APIGEE: PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

PRACTICES AND THE CHALLENGE OF

GROWTH

Case Analysis

Contents
Situation Analysis 3
Campbell and Bailyn Fixed Income Division 3
Campbell and Bailyn: The Boston Regional Office and Key Accounts Team 3
Changes in Performance Management System 4
Previous system 4
New System 4
Problem statement 4
Alternatives 5
Criteria for evaluation 5
Evaluation 5
Solution 6

1
Contingency Plan 6
Risks associated include 6
Backup 7
References 7

Situation Analysis
Apigee Technology Pvt. Ltd. is a technology-based company known for providing application
programming interface (API) based solutions that enables companies to securely share their
enterprise data and services to provide connected digital experiences. Apigee is diversified
into three main areas of operation: product, consulting and implementation making it a
category creator and market leader. Known for offering its client credible and trustworthy
advisory services, Apigee believes in rapid resolution of client needs and deliver products
that help “make every business a digital business.”
As a company, Apigee believes in empowering its employees through three critical values:
passion, a bias for action and respect. The employees are passionate about their work,
supportive of each other, creates friendly work environment and sometimes even go
beyond their regular duties. Hence, Apigee has been successful in continuously delivering
value and best practices to clients. They also have a flat organizational structure and
provides autonomy to its employees in decision making and encourages cross-functional

2
team work. So the employees have deep sense of commitment and unwavering loyalty
towards the organization.
Based on its core values, Apigee has developed employee-friendly human resource
practices. 3600 rating system, app-based performance management system, responsibility
driven growth hierarchy and generous stock options, excellent work life balance, liberty to
plan individual work day, high degree of self-evaluation, performance enhancement
coaching, flexible leave and travel approval policy are few to be mentioned. As a result of
this Apigee have been successful in achieving enhanced productivity, lower attrition, better
collaboration and effectiveness. But with the company growing at a fast pace, Mr. Grandhi
felt that the present flat structure of the organisation might not be feasible in the long run.

Problem statement
Now, as Apigee is growing rapidly and expanding its employee base, the top management is
concerned that the existing culture might not be effective and could lead to lower
productivity, insufficient benchmarks and possibility of loafing. The question facing Apigee is
whether to sustain the structure or introduce suitable institutional changes to tackle the
challenges posed by rapid growth.

Alternatives
The following alternatives can be considered:
● To maintain the status quo and continue with the same company culture with fast
growth. And try to find ways as to how would they guard against the complacency.
● To impart the structured culture in a short time frame through an institutional process
while maintaining a controlled autonomy and freedom among the employees. A
hierarchical change will be implemented.
● To impart a semi-hierarchical structure in a gradual process while maintaining
innovative thinking among employees and autonomy among experienced members
and to maintain the emphasis on imbibing Apigee’s organisational values by the new
employees.

Criteria for evaluation

To test the above listed alternatives, the following array of parameters can be used:
● Maintain organisational values
● Maintain and improve productivity of employees
● Extent of structural change
● Ease of adoption for employees
● Speedy responsiveness towards clients demands

Since the main reason for Apigee’s success was its focus on organisational values of passion,,
bias for action and respect hence, maintaining organisational values has been accorded the
maximum weight of 30%. Since Apigee has always been employee centric company,
maintaining productivity of employees is given 25% weightage. Similarly, keeping the culture
of Apigee in mind, extent of structural change, ease of adoption for employees and speed of
response to client demands (agility for client response) have been assigned weights of 20%,
15% and 10% respectively. Alternatives are evaluated based on the weights given to each

3
parameter and how the parameter impact the alternative (1 – positive impact, 0 – neutral
impact and -1 – negative impact)

Evaluation

The table above shows the different weighted alternatives against the Parameters in the
previous section. To decide the choices, it would be beneficial to assign different weights to
the five parameters.
● The main concern is to maintain organisational values as it continues to grow rapidly.
A semi-hierarchical structure would allow the new members to imbibe the core values
of passion, bias for action, and respect in a standardised setting which would not be
possible in the other two alternatives.
● A semi-hierarchical structure, implemented gradually, will boost employee
productivity. Maintaining status quo will lead to fall in productivity with increasing
employee base.
● The hierarchical structure imposed in a short time will have the biggest extent in terms
of structural change followed by the semi-hierarchical structure. Maintaining status
quo will have no impact on the structure.
● Maintaining status quo will be the easiest for the employees to adopt while they will
be the most reluctant to adopt a highly hierarchical structure.

4
 ● The current structure allows the employees to respond most quickly to client demands
while a hierarchical structure leads to considerable delay given the approvals to be
taken on different levels.
Given the above mentioned criteria, we see that the third alternative has the maximum score
of all the given options.

Solution
For Apigee, the best alternative would be to implement a semi-hierarchical structure in a
gradual process while maintaining innovative thinking among employees and autonomy
among experienced members and to maintain the emphasis on imbibing Apigee’s
organisational values by the new employees. In semi-hierarchical structure following changes
can be made:
● Create new dedicated department for HR in the organisation
● Molecule Leads along with Senior members are added to better manage the growing
workforce.
● Horizontal interactions between directors of different functional divisions of company
● More responsible people would be given designation of senior members who will be
given task of coordinating the members
● HRBPs assign to functional division
● Two step travel approval system before and after trip completion
● Fixed number of working hours with flexible timing
● Regular training sessions to imbibe organisational spirit and culture in employees

References
● Designing Work Organisations ; IIM Lucknow ; Prof. Ranjeet Nambudiri
● https://www.hbs.edu/ ; visited on 19th Novemeber 2019 ; 11pm