Welcome to Katapult Pro: A Letter From Our Team

If you're reading this, your team has probably just signed up for Katapult Pro, or you're doing homework before you do. Either way, welcome! You'll get the login link and the kickoff invite soon. Before all that, we wanted to introduce ourselves, because for the next few months you're going to be working with us a lot, and we've learned a few things about how to make that go well over the past decade.

Most of what follows comes from Seth Miller, our rockstar solutions specialist and currently our interim support team lead. He's been at Katapult ten years and has worked just about every seat there is here: developer, field technician, project manager, designer, configuration specialist, software support, and team lead. When we asked him what new customers should know, he didn't talk much about features. He talked more about culture and approach.

Who you'll be working with

Katapult is an OSP engineering firm and software development firm rolled into one team in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. What started as a small team of three in 2008 has grown to about 100 today. We built Katapult Pro for our own engineering work before we ever sold it to anyone, and we still run our local engineering services out of the software. We’re always dogfooding our own solutions, so we often know about issues and feature requests before the phone even rings.

Since January, the company has been 100 percent employee-owned through an Employee Ownership Trust. The practical version of that: the person on the other side of your email owns a piece of the company, and nobody here is working toward an acquisition or an investor exit. Our business model only works if you keep finding the platform worth paying for, which is also why our agreements run month to month, your data stays yours, and if you ever decide to leave, we'll help you take it with you.

Seth's a good picture of who's on the other end of the line when you call our team. Ask him why he's stayed ten years and he'll tell you it's "just the focus on people." Ask his coworkers why they love Katapult, and they might just say “Seth.”

Our team takes culture and our core values extremely seriously—and you can call us out any time you think we’re not putting our money where our mouth is. When you work with our team, we expect you to feel like we brought maximum value to the table, and were willing to go more than halfway to help your team win.

The hard part about a new workflow

Here's the thing we'd rather say now than have you discover in month three.

"Katapult Pro is an amazing product, but it's also not a silver bullet. If you're expecting this solution to just take away all of your problems, it can, but it's also gonna take work and effort from your side as well. We'll come alongside you. We'll probably even prepare the way for you. We'll set things up for you, we'll ask the questions, but we need you to be involved, we need you to help make decisions, we need you to want it to succeed."

~Seth Miller, Solutions Specialist 

We've watched a lot of projects spin up over ten years of supporting Katapult Pro, and when one stalls, it's rarely because of technology. Usually the program got handed down from the top and the people using the software never asked for it, or the team is so far behind the demands of the client that there's no margin left to learn a new way of working. 

We'll work hard with you in either situation. But Seth's honest version, the one he'd tell you in a nice way, is that you have to put some effort in too. The platform's good enough that it might work anyway. If you want it to be amazing for your team or your clients, your team will need to create the margin to work ON the new workflow, not just work IN it.

Solving problems

Seth describes his support philosophy as pulling on threads. When something doesn't behave the way it should, he pulls until he understands why, including the big messes where the job data, a configuration, and the code are all a little bit wrong at the same time and the first fix doesn't end it. He's been known to help the support team triage a tough situation by leaving an internal note with sixteen paragraphs on what went wrong and why. The part you'll probably notice most comes after the fix, though.

"We might have pulled you out of the pit you just fell into, but what's the next one? Because of how we just helped you get out of this, we know you're going in this direction, and we know about these two other things you're probably gonna hit going that direction. So we try to give people a heads up. I don't want people to have to reach back out."

So when come across something that isn’t working the way you expected, provide a little extra context so we can also help you avoid the next few bumps.

One more thing worth knowing about the platform itself. Katapult Pro bends a lot of different ways, and Seth calls that a double-edged sword: there are sometimes so many ways to solve a problem that it overwhelms him, and he does this for a living. So if a setup doesn't cover what your program needs, let us know instead of quietly working around it. A lot of the time the capability's already there in a configuration you (or we!) haven't found yet. When it isn't, we can build it through custom services, or add it to our software roadmap. Every once in a while the honest answer will be that we're already building something more general than your exact request, which means you'll have to wait, but it also means you get a say in how the feature turns out.

What we expect

When we sit down for your kickoff, bring two things: what hurts and what you actually want. Seth opens every needs assessment listening for both.

"Hearing where they currently are. What's the pain you're experiencing, what do you wish was better, what's the thing that's most frustrating about what you're currently doing? And then also trying to hear their dreams. Where do you want to be, even if it's not currently possible within Katapult Pro? That always helps to be our North Star."

The pain tells us what to fix first. The dream is the part teams tend to keep to themselves because it sounds out of reach, and it's the part we most want to hear, because untangling a joint use or make ready program takes a while and we'd rather be working toward your version of done than ours.

Past that, give the platform a real owner and some real hours. The teams that struggle usually aren't short on talent so much as time and buy-in. We want to work with your champion. The customers Seth brags about are the ones who get one thing working and immediately ask whether the same trick works somewhere else, the ones who take the platform places we didn't take them. Some of them run so well we rarely hear from them, and when we finally do, the reaction in support is usually "wait, you did what?"

When you need us

We expect you to have a lot of questions. We have a full support team with people who care about you and the impact of your work.

"We have your back. If we're not responding to an email quickly enough, just call."

You can reach us at support@katapultengineering.com or 717.430.0910, and you'll hear from us at kickoff either way. We're glad you're here!

~The Katapult Team