RALEIGH — Pendo wrapped their seventh annual Pendomonium last Thursday, ending on a high note with record attendance and a closing performance from rapper and songwriter, Big Boi.
The event has its share of big news for the company which provides application experience management and is celebrating its tenth year in business. Celebrating the theme “How to break away” in the age of artificial intelligence, the major news was the launch of Pendo One, a unified application experience platform centered around AI. Among the products and features available on Pendo One are:
- Session Replay: a video playback tool for product teams to see how their users interact with an application, which captures data on clicks, scrolling, cursor movements, and more. The solution touts itself as having a priority on privacy.
- Pendo Discover: a product discovery solution powered by AI that gathers and prioritizes user feedback.
- Pendo AI: a suite of AI products that help accelerate application insights with tools like one-click guides, feedback summaries, automated feature tagging, and workflow recommendations.
Todd Olson, Pendo CEO and co-founder, had a busy week last week but was able to share some of his excitement about the event with WRAL TechWire.
Instant replay comes to software development: Pendo launches ‘Session Replay’
TechWire: Can you talk about how the Pendomonium conference came about?
Todd Olson: This is our 7th year doing Pendomonium – October marks our 10-year anniversary in business. It was a bold choice to do a conference within three years of launching our first product. But we prioritized community and education since the very beginning of Pendo.
Todd Olson speaks on stage at Pendomonium 2023
The field of digital product management was relatively nascent, so it felt like the right thing to introduce early. And, 160 people showed up! The conference has continued because there’s a strong desire for thought leadership, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration in this field – and we make this event really fun every year. It’s really unlike any corporate event you’ve been to.
TW: Can you share some data on registration numbers this year?
TO: We had 1,300 people at Pendomonium this week – making this our largest event ever. We had folks from over 460 companies in town, representing 428 cities and 12 countries. Attendees who traveled the furthest [were] from Japan and Australia.
TW: How has the conference evolved?
TO: It’s grown in every possible way – we’ve gone from one full day to two, we’ve gotten bigger-name keynote speakers and headliners like Christina Tosi and Big Boi. And we now have a lot of ancillary events, like workshops and trainings, an Executive Summit, Partner Summit, Customer Awards, user group meetups, and a variety of special dinners and celebrations. We also have hundreds of Pendo volunteers supporting this event. And we kicked the whole week off with a celebration of our R&D teams, who built all the amazing products that we’re launching this week.
Speaking of product, we’re showcasing a record amount of innovation this year. A host of new AI features, as well as a long-term AI vision, and two new products that expand the power and breadth of our platform. There’s Session Replay, which lets teams watch video playbacks of their users’ interacting with their software, and Pendo Discover, which gives them new ways to centralize user feedback, set product priorities, and communicate back to users what they’re building and when. We also announced Pendo One, our new unified application experience platform.
Pendo is not just for product people. Customers are using Pendo across all of their applications – those they sell to customers and those they provide to their own employees. We wanted to reflect the breadth of our platform, and the growing number of use cases for Pendo.
TW: Can you talk about something that hasn’t worked?
TO: In 2020, we were forced to make Pendomonium virtual, and I’ll be the first to say it was not my favorite event. I’m proud of the team for pulling it off that year with so many constraints, but I just love getting to see everyone in person.
Outdoor activity at Pendomonium 2023
The next year, we adapted to the pandemic by hosting Pendomonium at Red Hat Amphitheater. The venue was awesome, and it inspired us to host indoor-outdoor events during the subsequent two years. But there are a lot of complications with an entirely outdoor event – Internet connectivity, train noise, heat, and lack of shade. We realized the best experience for attendees is in a performance venue like Martin Marietta. It’s been amazing to host Pendomonium here the last two years.
TW: What is your favorite part of the conference? What is the piece you look forward to the most every year?
TO: I really love talking to our customers and hearing about the problems they are solving with Pendo. We have customers who are doing things we never imagined 10 years ago – like leveraging our data to detect fraud or to train their machine learning algorithms. Pendo completely transforms a lot of product and digital teams – we give them access to data they’ve never had before and enable their teams to make fast and confident decisions about what to build or how to help their users. It’s incredibly inspiring to me to hear so many of these stories in a single week.
