How Plandek Scales Software Delivery With AI: Q/A with CEO Charlie Ponsonby

The Custom Software Development Market is expected to register a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) increase of over 21.5% between 2023 and 2032.

Technology teams need to find a solution to deliver custom software quicker while keeping clients and stakeholders updated on their progress.

In this interview for Website Planet, Roberto Popolizio spoke to Charlie Ponsonby, CEO of Plandek, to learn how their Engineering Intelligence Platform helps the UK Ministry of Justice, SkyScanner and many other companies worldwide develop custom software more efficiently by extracting data out of their DevOps tools using AI.

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

Businesses of all types increasingly rely on technology teams (either in house or outsourced) to build custom software solutions tailored to their specific needs – these may be accounting systems, customer management systems, websites – you name it.

A key challenge is to deliver these software projects quickly, predictably and efficiently (on budget).

Plandek is an intelligent analytics platform used by technology teams to streamline and continuously improve the process of software delivery – and to build trust with their internal customers by communicating their efficiency improvement through understandable metrics.

So in a nutshell, Plandek helps technology teams deliver software projects faster, more efficiently and more predictably – and then evidence that improvement to their customers or stakeholders.

As such, Plandek is a global leader in the fast growing areas of DevOps tools known as ‘Engineering Intelligence Platforms’. As such, Plandek extracts data from the underlying toolsets that software teams use (such as Jira and code repositories) and applies advanced data analytics and AI to identify where inefficiencies lie and suggest mitigations.

“Essential tool to support teams in modern software delivery. Plandek helps teams to understand their areas for improvement in a way that the default charts in Jira don’t enable…”

Ramsay Ashby, Senior Software Delivery Operations Manager, Skyscanner

What makes people eventually choose you over your competitors?

Plandek is based in the UK and is seen by Gartner and Forrester as a global leading vendor in the fast-growing Engineering Intelligence space. Our clientele spans across Europe, North America and Asia, including Trainline, Skyscanner, Mimecast, Legal and General, the UK Ministry of Justice, Kindercare, Maya and many more.

Plandek has built a global customer base as a result of its unique ability to apply AI and predictive analytics to provide software teams with intelligent insights not currently available in the underlying DevOps tool sets.

Plandek provides new insights at three levels:

1. The CTO and technology leadership get a ‘single pane of glass’ to track and drive efficiency improvement across all teams and communicate that improvement to stakeholders
2. Delivery managers get insight and mitigations to deliver product milestones on time
3. Developer teams (squads) get intelligent insight to remove blockers in order to build and ship code faster.

This new insight helps delivery teams transform their effectiveness in a relatively short period of time – increasing velocity, productivity, predictability and of course quality.

What is the current techstack you use to run your online business?

Plandek is a cloud-native SaaS product hosted in the Google Cloud in Europe.

Plandek’s online presence is a key element of our sales and marketing strategy. Our website is built in WordPress and drives leads through paid and natural search.

Plandek website home page

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

Plandek has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2018. The website remains at the heart of our lead generation strategy.

Inbound lead generation is underpinned by strong content generation including whitepapers and thought leadership, articles, guides, case studies and demos.

Onsite conversion has been optimised to drive prospects to interact with the content and get started with Plandek (as it is possible to self-serve and sign up to the Plandek platform at www.plandek.com).

Content creation has been optimised to focus on content that appeals to ‘end of funnel’ prospects, rather than speculative visitors who are researching the space.

As ‘Engineering Intelligence’ is still a small (but fast-growing) sector, paid search and SEO has to be optimised around a long-tail of medium-to-low volume search terms. This requires architecting the website to support a number of rich content areas and running multiple landing pages concurrently.

In addition we have built an advanced and segmented prospect database to whom we communicate regularly with email communication and invitations to events (typically customer-led webinars).

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

Plandek is a fast-growing player in a very fast-growing global marketplace. As such, competition is strong with competing businesses in North America, Europe and Israel all pushing hard to build market share.

Product innovation is therefore critical and Plandek invests heavily in its team of data scientists and proprietary intelligent analytics to stay one step ahead. As such, Plandek has an exciting innovation pipeline of new features that it constantly releases, based on a very close relationship with customers to ensure it meets their needs.

The focus for 2024 is rapidly growing market share globally.

What do you see in the future of your industry?

In the current economic climate, Plandek solves a big exam question for almost all businesses globally – how to enable technology teams to deliver more with less.

The advances being made in data analytics and AI now enable a new generation of analytics tools like Plandek to help hard-pressed technology teams do just that. These advances are rapid and recent and hence the adoption of tools like Plandek is still relatively limited across software delivery teams globally.

But that is changing rapidly and 2024 is likely to be the year that Plandek moves from the domain of ‘early adopters’ to the ‘early majority’.