“What would you do for a developer?” could be the name of a parlor game for enterprise managers. Hypothetical answers might be, “Crawl through broken glass,” “Swim with sharks” and “eat a diet of snails and snake blood for a month.” Such is the market for highly skilled developers. So when a company is able to easily attract developers, we like to pick their brains to find out what’s in their secret sauce.

Jonathan Sparks, director of Product Management at ServiceNow, Inc., spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the company’s pull for developers. He said that exploratory freedom and leeway has a lot to do with it — and it also leads to interesting business solutions for customers.

Sparks spoke about a session with a speaker from the New York Stock Exchange who hires only web developers; he said their expertise in customer-facing business solutions makes them inspired problem solvers in the IT realm.

Sparks said ServiceNow has seen interesting results from shaking up the traditional roles of back-end admin IT folks and front-end web developers. “So taking IT admins, making them developers, taking web developers, breaking the chains from that kind of low-level engineer that they’re so dependent on. That’s kind of where we see our sweet spot right now from the developer perspective,” he explained.

Giving the people what they want

Sparks said that ServiceNow’s formula for success is actually surprisingly simple: It just listens to users. He recounted how the company used an integration with Twitter to take a vote on what it needs to offer more of to customers — DevOps, testing or UI.

“It was 60 to 65 percent UI development tools,” he said. Right after that, he found his colleague and said, “Hey, did you see that result? Can you work harder, faster on service portals?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by  SiliconANGLE