DevRev is built with an ambition of being the product where an organization can run all of its front-office (sales, marketing, support) and back-office (product development, HR) functions. However, it is not a mere amalgamation of products. It is built with the intelligence and intention to bring convergence across these business functions breaking down silos such that everyone talks the same language - language of the customer and language of the product.
While we are creating a new category of OneCRM at DevRev, we are also replacing legacy tools in individual categories that make up the experience - for example - Zendesk (Support), JIRA (Product Development), Hubspot (Sales and Marketing). From an engineering perspective, this implies that we cannot escape building feature parity for a broad spectrum of personas. Most of these are feature rich tools built over decades.
Enterprises require software which is highly customizable. End consumers require software to be delightful and experience driven - the bar is set very high for the B2C products we use on a daily basis. Scaling demands for the product to be low-touch and hence self served. Finally, we have the responsibility to innovate on behalf of our customers such that they continue to derive value from the product.
But how does one build and grow such diversified products? The key lies in the basics - the ability to abstract, modularise and leverage. Drawing parallels from C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel note in https://hbr.org/1990/05/the-core-competence-of-the-corporation which talks about organization building but is synonymous with product building in many ways.
In the long run, competitiveness derives from an ability to build, at lower cost and more speedily than competitors, the core competencies that spawn unanticipated products.
The diversified corporation is a large tree. The trunk and major limbs are core products; the smaller branches are business units; the leaves, flowers, and fruit are end products. The root system that provides nourishment, sustenance, and stability is the core competence. You can miss the strength of competitors by looking only at their end products, in the same way you miss the strength of a tree if you look only at its leaves.
Core competencies are the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies.
This article aims to present a mind-map of the core competencies of DevRev which power our core products, which then spawn into multiple end products. This will help you visualize DevRev as not just the present set of end products (the extreme right) but the art of possible with permutations and combinations of what we continue to build as our core competencies(the deep network on the left).
Core competencies
Data and Analytics
- Low latency operations on the system of record.
- Customizable object model with dynamic APIs and UI that allow modifying the stock object model as per organizational requirements.
- Customizable security model with self served granular access control.
- Customizable compute (workflows) to wrangle data and build organization specific automations at an arm's length.
- The change data capture a “river” that effortlessly builds a multi-tenant data lake.
- An analytics/visualization engine (single user) that runs on the user’s browser (utilizes the edge).
- 1-click migration from legacy systems.
Design
- Principles from a common design system provide consistent experience and reusable components across products.
- Delight with social: threading, emojis, mentions, lobby.
- Multiple surfaces to help clients consume data where they are: apps vs. APIs, chatbots vs. portals, desktop vs. mobile.
- App switcher, dynamic left-nav’s and personalized snap-in that help us deliver persona based experiences that sew several features together into complete, optimal and delightful user stories.
- 1-click workflows.
AI
- Generative fill of forms: auto-complete, real-time keyboard-speed suggestions, multi-select recommendations.
- Auto summarization and auto generation from the data being captured in the app - product requirement docs, release notes, executive business reports, account summaries, post incident analysis docs, retrospectives.
- Syntactic and semantic search on top of structures, unstructured data like docs, conversations.
- Highly economized multi-tenant vector DB.
- Spacebar - scoping AI to the context of the current view.
Core products
👉 Support
DevRev re-imagines customer support in the post-GPT era where support is not just a reactive first line of response to customer queries. It is the knowledge hub to capture customer’s desires, pain points - thus acting as a main input stream to product development.
👉 Build
Build aims to bring the customer’s voice to software development. It is a customer-first approach to issue tracking, sprints and product enhancements.
👉 Grow
Coming soon !
Grow aims to power the fly-wheel of revenue and product growth. It does so by proactive account tracking, opportunity tracking, SLG and PLG engagement tracking as well as product usage analytics to generate a 360 view of the product and customer.
Core object models
This article captures the core data models of DevRev.
One can only wonder what the future holds but as the tree (DevRev) grows bigger we will add more branches (businesses) and many more leaves (products) but it is the root (core competencies) that will give the tree its strength and stability for its lifetime.
