Imagine having a roster of big-name customers — including giants like Uber, Airbnb, Canva, and Pinterest— but still considering yourself “the best kept secret in DevOps.” Imagine winning over some of the most demanding engineering teams in the world but still needing to find your product market fit and unlock your potential for accelerating growth.
The Challenge of Being an Industry’s Best-Kept Secret
This was the paradox facing Buildkite, an innovative startup in the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) market. About fifteen years ago, CI/CD tools revolutionized software development by enabling software developers, testers, and operations engineers to continuously update, test, and deploy software packages instead of saving up new features and bug fixes for a few big software releases each year. With CI/CD, DevOps teams could suddenly release software updates every few weeks — or even days — to meet market demand. Those mobile app updates showing up on your phone several times a month? Those are possible thanks to software teams using CI/CD.
However, as helpful as CI/CD tools were when they were introduced, they weren’t intuitive or easy to use. They didn’t delight developers; instead, developers found them tolerable — just barely. And the tools still weren’t fast enough to meet the ever-increasing pace of business.
Buildkite founder Keith Pitt saw an opportunity to make CI/CD more usable. His vision was to unblock the bottlenecks of running CI/CD pipelines in ways that would significantly accelerate the pace of work. When other developers asked to use his tools, he realized he had a business opportunity. He founded Buildkite in 2013.
Fast forward to 2024. The company had expanded its product line and won over many marquis accounts, including companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Shopify, Slack, and Uber. Customers loved the product and told Buildkite they couldn’t live without it. But Buildkite still had trouble telling its story in a clear, differentiated way — a way that could break through the noise of the CI/CD market and help Buildkite stand out.
Then, an additional round of investment brought in a new management team, including Jay Wampold as CMO and Michael van Dijken as Vice President of Product Marketing.
“When I joined the company,” says Michael, “the first slide in our sales deck said we’re the best kept secret in DevOps. Of course, no marketer wants their company to be a secret. So, Jay and I sat down and worked out a new marketing strategy. We knew why our customers were choosing Buildkite and what they could do with our platform that they couldn’t do with others, but we weren’t articulating this very well. As a result, our sales and marketing efforts weren’t achieving their full potential.”
As part of their new strategy, Michael and Jay needed several things: a new company positioning and a narrative that told the Buildkite story, reflecting this new positioning. They would also need a new first-call pitch deck along with material for training their sales team so the sales and marketing teams could work together to tell the new story of Buildkite’s benefits for development teams.
“To do these things and build out our vision was going to take a lot of product marketing work in a hurry,” says Michael. “That’s why we brought in Fulcrum Group for help.”
The Story’s the Thing — and Fulcrum Helped Buildkite Develop It
Michael had worked with Ian Hameroff, Founder and CEO of Fulcrum Group, at Microsoft. He could trust Ian and his team to bring product marketing expertise and best practices to the work being done at Buildkite.
“We already had a pretty good understanding of who our ideal customers were,” says Michael, “because we knew our customer base, and we knew the specific capabilities of the product they liked. We also had an idea of how we wanted to describe who we were and what we sell, but the idea was still rough. We had elements, but not the whole story.”
“Fulcrum came in and ran some workshops with our CEO and our sales and marketing leaders about positioning, messaging, and the overall story we wanted to tell,” Michael continues. “Then, with Fulcrum’s help, we developed a new company narrative and a first-call pitch deck, which, as a product marketer, I can tell you can be one of the most difficult things to land. They helped us develop a demo, which is on our website today.”
The demo, which is featured prominently on the company’s website, was an important step forward. “As a company,” Michael says, “we didn’t have a standard demo that really told our product story in a cohesive way. Typically, individual sales engineers would tailor each demo to the capabilities their prospect was interested in. Custom demos like that can be useful, but we also needed a demo that told the platform story and conveyed the big mindset change with Scale-Out Delivery Platform. Fulcrum helped us build that.”
What’s next? “The market is evolving,” says Michael. “Modern engineering teams are under intense pressure to deliver software faster, so naturally, those teams are expecting more of their tools. Fulcrum is helping us equip our sales teams with the tools they need to tell our story so that engineering teams can quickly understand how we’re meeting their needs. And Fulcrum is helping us better position ourselves against the status quo so we can clearly articulate what makes us not just different but better than the other CI/CD tools out there on the market. DevOps teams today recognize the real limitations that came along with the first generation of CI/CD tools. Those tools might have seemed adequate when they were introduced over a decade ago, but engineering teams can no longer depend on them if they want to meet today’s expectations for rapid development. DevOps teams are struggling to keep up, and Fulcrum is helping us tell the story of how Buildkite is exactly what these teams need.”
He concludes: “Thanks to Fulcrum, I’m now well prepared to offer sales training based on our new story and product marketing assets.”
No More Secrets: Relaunching Buildkite with a New Story
“Fulcrum Group’s mission was to help get our story out there,” says Michael, “to create a way for us to differentiate from the market and to make sure that our target audience understands how we’re different. We also wanted to make sure that our sellers know how not just to get the first call but also the second call and others beyond that. I feel that Fulcrum succeeded in helping us with this. And this work, ultimately, should help us get more prospects.”
“At our launch in October,” he says, “we received really good coverage from some influential journalists. That’s the start of Buildkite becoming less of a well-kept secret. Of course, we know this work is a multi-month endeavor. It’s going to take time, but I think we are well positioned now to go down that path and finally being able to say, ‘Buildkite is the worst-kept secret in DevOps, because everyone knows about us and so many people are using us.’ With Fulcrum’s help, we’re making real progress toward that goal.”
The Fulcrum Group Experience
What was it like to work with Fulcrum Group?
“The Fulcrum team works really hard, gets it really fast, has amazing strategic insight, and can execute on the stuff we need,” says Michael. “And it was good to be working with Ian again. If I was struggling with something, I could just reach out, and he’d provide me with counsel. The whole experience was just great.”
Buildkite plans to continue working with Fulcrum for ongoing product marketing support, taking advantage of Fulcrum’s Product Marketing Manager as a Service (PMMaaS). Together, the two companies are working hard to tell the story of Buildkite’s Scale-Out Delivery Platform, ensuring that this innovative approach to CI/CD is anything but a secret.