Press release

Appfire Adds Top Talent to Executive Management Team

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Appfire, a leading provider of apps for software development teams, today announced the expansion of its executive management team with the appointments of Steve Rankel as its first Senior Vice President of Customer Research and Insights and Andy Boyd as its first Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth.

Prior to joining Appfire, Rankel led customer research and go-to-market strategies that helped accelerate breakout growth at numerous organizations, including Dictaphone (acquired by Nuance), ADF Designs (acquired by RIMI Group), Instant Information (acquired by Magnacomm), Credo Reference (acquired by Infobase), and several other successful ventures. For the past 16 years, he has served on the advisory board of the AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing & Management), where he has trained organizations as a speaker, instructor, and thought leader on frameworks and best practices for creating and conducting effective customer research.

In this new role, Rankel is charged with building a highly-skilled team that will engage our target audiences more deeply in order to fuel tighter product focus, data-driven decisions, refined messaging, and scalable organic growth. His team will establish global research frameworks and repeatable customer engagement standards for use across Appfire’s entire brand portfolio.

“Appfire continues to impress with its rocketship pace of delivering digital transformation apps within the Atlassian ecosystem,” said Rankel. “The level of energy and investment being made to ensure we’re making products that truly matter is inspiring. Appfire is creating a virtuous circle where everyone wins. I am honored to have been invited to be a part of this exciting journey.”

“As a seasoned authority in customer research, Steve has used skilled research science to fuel breakout growth for dozens of successful brands. His boundless curiosity for actionable audience insights is truly infectious. From day one, those traits will be laser focused on Appfire’s core value of ‘getting it right > being right’ as we continue to scale our most successful commercial apps,” said Mat Gauvin, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Appfire.

An early thought-leader in the rising field of ‘Enterprise Growth Hacking’, Andy Boyd joins Appfire after a successful seven-year career scaling cloud-first product portfolios for IBM.

Well-versed at transforming innovation into commercial success, Andy was part of the founding team that brought the IBM Watson (AI) platform to market, serving as the product management leader for the natural language processing portfolio. He then expanded into broader leadership roles at IBM, establishing the first Growth team for IBM Watson, and based on his success, launched and led growth teams internationally and across multiple business areas, including in the Cloud division and Quantum Computing.

“We’re excited to welcome Andy’s success and thought leadership in the emerging field of ‘Enterprise Growth Hacking’ into our rapidly growing Appfire family. His unique experience coaching elite product teams at IBM, and systematizing organic growth for multiple high-profile portfolios, will be priceless as we continue to scale Appfire’s growing collection of successful brands,” continued Gauvin.

In his new role as Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth, Andy will institute and lead both new disciplines for Appfire’s global portfolio. He will be chartered with elevating frameworks and growing teams of skilled product managers, delivering targeted, measurable product improvements, and driving more clear value into Appfire’s most successful apps.

“Appfire’s product portfolio has huge potential — a great team, loyal following, and impressive growth that’s built on the amazing Atlassian platform. I’m thrilled to be a part of the team and l look forward to driving continued growth in this next phase with Appfire,” said Boyd.

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About Appfire

Appfire is an award-winning Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner and has been a global authority in the Atlassian ecosystem for more than 15 years. Appfire’s popular Beecom, Bob Swift, Botron, Feed Three, Innovalog, and Wittified product brands comprise the largest portfolio of apps on the Atlassian Marketplace with 70+ purpose-built products and 100,000 active installations worldwide. Learn more at www.appfire.com.