Chapter 4:
Staying true to our roots
Sridhar Vembu at the inauguration of the Velachery (Chennai) office, early 2000s
If you talk to any ManageEngine leader about our work culture, you'd hear a common analogy: as humans grow from childhood to adulthood, we've also evolved as an organization.
Loyalty is a true testament to an organization's culture. For instance, Sridhar Iyengar has been a part of ManageEngine since its inception. Like Sridhar, we have many senior leaders and managers who have been with us for 10-15 years, despite receiving better opportunities. So, what is the reason for this loyalty?
Our leaders attribute it to the work culture and the overall environment. Managers are given the freedom to innovate and bring their ideas to the table in purview of what it takes to solve a customer's problem. Teams are free to experiment without pressure, explore new challenges, and come up with solutions.
As a result of this loyalty, the products and the organization as a whole have benefited tremendously as well. The products that we've built over the last two decades require a certain level of domain knowledge and expertise, the kind that cannot be built overnight. The reason our solutions work and we're able to continue crafting these products is only because people have stuck around for the long haul, giving us the ability to cover the entire enterprise IT spectrum.
Founding values
Our leaders have all lived through the "How are we going to pay everyone this month?" phase—more than once. Knowing how to navigate tricky circumstances has given them a different perspective. These lessons and values have shaped the organization. Now, it is their responsibility to impart those values to the leaders of tomorrow. Leaders make the effort to provide employees with a sense of history and show them that their work, however small it might seem, contributes to a bigger picture: ManageEngine as a business and Zoho Corp as an institution.
Instant gratification: We've always believed customers should see value in our solutions within a day or a few days of implementation. This means taking a product-led or technology-led approach. The product has to speak for itself first, and only after then do we bring in the right people to provide support.
User experience: The user experience doesn't start when a customer starts using the product. It starts right when they download or purchase our solutions and services. We focus on everything from a user-friendly interface and immediate assistance to clear feature descriptions that address the majority of commonly asked questions and required features.
Customer-driven service: How do you know what your product needs? Business in the long run is not about sales or a bottom line, it's about listening to your customers and giving them what they need. We want to be known as a company that's easy to do business with. We also want to be accessible at every level. "You can connect to anyone within the ManageEngine team at a technical or leadership or sales level, they'll always try to help. That's something we want to continue to be, approachable" says Sridhar Iyengar.
Simplicity: Our tools should be easy to configure and easy to deploy—plain and simple. People often get carried away with needlessly complicated features and forget about functionality. Our goal is to provide affordable solutions that address IT needs and nothing more.
Employee-centric environment: Being an organization that listens can lay a strong foundation to any successful business. Employees are our beta users, our first customers. They also work with customers and partners and could have a gold mine of information that is indispensable for growth. It comes down to building a receptive enterprise that's got its eyes and ears open and is also willing to adapt and implement customer and partner feedback.
Fearlessness: When we launch a product, we are usually up against hundreds of competitors, some already making big waves in the market. We'd know that. That hasn't stopped us from doing what we want to do. "So many things have come and gone but this culture of fearlessness and staying the course with conviction has existed in ManageEngine from day one. It has stayed that way to date because of how we operate, how resilient we are, and how modest our aspirations are. Our objective is not to make a quick buck and disappear or become a monopoly. Our objectives are to stay relevant, identify new ways of solving problems, enjoy the journey, and work in a way that impacts society," says Rajesh Ganesan, president of ManageEngine.
Tech independence: We'd like to think we're bootstrapped, not just from the business perspective, but in terms of technology, too. Building an IT ecosystem from the ground up takes time and the desire to experiment. To this day, our managers refer to us as "a collection of startups with an enterprise outfit" or "an enterprise with a startup mindset," because they've been able to test, collaborate, and bring out technology that meets customers' needs without having to rely on external resources.
Value for money: Customers should see tremendous value in our products. How do we do that? We keep investing in our solutions. We keep adding features, capabilities, and integrations (with our products and third-party products), because only then can customers see real value in the suite. A big part of providing value is by alleviating the pressure that customers face with their daily tasks. ManageEngine's support, development, and implementation teams are growing faster than other departments, simply because our intention is to keep up with demand and make using our solutions a seamless experience.