Chapter 20: Rise, Rise, Rise!

From launching groundbreaking innovations to outpacing competitors, this chapter is a celebration of milestones, resilience, and a team determined to change the game.

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Transcript

It needs to go under the skin! 

Since the acquisition, we still hadn’t managed to bring the entire SAP Signavio organization together in one place - Code Camp style. By now, our team was spread across dozens of countries around the world.

A global gathering had been budgeted as part of the acquisition, but Covid restrictions and SAP-wide cost-saving measures had forced us to delay it multiple times. Now, it was finally here: Our big event, where we could bring all of SAP Signavio together; more than a thousand people!

When we briefed the event organizers, I had a simple but critical request; it needed to go under the skin. SAP Signavio was a unique and special place, and this event had to make everyone feel it deeply.

When I entered the event space, I was absolutely overwhelmed. Seeing 1,000 people all in one room was vastly different from a virtual meeting. Most of them I’d never met in person before, and it was astonishing to realize that all these individuals worked together at SAP Signavio every single day. The last time we brought the team together had been the Code Camp before Covid, with 300 colleagues only.

Of course you know my magic formula for great events - 70% fun, 30% work - created the perfect focus. Yes, there were great sessions about our products and how we go to market. Yes, Rouven and I held the keynote to motivate everyone about the path ahead. Artificial Intelligence and so on.

But what truly made the event unforgettable were a few deeply special moments. Rouven hosted an intimate fireside chat with Luka, perfectly timed for Luka's departure from SAP. It was an honest conversation filled with reflections on his experiences and learnings over the years.

And then there was Martin Adams at the piano, as everyone sang along to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” with the lyrics playfully transformed to “Imagine a world without Signavio.” Those were the moments that truly went under the skin.

Manja Kuchel from our marketing team had suggested hosting a diversity & inclusion session. Initially, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic - but how can you say no? So, we added it to the agenda. What happened next completely blew me away.

Manja began by asking the audience to stand if they had played with a Gameboy during childhood. I stood up too; I loved Tetris and Super Mario. She moved on with a few more light-hearted questions that prompted people to identify with different experiences.

Then, Manja changed the atmosphere by playing soft music in the background. She asked: “Now, please stand up if you can’t go back home right now because there is a war going on.”

Nobody was talking, it was absolutely quiet. Like before, everyone glanced around, waiting to see who might stand up. But this was no ordinary question. Facing a war at your home is one of the most horrible things you can imagine.

After a pause, one colleague slowly rose to their feet. Then another. And another. In the end, dozens of colleagues were standing.

It was such an intense moment and I was almost crying. Realizing what many colleagues are going through made my daily struggles seem so insignificant.

In the end, it is all about the people. The people that you spend your time with, who you work with. Appreciating all the different backgrounds and experiences, appreciating everyone makes a great team. SAP Signavio brings together the best people from around the world.

I was also proud to see our “sixth sense” of daring to try, fail, and learn in action at this event.

One group of colleagues had taken the initiative to experiment with a new idea for our product. They proposed integrating Process Insights with our Process Mining solution through direct data interchange, allowing customers to scan their entire process landscape broadly and then dive deep - all within minutes and with just one click.

The approach was called “Plug & Gain.” Over the past few months, the team had piloted it with several customers, and now it was ready to make its grand debut. At our employee event, we celebrated it with fanfare, and a few months later, we officially launched it at Sapphire.

For the first time in Signavio’s history, we absolutely nailed it. Our product had become so indispensable that it was no longer a choice - it was a necessity for companies. Within minutes, customers could gain broad and deep insights that made it irrational not to use it.

The best part? Our competitors couldn’t replicate it. Achieving this required more than just software capabilities. It needed access to data from thousands of customers, combined with SAP’s unparalleled process domain expertise and library of best practice processes - a combination only we possessed.

Four years prior, I had predicted this to happen at our main customer event. To illustrate the point, I used a well-known analogy. In the past, navigating by car meant using paper maps. You could see which roads existed and whether they were highways or backroads. Then came navigation systems that plotted routes and guided turns. Finally, real-time traffic data emerged, allowing route adjustments on the fly based on current conditions.

I predicted the same evolution for the world of business process management. First, you’re content to understand basic process logic and available paths. Next, the system maps out optimal paths for different scenarios. Eventually, with enough data, you gain complete visibility into processes, enabling rapid and confident adjustments.

