At Allocadia, we have a few core product themes that drive everything we do — and every new product feature we create. In 2015, the product team, led by Katherine Berry, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder, Ryan Marples, CTO and Mike Squance, VP of Engineering, focused on four of those themes: openness, lovability, value for all marketers and enterprise-class.
Openness
Marketers deal with a lot of data, all housed in a variety of disparate systems, from financial to CRM, social and more. It’s important to be able to connect all of that data in order to streamline workflows as well to get a full view of their marketing performance. To help our customers improve efficiencies and visibility into performance, we plug into other related marketing technology systems seamlessly. In 2015, we further developed our data integration capabilities to help marketers fulfill the path to marketing performance.
We’ve also honed in on another big player in the marketing cloud race through a deep partnership with IBM. Through our partnerships with providers like IBM, Oracle, and Workfront we’ve created a best-of-breed marketing cloud. See all of our partners in the Allocadia Cloud Exchange.
Lovability
When you think “budgeting and planning,” the first word that comes to mind probably isn’t “love.” But we’re changing that. We know that most Allocadia users log into Allocadia every day, and we want to make their experience a great one. We’ve added more capabilities to streamline data entry to speed the process as well as add more quality to the process through innovative strategic planning features that help marketers have more strategic conversations.
Read more about how we’re making marketing planning loveable in The Gold Medal Marketing Planning Playbook.
Value for All Marketers
We’ve always set out to serve every marketer, from the field marketer to the marketing coordinator to the CMO. This year, we’ve started serving another group: the external collaborator. Many of our customers wanted to manage their spend in collaboration with partners, agencies and distributors. We’ve added to the capabilities within Allocadia to support those external collaborators, extending the network of marketers we serve — and helping marketers collaborate with every stakeholder in their ecosystem.
Enterprise-Class
Being mobile-friendly is a must in today’s world, and this year we made the transition to being completely mobile-accessible. There are several use cases for mobile, including executives consuming reports on the road to end-users updating forecasts in the field, which drove us to invest further in supporting mobile access.
We’re also continually making improvements in security, scalability and reliability for our existing enterprise customers, especially as we start to serve more and more enterprises in highly regulated industries like financial services.
What’s Coming in 2016
In 2016, the Allocadia product team will continue to focus on the above product themes as well as add some efforts around Evangelize Marketing Performance Management as another key theme:
- Evangelize MPM: As a company we started with budgeting and planning as our core foundation and have moved to layer on performance into the equation. Our product still “speaks the language of budgeting” and we want to use the the language of planning and performance as well. Our aim will be to make it less budgeting centric and shift the language to be equal for all areas we address.
- Openness: We’ll extend the performance management capabilities of Allocadia, helping marketers make a connection between their spend and their results. We’re working on an enhanced Salesforce.com connector which includes out-of-the-box attribution models as well as configurable custom attribution models.
- Value for all marketers: Some UI adjustments will focus on giving different kinds of users a personalized experience, where they’ll see the information that’s most important to them. For example, when the CMO logs in they can see analytics right away, whereas the field marketer can see their budget and Operations their marketing organization hierarchy. We’ll also continue to invest in supporting the new persona of “external collaborator”. We will also be adding features for the finance persona around managing budget requests and transfers.
- Lovability: In 2016, the focus will be on collaboration. Users will be able to dynamically collaborate with key stakeholders, get feedback and notifications in real-time, and work together to build better marketing plans.
To get all this important work done, our team is growing! In 2015, the Allocadia product team doubled in size, and next year we’re looking to do the same with our Series B funding announcement, adding new members to the engineering, product management, user experience and technology group. I’m proud of the culture we’ve created for employees — as Allocadia has grown, we’ve been able to provide more opportunities for our people to grow, develop and learn.
Finally, in 2016 we’ll continue to focus on what’s always mattered most: our relationships with customers. Kristine and I started Allocadia to solve marketers’ pains. We’ve been focused on the same pains and problems every step of the way. We believe that unwavering focus has contributed to Allocadia’s success, and in 2016 we’ll continue to find new ways to make marketers smarter, fueled by conversations with our customers.
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