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In a ‘Work Anywhere’ world, businesses today are looking at outcomes. Managing remote working teams has been relatively easy after getting onto Fitbots
Key Metrics
Customer Issues Resolution with 85% less turnaround time by bi-directionally aligned teams
Increase in Top of the Funnel (TOFU) leads impacting revenue goals directly
2X increase in speed of release of test cases for improved security.
Company Overview
HQ: Singapore
Funding stage: Bootstrapped
Industry: SaaS
Appknox is an enterprise mobile application security solution built to secure businesses, their data, and customers.
The story begins in Bangalore India, where two friends get together with a mammoth mission to secure applications that the world uses. Harshit, who is the CEO, had two prior experiences in building start-ups and co-founded AppKnox in 2014. Subho Halder, Appknox CTO, was fascinated by finding security issues in mobile applications since his early years as a teen. This fascination has now turned into an obsession and a full-time job that keeps Subho busy each day.
Today, Appknox (Headquartered in Singapore) has put the founders and the growing team on a path to securing organizations around the world one mobile app at a time.
Appknox supports Value SaaS, the team aims to create highly valuable outcomes for all stakeholders - customers, employees, investors, and also themselves to ensure they are always in control of the business while being laser-focused on their mission and vision.
The Challenge
"We have been very open with our teams since day one and that’s worked in our favor during the tough times. Even from a technical front, we raised funds. But overall not having clarity on what we wanted to achieve in the long term, say 6 months or a year, we were getting diverted very often. This led to challenges - we were not growing at a pace as we should be, overall the team was working but it was not adding up,” says Harshit, CEO & Co-founder of AppKnox.
Initially, they started having QBRs, Monthly stand-ups, all-hands teams meetings, and then reviews of tasks and activities. Though everyone knew what they were working on, yet teams were not able to understand a clear picture of how they are contributing to the organization's goals.
That’s when the leadership realized that there was something missing, in fact, they all had to get aligned themselves.
The Solution
Appknox implemented the Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) framework to break silos, and align teams cross-functionally and vertically towards common goals. With Fitbots OKRs Software & Coaching, the OKRs journey became easier for Appknox for driving goals to outcomes.
“Managing OKRs has never been easier - you can easily track, record & visualize progress using Fitbots platform. Fitbots brings in the expertise with the software and the OKR Coaching sessions by their expert coaches that bring a clear picture of how and what you are about to execute.”
– Subho Halder, Chief Technology Officer, AppKnox
As the team was growing, everyone including new team members had clarity on ownership - what needs to be done, and how valuable their contribution is to the organization. This brought in a boost in confidence and a positive shift in attitude - A shift from ‘Me to We’.
"We started seeing more involvement from teams. They started coming up with ideas on organization goals and suggesting what we should focus on or not. Earlier teams used to contribute but what was missing was everyone owning and driving organization goals. But OKRs made us rethink how to get things done faster and better, and instead of me and Subho taking calls, the team knows what needs to be done” recalls Harshit with pride.
An illustrative Example of Alignment Board on Fitbots
The Results
With OKRs, there was a shift in focus on outcomes and metrics-driven discussions, through shared KRs between sales and marketing. Earlier the weekly calls between the sales and marketing team were more of a discussion on what was happening, and what was going on.
Now, the marketing team knows exactly what help the sales team needs and vice-versa. This also has helped teams in visualizing progress & impacting Organization revenue goals with greater clarity.
For a customer-centric organization like Appknox, it was a top priority to resolve customer issues at the earliest. Leveraging the benefit of OKRs, both the Customer Support team and the technical team picked up the priority as a bi-directional KR and set up a complete process to drive metrics around it.
They set up internal processes to classify Technical Requests (TRs) / Customer Requests (CRs) and set up SLAs as per high / med / low requests. The Technical team picked up the TRs from JIRA and solved it within SLA; the Customer Support managed CRs in the same way.
One of the direct customers of Appknox is Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) whose goal is to have 100% secure applications. In order to help CISOs succeed, the teams needed to create robust test cases from time to time and implement them to have automated assessments. Due to time/resource constraints, the creation and roll-out of test cases always took a back seat. None of the teams took ownership to drive the same.
Through OKRs, the Security team and product team took the customer-value metrics to improve product security. The Security team wrote and added test cases while the Product team implemented those test cases.
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