Armory is a company that empowers software development organizations to accelerate their innovation and time-to-market while reducing risk to their customers’ experience. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Armory Director of Product Marketing Anna Daugherty to learn more.
Anna Daugherty’s Background
While working in product marketing, Daugherty also held positions with brands like Ansira and Stoplight. And Daugherty said:
“Unlike other careers, Product Marketing doesn’t necessarily have a clear trajectory. And for me, it was definitely less of a straight path and more of a winding road. I went to university for technical writing, and my first job out of college was in Public Relations. From there, I moved on to video game marketing, bounced around tech marketing generalist jobs for a few years, and found Product Marketing as a discipline five years ago.”
As Director of Product Marketing at Armory, Daugherty holds a unique position as a strategic manager and an individual contributor. And Daugherty has the unique ability to create strategies and execute them. Her primary responsibilities include:
― Go-to-Market Strategy
― Launching New Products, Features, and Enhancements
― Positioning and Messaging for Internal and External Audiences
― Content Creation
― Competitive Intelligence, Market Research, and Customer Insight
― Vendor and Partnership Management
― Growing and Shaping the Product Marketing Function
Favorite Memory
What has been Daugherty’s favorite memory working for Armory so far? Daugherty shared:
“So far, my favorite memory at Armory has been the Product Marketing offsite we held recently in Toronto. Our small but mighty team was able to get together, collaborate, problem-solve, and be creative over some poutine. It was a unique PMM experience.”
Core Products
What are Armory’s core products and features? Daugherty explained:
“Software can be a competitive advantage for any company, but the pressure is constantly on dev teams to accelerate time-to-market, maintain stability, avoid outages, and remain reliable for customers.”
“At Armory, we believe deploying software safely and continuously at any scale is key to achieving your competitive advantage. We make this dream a reality by enabling development teams to confidently deploy their software every time; easily, reliably, safely, securely, and continuously.”
“Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service (CDaaS) offers multi-environment declarative deployment orchestration, advanced deployment strategies like Blue/Green and Canary out-of-the-box, integrations with observability and security tools, multi-tenant access control and, of course, extensive security, all with a GitOps experience developers love.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Armory from its competition? Daugherty affirmed:
“One of our major differentiators is our focus on deployment capabilities. Armory is designed to orchestrate the deployment process by automating deployment constraints and promotions. This removes manual steps that can often cause errors and delays in deployment while making it incredibly easy for developers to get their code to production.”
“Additionally, our platform provides advanced progressive deployment strategies like blue/green and canary with automated impact analysis at all stages of the deployment – not just production. This capability allows you to quickly deploy new versions of your software while ensuring the code meets quality standards and doesn’t cause a customer-impacting outage.”
“With Armory, you can keep up with the latest and advancing deployment trends and ensure your software remains secure and up-to-date, all with incredible uptime.”
Open-World Gaming As Applied To Product Development
As a former gaming employee, I felt compelled to ask Daugherty how open-world gaming experiences help startup leaders innovate their product development processes. She replied:
“1.) Onboarding – One of the biggest achievements an open-world game can have is a tutorial that doesn’t feel like a tutorial. You should be placed into a training ground and learn new abilities in meaningful, bite-sized ways before being let loose into the open world. This gets you primed and ready to experience the adventure without overwhelming you.
2.) Simplicity – In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for instance, each loading screen is a stark, minimal design that displays just enough information to be incredibly useful. Loading screens show you how many hearts and how much stamina you have, how many Divine Beasts you’ve freed, how many Korok seeds you have collected, and how many spirit orbs you’ve earned, all in simple visuals. Good UI is clear and easy to understand at a glance.
3.) Investigation – leave no stone unturned. You will find new and interesting vulnerabilities, traps, and ideas if you take the time to use the product, map out user flows all the way from your different marketing channels through your website and into sign-up, and watch how users engage with your product through their entire journeys.
4.) Purpose – Players need a sense of purpose, even in huge open worlds. That’s why there are so many side quests and mini-adventures in a good open world game. Similarly in good product design, you need to clearly show how your product is solving their problems and give users a sense of progression and accomplishment.
5.) Repeatability – There’s a reason why people played Breath of the Wild for 6 years and why Tears of the Kingdom became an immediate hit: they’re satisfying to play. When your product is satisfying to use, you create a fan who wants to continue to play, who wants to advocate for it at their org, and who wants to talk about it with the community.”
Customer Success Story
Upon asking Daugherty about a customer success story, she concluded:
“One customer success story that stands out is our work with Tesouro. Tesouro is a small, nimble team with only 15 engineers and some tech-savvy folks across the business. They needed a way to implement a successful deployment process using tools that gave them simplicity, consistency, compliance, and flexibility, ultimately leading to scalability right out of the gate.”
“The Tesouro team feared ending up in a place where they’re creating unnecessary technical and process-driven debt. They needed the ability to fail fast, fix issues quickly and minimize the impact of failure.”
“After adopting our CSaaS solution during the early phases of their company roadmap, Tesouro established faster development speed and higher deployment frequency, enabling more innovation and less impact from failures, as evidenced by their DORA metrics:
― Lead Time for Changes: Eight minutes. New features, enhancements, fixes and innovations can be deployed in as little as eight minutes
― Change Failure Rate: 4.5%, placing Tesouro’s development team in the Elite performing category
― Deployment Frequency: 4.3 deployments per day, which is well above the high-performance average of once-per-day
― Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): < 2 minutes, well below the average of 5 hours for most well-performing companies
― Internal + External NPS Scores: High. People love their jobs and our products!”
