General Information
Rainforest QA was founded in 2012 and is an on-demand QA solution that discovers problems that affect the customer experience before code hits production. Rainforest QA’s solutions perform the QA testing at the speed of continuous delivery. The vision of Rainforest QA is to have a Bug-Free Software and that will be done with help of the mission; to change the way QA is done. Rainforest QA is in the B-seed stage and has offices all over the world.
Product Innovation
Rainforest QA builds their product around their customers. Everyone in the company has involvement and knowledge on problems and pain points of the software and ways to solve them. Rainforest QA core audience right now is SMB (0-500 employees) companies and there are various personas that are being used to frame the product. Chris Yin mentioned in the meeting that he believes that all newer companies is working mostly with disruptive innovation and so does Rainforest QA on their new product innovations. However they also try to balance it with more incremental improvement. As a lot of disruptive changes are happening for the customers, Customers are kept up-to-date and educated on new features on a regular basis. By the regular contact Rainforest QA not only building a huge trust from customers but also gets to understand how their products fits in in the customers workday which is very valuable for future improvements. Rainforest QA is also keeping a close eye to other companies in the industry as well as what universities are researching.
Innovation Process
At Rainforest QA, they believe a top-down company structure is bad for innovation. Instead everyone should feel comfortable to bring ideas and information to the table. Rainforest QA has a process in place to evaluate, accept, reject and bring ideas into their infrastructure. The process is based on a transparency where everyone in the company should be able to end up with the same decision regarding an idea. However, the product team is responsible for product innovation and even if anyone with in Rainforest QA can email their own ideas to the product team, the product team also has a specific method for collective innovate ideas. Each month, a sync between teams is hold and during the sync the product team try to listen and encourage the employees to share their ideas.
Since Rainforest QA’s platform is relatively new, workable ideas and changes are pushed out relatively easy. What ideas that should be pushed out are prioritized by Product Managers. It is thereby the Product Managers responsibility to make sure everyone has access to the same information and understand the goals and vision for the product. Another advantage of being a young company is that the company has less organizational memory and is therefore more willing to try different ideas instead thinking of a failure that happened earlier, maybe due to the wrong timing.
Innovation Metrics
Core metrics used at Rainforest QA are revenue and burndown rate (how quickly the company is spending money). In the end everything comes down to business and the money you making, so naturally everything is based on overall business goals. However Rainforest QA is also working with North Star Metrics and other leading indicators for a specific product or feature. The measurement is decided before each new feature launch but can differ from feature to feature. Another very important metrics is also the customer’s feedback and how the constantly evaluating ties together to the admin platform.
The Cluster Advantage
Rainforest QA believes that the Silicon Valley cluster is important in the sense that a lot of companies are in the same area and can learn from each other. Rainforest QA believes that competition always exists between companies, especially when you are a start-up. However, for a start-up it is important to not compare yourself to much to other companies, instead you should focus on competing against yourself and always strive for doing it better. In the competition against yourself you will most likely need a lot of help from people without the company and collaboration therefore becomes important.
Fun Fact
Rainforest QA was getting an award for the top company culture for medium size companies in 2017 from Entrepreneur.
Memorable Quote
“Build off what you know. When you fail remember it.” Chris Yin – Product Management Director at Rainforest QA