ServiceNow: Workflow Platform Driving Rapid Organic Growth

Description

This case follows the organic growth story of ServiceNow, a workflow platform serving enterprise customers. ServiceNow found product-market fit in streamlining workflows for IT service management. It later evolved its product, engineering, and go-to-market organizations to expand first into adjacencies within IT and then into additional domains such as HR, customer service, and others. The case charts ServiceNow’s path of organic growth towards $10 billion in revenue, challenging students to consider decisions around build vs. buy, organizational design, innovation investments, and the leveraging of a unified platform technology.

Learning Objective

This case is designed to help students examine critical success factors for organic growth through 1) developing products for adjacent use cases in the same domain and 2) launching products in new domains. Additionally, students may better understand what makes up a technology platform as well as the benefits and implications for product managers in a platform company. Third, the case explores nuances of organizational design, talent, and decision-making processes within a product organization that builds for multiple domains on a unified platform.

Keywords

Organic growth platform Product management workflow