Just as smartphones have become omnipresent so that everyone can navigate easily from A to B, our Plug & Gain approach democratized process understanding, improvement, and transformation for every business.

Up until now, competing with Celonis had been draining. Finally, we reached the tipping point. We had become the obvious choice for all customers who ran at least a little bit of SAP software.

While Celonis had thrived in previous years, we suddenly leapfrogged them, offering an unbeatable capability and value proposition. Strategically, we had made all of the right moves and executed on it with speed, just as Celonis started to struggle.

Previously, Celonis had tried branching into the process automation space, positioning “Execution Management Systems” as the future. It turned into an uphill battle against established process automation approaches, and to make matters worse, it damaged their relationship with SAP. Also other big product bets didn’t change the game for them. Now, Germany’s most valuable startup found itself reduced to copying our strategy - integrating Process Mining and modeling into one comprehensive offering. It was a striking defeat. Their acquisition of Symbio was too little, too late, as SAP Signavio surged ahead. Fighting back would be a steep challenge for them in the years to come.

Software AG didn’t do better, either. In fact, after years of stagnant revenue growth, they were taken off the public markets by a private equity firm for a modest sum. The once-proud giant had been reduced to a collection of assets sold off piecemeal, while SAP Signavio continued to soar.

On the Process Mining front, our successful integration into SAP kicked off a wave of acquisitions. Lana Labs was acquired by Appian, PAFnow by Celonis, myInvenio by IBM, UltimateSuite by ServiceNow, and Minit by Microsoft.

For these startups, it was a final opportunity to secure a solid acquisition price. For the acquirers, it was a chance to stake their claim in a booming market. It all stood as a powerful validation of our journey.

They could all see our massive traction, but they probably underestimated that we just got started.

With our integration into SAP complete from a product standards perspective and our development team thriving after rapid expansion, we were now operating with confidence and full speed.

Right in time for the next technology frontier: Artificial Intelligence.

Back in the day, Signavio was built on the wave of the last big tech disruption: the cloud. We pioneered offering process management solutions in the cloud, transforming how organizations managed and collaborated on their processes. Now, generative AI had opened up possibilities that previously didn’t exist.

Long before ChatGPT became a household name, our team discovered a promising AI startup called Aleph Alpha that specialized in Large Language Models (LLM). Early prototypes using their technology revealed transformative capabilities we hadn’t thought possible before.

With generative AI, our software could retrieve insights faster than ever. It enabled functions like crafting sophisticated analysis questions, generating complex queries, and extracting process knowledge from vast bodies of text with unparalleled accuracy. Contextualizing insights and linking findings seamlessly became a reality.

More than just speeding up tasks, it unlocked something entirely new: making tailored recommendations for potential changes and generating technical artifacts to put those changes into effect. Unlike many overhyped technologies, AI delivered tangible value from day one.

With our prototypes, we could simply take a text document, distill the biggest business challenges for it, determine the most relevant KPIs to track, automatically retrieve the right data from the transactional systems, craft improvement initiatives and spell out which changes to the existing processes would most likely yield the biggest improvement. To prove the point, we used the quarterly financial report of SAP as an example and could automatically spell out dozens of improvement suggestions on the operational level. What required weeks and months of consultant work before, could now be done by our products within seconds.

My co-founders Nico and Willi were also captivated by AI. But after exploring the technology for a while, Willi came back to me, sounding a bit disheartened. 

“This time, it doesn’t matter if I’m a great programmer or not,” he admitted. “AI handles all the technical work for me. The only thing that matters is the data to feed the system. And that’s the one thing I don’t have.”

I smiled and replied, “I know a place overflowing with data. It’s called SAP Signavio. Why not come back and build something great?”

With the cloud, small companies had a structural advantage: They could develop applications particularly fast and then iterate with their customers to reach superior user experience. With AI, data is key, which puts large players like SAP into a better position.

AI startups were popping up everywhere, but many of them struggled to achieve real commercialization quickly. This worked to our benefit, providing a wealth of opportunities to bring talented teams and innovative technologies into our fold.

Kausa.ai was one such company with a standout technology. They could automatically determine the root causes of a certain KPI development. Unlike most others relying solely on correlation-based methods, Kausa had figured out how to establish causal relationships - even with messy, complex data. They eagerly joined our Process Mining team, and together, we brought their root cause analysis capabilities to market.

And Kausa was just the beginning of our shopping tour. The success of SAP Signavio had not gone unnoticed within SAP. Suddenly, Rouven and I were seen as the people who could seemingly turn everything we touched into gold.

