Most product managers (PMs) would agree: The best product development tools are the ones that not only function beautifully on their own, but are also part of a unified ecosystem that makes it easy to identify insights—and act on them. And while it might be tempting to shop around for the “best of the best” in each category (e.g. product analytics, in-app guidance, session replays, feedback collection, etc.) taking a point solution-driven approach can be seriously detrimental to efficiency—and to your wallet—in the long run.
From creating silos and data inconsistency, to interrupting the customer experience, to inflating your total cost of ownership, point solutions actually create more complexity and slow down innovation for product teams. If any of this sounds familiar, it might be time to ditch those one-off tools and explore an all-in-one product experience platform like Pendo instead. Keep reading to learn three signs you might be ready to consolidate your team’s product tech stack.
1. You have to export data or cobble together integrations to make your product insights make sense
If your engineering teams have had to spend a lot of time building custom connections between all the various product management point solutions your team uses, you’re a prime candidate for a unified platform like Pendo. From a development perspective, not only do these kinds of homegrown integrations create risk and operational complexity (e.g. outages when something breaks), they’re also challenging and time-consuming for teams to maintain. Plus, from the PM’s point of view, they can create inconsistencies in the data and diminish trust since there is no single source of truth product teams can turn to.
Here’s an example. Say you’re using one vendor for product analytics and a different one to deliver in-app messaging. In order for your analytics to inform how you target your in-app guides, you either need to export one data set out of the first tool into the second (while making sure it’s organized in a way that makes sense), or ask your dev team to build custom code that allows the two systems to talk to each other. But this back-and-forth is frustrating and prone to error.
Using a number of disparate tools (each with its own interface and learning curve) is also highly inefficient. Without a unified source of truth for all your customer and product insights, as a PM, you end up needing to context-switch hundreds of times a day. And you’re often left with inconsistent reporting across tools because they all organize your data differently. Ultimately, this means it takes longer to get the answers you need, and makes it nearly impossible to understand the complete customer experience.
With a unified platform like Pendo, all of your data—quantitative, qualitative, and visual—lives in one centralized place. This allows you to leverage all the insights you have at your disposal to make the most informed decisions possible. So session replays can inform product design, usage analytics can guide feature development, guide views can pivot messaging strategy, and so on.
2. Different teams are using different tools to do the same work
In the software as a service (SaaS) economy, it’s not uncommon for businesses to experience software redundancies: keeping multiple tools in their stack that do essentially the same thing. At enterprise scale, this issue is amplified (and comes with a hefty price tag). Because different departments often report into different cost centers, it’s easy for purchasing decisions to get made in silos—meeting the needs of individual teams, but not taking into account the tools that are already in use elsewhere across the business and how they work together.
If different teams throughout your business are using different tools to try to uncover the same insights—for example, gathering customer feedback—it might be time to consider consolidation through implementing a solution like Pendo. Pendo brings all of the data associated with your product together in a single platform—so you can quickly spot trends and take action on them. Making all of this information accessible from a single place increases transparency across your business and reduces the risk that teams might “go rogue” and shop around for point solutions to fill the gaps their specific business units are trying to patch (which results in pesky shadow IT).
Because Pendo is quick to implement and easy to use (especially for non-technical teams!), it’s also a perfect platform for organizations that are trying to become more product led. But unifying all your data and democratizing access to it, you encourage teams outside of product (including marketing, sales, customer success, design, and more) to leverage the product as a vehicle for engaging users and driving positive business outcomes.
3. Your annual tech spend is through the roof
While it might seem less expensive in the short-term to leverage a number of point solutions rather than a comprehensive, all-in-one platform, all of these individual subscriptions add up over time. And especially at enterprise scale, it’s easy for subscriptions to go unmonitored, and for teams to mindlessly pay for seemingly inexpensive upgrades and one-off additions that actually cost the business more in the long-run.
Piecing together point solutions is also costly for engineering and development teams, because it forces them to allocate resources towards building custom integrations and APIs to get all of these tools talking to each other. Similarly, from a support and customer success perspective, using a mishmash of point solutions from different vendors also means relying on a number of different support, success, and technical teams (and not to mention, creates headaches for your procurement team). And once you factor in the additional—often hidden—costs of implementation, maintenance, support, and system integration consulting, your total cost ownership balloons even further.
An all-in-one platform like Pendo reduces all of these operational complexities and makes it much easier for teams to manage tech spend and IT effort at scale. And it ensures your analytics, guidance, feedback, session replay, and roadmapping tools can truly work in harmony—without any additional burden for your engineering team.
Want to learn more about Pendo’s fully integrated platform and see our solutions in action? Schedule your custom demo with our team here.
