Many dev teams take the “haste makes waste” approach to development—quality is key. Others emphasize that having an edge in product strength and features wins the day: they’re willing to “move fast and break stuff”–it can get fixed later. Tom Jaklitsch, CTO of Negotiatus, knew he needed the best of both worlds for his team to thrive.
Tom co-founded Negotiatus in 2016, and has led the company to explosive growth in just three years. Negotiatus is a cloud-based spend management software that alleviates the pain points of the procurement process. It’s one place for every purchase, for every department, from every vendor–and by streamlining purchasing, their customers save significantly on both the goods they are buying and the time required to manage the process. Negotiatus quickly reached millions in annual revenue, raised a venture round in August 2018, and began to rapidly grow the team.
Scaling with Panache
Tom’s team tripled in the past year, and is growing even faster. “I knew many promising startups stumbled as they scaled,” said Tom. “I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the discipline and quality that made us great as we expanded. Because of how integrated Negotiatus is in businesses’ workflows, letting major bugs into production is unacceptable.” Tom’s team follows strict coding practices and tests rigorously, but he knew he needed strong end to end testing automation to allow his team to accelerate deployment without losing the quality benefits of meticulous testing.
Tom had been approached by many services hoping to outsource or crowdsource his testing process, and had considered hiring an in-house QA Engineering team. When he met ProdPerfect, he was interested instantly–he believed he could achieve accurate and broad testing coverage and efficient test maintenance by working with them, allowing his team to move quickly while thoroughly testing every single build before it went to production.
Months later, Tom’s plan is working. His team is moving fast, maintaining high product quality, and spending far less on QA than they would with alternatives. “ProdPerfect has identified 5-6 potentially site breaking bugs. The service was entirely worth it as soon as we found 1. It’s an integral part of our testing and deployment pipelines, and knowing that our integration tests are constantly up-to-date and protecting our core workflows has empowered our engineering and product teams to deliver more efficiently.” Tom and the Negotiatus team continue to scale, thrive, and rapidly expand Negotiatus’ value to its customers.