HashiCorp Case Studies
Cloud infrastructure company sets sights on grand exit
The Challenge
HashiCorp is an incredibly technical company. Its suite of tools help its customers' engineers use the cloud more effectively and efficiently. But with an engineer founder, developer jargon and acronyms are at the heart of how the company presents itself. The company wanted to attract more customers as well as potential buyers by highlighting customers in digestible case studies.
The Approach
My interviews were with people that had titles like "Cloud Engineering Manager." They spoke to me as if I understood the ins and outs of scaling cloud infrastructure for an engineering and development team. ​
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To attract c-suite attention, I treated my audience as if they were me -- effectively clueless about how everything works. While I had to defer to some idioms of the developer world, I tried hard to describe how and why HashiCorp's tools benefit the business writ large.
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I think I was more successful in some case studies than others but generally did a good job translating the material for people who might not know what a Cloud Platform Team is.
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My biggest regret about the project is how much I relied on the descriptor "modern" in my case study headlines. With so much time elapsed between publication, I often forgot how I had framed the previous story.
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The Outcome
I produced six case studies for the client, all of which described how a given solution helped a customer scale their cloud usage and further optimize the business.
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Very recently, IBM acquired HashiCorp at a $6.4 billion valuation.
