2019 in review (and why I'm excited for next year)

This year has been a really terrific one for Yellowfin. The highlight for me was having an ‘aha’ moment where I could really understand our value proposition and see what we offer our customers. This may sound odd, but I think we’ve made a complete step-change in the way we think about our organization this year.

Our best release yet

From a product perspective, it’s been a big year. We did a huge amount of work on Signals and released Yellowfin 9 and this has had a massive impact on our organization. The feedback we've had from our customers and prospects on the release has been amazing. But what’s made me really proud is seeing just how much our development team has matured. We've got several new leaders in our dev team and they are really contributing to the success of the business.

This understanding has fed into our sales organization who have never been more excited to sell. Yellowfin 9 has helped them understand the totality of what we offer, from automated insights all the way through to building pixel-perfect dashboards.

An even better customer experience

To that end, we’ve reorganized the organization so that we’re really thinking about how to best support the customer journey. We know what we’re going to focus on - we understand our value proposition, where we sit as a product and who we sell to. That process has been really interesting and something that I’ve really enjoyed this year.

There's a level of maturity of understanding within the organization now that we can't be all things to all people. We know where we add value and the kind of deals we should be pursuing and that’s where our focus is so we’ve been enabling our sales organization to do that well. It also means that we’re doing the right types of deals and not the wrong ones, and I think what will make a big difference to the organization moving forward.

As part of building out our value proposition, we’ve also improved our end-to-end marketing and done a lot of work with service and technology partners this year. Thinking about the totality of our customer’s experience, we want to make sure that we deliver a complete package for them. This is a combination of products and services, and in some cases includes additional third-party products like analytical databases or hosting.

Seeing 2020 with excitement

On the whole, I'm actually more excited about next year as a result of what we've done this year. We’ve done the foundational work for the next phase of our growth, clearly differentiated our product and have a value proposition that is more compelling to our customers.

I don't think there's another analytics product that you could buy today that looks anything like Yellowfin and solves the same problems we do in the same way. This means that we're well and truly prepared to deliver what I think is probably the most exceptional customer experience in analytics that anyone could buy next year. For the first time in our organization, we have a clear sight of where we’re going and how we’re going to get there that will not just grow our business but supersize it.