The customer: Meet Dynatrace
As the VP of Customer Experience at Dynatrace, Stephen Hull is in charge of seeing customers through every touchpoint, from service, to support, to success.
Dynatrace is a software observability platform, using AI, analytics, and automations to monitor and secure their customers’ full tech stacks. Their mission is to help companies innovate faster with less risk and drive better business outcomes.
With more than 50 offices and 4,000 hybrid or remote employees, Dynatrace has team members around the world, including across the US, strategic hires in the field, and a satellite office in Sao Paulo.
Stephen’s Challenge: Quick growth but no meeting process in place
Dynatrace has scaled quickly.. In the last five years, Stephen’s team had grown from six people to more than 200 people distributed around North America. That meant daily, in-person stand-ups had gone out the window and a new solution for efficient meetings was needed.
One issue Stephen noticed is that every meeting would lose five or ten minutes at the beginning because people had to get up to speed with what the meeting was about.
That was because there weren’t consistent agendas or pre-planning. It also meant there wasn’t a clear structure for each meeting, so it was difficult to know what to prioritize. When it came to meeting notes, everyone used their own method, so there was no one source of truth and action items got lost.
Stephen noticed he’d discuss the same thing in several meetings because decisions and action items hadn’t been recorded and followed up on. As a senior leader, Stephen saw that there was an organizational issue that needed to be solved to allow everyone to do their best work.
That became a bigger issue for high-stakes meetings. Once per week, he takes part in a call with his global counterparts, including employees in EMEA and APAC. With people coming from different time zones, the pressure is on at these meetings to make the most of that single hour.
Stephen’s Solution: Cross-functional alignment for maximum efficiency
Stephen first heard of Fellow from the Supermanagers podcast, in particular an episode with Mark Horstman, co-founder of Manager Tools. From there, he found out one of Dynatrace’s chief product officers was already trying out the platform, so Stephen hopped on board.
They compared Fellow to other meeting management solutions they had tried out, but Fellow came out ahead because it’s designed to be an enterprise-wide solution.
The greatest benefit he quickly noticed was how Fellow made it so much easier to collaborate with different stakeholders across the company. That led to not just a process change, but a culture change.
From a technical perspective, Fellow gave clear insight into what everyone was focussed on and allowed visibility on action items. Now, decisions weren’t getting lost — they were leading to results.
For Stephen, for example, that means if an idea pops into his head he can add it to the next meeting with his own boss to discuss at their biweekly one-on-ones.
Results: A refreshed culture of visibility and getting more done
Fellow has had wide-reaching impact at Dynatrace beyond support in meetings themselves. It’s a cultural transformation that has built trust and accountability and a clear path towards meeting business objectives.
Now, teams have insights into what everyone is working on. Outside of meetings, Fellow facilitates asynchronous communication that allows team members to add to agendas and notes at any time with full visibility. Having everyone on the same page has brought the organization closer together.
Stephen is now on a mission. He wants to cut down overall meeting time by 5% and he knows that Fellow is a tool that can help achieve that.