Funny story: During a cross-SAP project meeting, someone asked, “Haven’t we tried this before and failed? What’s different this time?” Without missing a beat, one of my peers answered, “Well, this time, we have Gero on board.” I thought it was a joke at first, but he was dead serious. And none of the others laughed - they all nodded in agreement. It was a crazy feeling!

Rouven loves numbers and wanted to measure just how much SAP Signavio had outperformed expectations. We revisited the original acquisition financial model, updating it with our actual results since joining SAP. The analysis revealed that if we had known how well we’d perform, SAP should have paid €700 million euros more for the acquisition.

Rouven, always quick with a quip, jokingly asked if our team could get a share of that €700 million euros as a bonus. The response came back immediately and with perfect humor: “Well done, Rouven, you’ll definitely get a mug of appreciation upon retirement.” 

Back to the shopping tour.

At the airport in Frankfurt, on my way to Sapphire in Orlando, I ran into Christian, our CEO. After some brief small talk, he got straight to the point. Given all the success with Signavio, he asked me directly: “Which other cloud company should SAP buy next?”

The only candidate that immediately came to mind was LeanIX. Just a week prior, Andre Christ, their founder and CEO, had invited me to deliver a keynote at their big customer conference. We had a strong partnership, and LeanIX had recently achieved “Endorsed App” status within SAP. This was a significant milestone, meaning that SAP sellers earned the same commission for selling LeanIX solutions as they did for SAP products. Our product integration was excellent, and the synergies were clear - not to mention, the revenue traction was impressive.

At the end of my keynote, I had displayed an image of a heart with SAP and LeanIX in it. It was intended as a lighthearted symbol of our partnership’s strength. Still, it stirred up a lot of speculation. After the talk, many people asked me if we were considering an acquisition. At the time, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind - at least, not seriously.

But just a week later, Christian’s question got the wheels turning. As we discussed the idea at the airport, the pace was astounding. By the time our flight touched down in Orlando, the SAP M&A team was already assembled, prepared to explore a potential acquisition.

This time, it fell on me to make “the call” - that crucial conversation with the CEO of a company you’re looking to acquire.

LeanIX was in a very strong position. They had strong year-over-year growth and were almost profitable. Their cash reserves were ample, and their customers absolutely loved them. If you’re familiar with Net Promoter Scores (NPS), LeanIX’s number would blow you away; around +70. To put that in context, NPS scores range from -100 to +100. LeanIX’s rating was phenomenal. To this day, I haven’t come across any other software company that comes close to that level of customer satisfaction. Their product and engagement were truly remarkable.

It was interesting to witness a major M&A process from the buyer's side. When SAP acquired us, the journey was a nerve-wracking ordeal filled with endless tasks, countless considerations, and the constant pressure of overcoming unforeseen obstacles.

Now, as a “business sponsor” for the LeanIX acquisition, my responsibilities shifted dramatically. All of the intricate, heavy lifting was handled by our corporate development teams. My job was to ensure we navigated wisely and avoided any serious missteps. Equally critical was sensing Andre Christ’s mindset, helping to smooth things out when negotiations hit inevitable bumps.

I knew how horrible it was to go through the legal negotiation in particular and it wasn’t any better for Andre. He suffered a lot, especially as he was the only founder left and had to deal with a diverse set of investors in the background. In my case, I had all of my co-founders with me and only one investor - Apax - running the negotiations.

The LeanIX deal almost fell apart a couple of times. And I felt sorry for Andre. Especially once you brief your core team about the planned acquisition and rumors start to leak out, there is no way back anymore. The transaction needs to happen.

In parallel, brainstorming how to integrate LeanIX’s capabilities within SAP’s various initiatives was exhilarating - a product management playground. It was a privilege to pitch these concepts to my SAP colleagues and secure their enthusiasm and support.

Thomas Saueressig, who was preparing to take on a new executive board role focused on delivery and adoption, was especially enthusiastic. Leveraging LeanIX across customer engagements promised to elevate our architectural work with clients in transformative ways.

Fortunately, we closed the acquisition successfully a few months later, at a final valuation of €1.2 billion euros - the largest strategic acquisition of a German software startup up until that point, replacing the Signavio acquisition on the leaderboard.

