found to have a 13% higher retention rate with Gartner in general, which was the key success metric for the product.
“BuySmart is the fastest growing product in Gartner’s history and we have 10,000 users in the first 6 months after launching!
“Working together has also made a truly material difference to the capabilities of our internal team and the ability to innovate and build software.”
– Group Vice President of Product, Scott Albro