The LeanIX acquisition had a special twist for us. Daniel Furtwängler, our first full-time hire at Signavio who I mentioned earlier, was part of this journey in a surprising way. After leaving Signavio in 2020, he joined LeanIX, and now, through this acquisition, he was coming back into the fold. He later joked: “You only acquired LeanIX because you wanted me back.” When we first hired him, it was during Signavio’s early days. Seeing him now as part of LeanIX highlighted just how deeply our ecosystem of talent and shared ambition connected us.

With SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX combined, we had enough momentum and presence to establish a dedicated “solution area” within SAP. Alongside SAP’s existing five areas (ERP, intelligent spend, customer experience, human capital management, and business technology platform), we became solution area number six - the smallest, but the fastest-growing.

The SAP Signavio Product and Engineering teams were thriving. Willi’s departure the year prior didn’t have any negative effect. Quite the opposite. Many of the leaders had matured and stepped up.

I always hated operations and I felt I could contribute less and less in actually running the organization. Honestly, I wanted to hand over my responsibilities as much as possible and find a setup for SAP Signavio that could work even without me. 

In the middle of this massive project, another disruption hit us. With all of the tumbling of the tech stock market since their peak in late 2021, sentiment had switched from growth at all costs to favoring profitability in the capital markets. SAP had always been in pretty good shape from a profitability point of view, but the supervisory board pushed hard for even better margins.

At SAP Signavio, we hit all of our targets, created tons of excitement, and still, our budget for the next two quarters was cut by 12%. Saving that much money from one day to another is a big task. It meant completely revising our recruiting plans and killing many of the strategic projects we had just started. I understood that cost cutting pressure might fall on you in a corporate context at unexpected moments. It just felt extremely unfair that we needed to carry the biggest burden in relative terms among all SAP solution areas, while we were the ones producing the highest growth.

I was furious, and for the first time, I seriously considered stepping away. Fortunately, Torsten was there to calm me down, assuring me that we could still find a way to succeed, even under these difficult circumstances.

Comparing our situation to many of the startups around us, we were still on a happy island. Many startups couldn’t raise any money any more in that market environment, and had to let go significant parts of their teams. We didn’t have to let go of anybody from our team and could even retain budget items that I deemed critical. We continued to allow internal travel, so that our teams could meet in person, and we didn’t cut down on team events, either. I would rather cut on third party spend or delay the creation of new teams, than create disruption to the existing teams.

Back to the succession project, I called Georgina to help. She had been transformational for me a couple of years earlier and I wanted my colleagues to enjoy the same experience. On top, I needed to know where the different colleagues stood and who was ready to take on more. Who could potentially replace me one day?

The exercise confirmed many of my assumptions. Torsten was excelling and simply needed a slight adjustment to the organizational structure to unlock even greater impact. Alessandro Manzi had proven himself more than capable, evolving from a product manager for a single offering to someone ready to lead all of SAP Signavio’s product management. And then there was Andre Wenz - the rockstar who was ready for a broader role.

For context, Andre had been Rouven’s key partner before the Signavio acquisition. An accomplished intrapreneur and seasoned SAP leader, Andre initially shifted his focus to product strategy and spearheaded Process Insights once we joined SAP. But now, it was clear he was ready for a greater responsibility.

Andre was the ideal successor to lead all of SAP Signavio’s Product and Engineering, which now encompassed 800 colleagues.

Internally, we referred to the transition as “project cardboard” because all our initial ideas and plans were sketched out on a large IKEA carton - the only big piece of paper I had at home. This effort went far beyond simply placing Andre in charge; we aimed to address every area within the organization that needed evolution and improvement.

Our goals were ambitious. We wanted to finally merge the Process Insights and Process Intelligence teams, build a proper design function, elevate technology & architecture work, mature our content development efforts, restructure our product management team, properly structure our AI development and many more things. It turned out to be a change effort that stretched over almost 18 months.

Eventually, after several months of delays, we formally announced our organizational changes, appointing Andre as the new head of Product and Engineering. Alessandro stepped into the role of head of product management, Torsten became head of engineering, Bastian Steinert took over as CTO, or head of technology and architecture as we called it, and Rebekka Kotinis was named head of design.

We have always had a phenomenal team at Signavio. But this now was the most rockstar team that I could ever imagine. This team was unbeatable and I was proud to have built it.

We capped off the strongest year in our history with an outstanding Q4. For the first time, we surpassed €100 million euros in New ARR within a single year - a milestone that underscored just how far we had come. With that growth, ARR had surpassed way above €200 million euros and the team was 1,300 people strong by now.