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Our Core Values: The Key to Product Development That Drives Results

With three major software releases per year, our Product and Engineering teams must evaluate what to include in each release — balancing time, energy, and cost during analysis, research, design, and development.

This balance helps us decide how we spend time on developing new features vs. improving current features, and it also sets our Engineering team — and our resulting product developments — apart from others. But there’s yet another underlying factor that drives our product decision-making: our three core values.

Ensure customer success
This is our obsessive and unwavering commitment to making customers successful. We do everything in our power to help customers achieve their goals and satisfy their organizational missions.

Focus on results
At Coupa, we have a relentless focus on delivering results through innovation and a bias for action. Achieving real, tangible results is built into the DNA of our company.

Strive for excellence
We are committed to a collaborative environment infused with professionalism, integrity, passion, and accountability. We strive for excellence by raising the bar for ourselves and our customers.

Example #1: Redesigning our notification and announcement feature

Coupa’s applications require engineers to build notification and announcement features. Based on user requirements, we trigger these calls on each page load. For a few years after the notification and announcement feature was released, we monitored and measured its performance and usage, and we didn’t identify any critical issues. However, since continuous optimization is a key part of our product development lifecycle, we ultimately identified around 1.2 million calls per day with 90th percentile latency of 4,500 milliseconds. To us, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to innovate.

 

As we started carefully looking at customer usage patterns and how this feature was being used, we were able to redesign the notifications, changing the way these calls are accessed and triggered without impacting end users. So, instead of making calls on each page load, we made on-demand calls that were triggered by user actions. We also used AWS Redis Cache to cache certain data for faster retrieval without invoking database calls. This continuous optimization had mind-blowing results, reducing 1,200,000 API calls per day to 150,000 calls per day along with a decrease in response time from 4,500 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds. That’s an 87% reduction in calls and 95% reduction in response time!

 

By invoking our core value to focus on results, we were able to strive for excellence and ensure customer success by creating faster calls, which made their overall experience faster and more productive.

 

Below are two graphical representations of our work, the first showing the throughput before and after the optimization, and the second showing the latency.


Example #2: Implementing a Database Column Alert

Another example of a successful optimization was the implementation of our Database Column Alert framework, embedded within our product development lifecycle, which provides upfront information on capacity of each database column and generates alerts to act on. Engineers have observed many times that applications would break due to database columns reaching their limits, resulting in application downtime and loss of unrecoverable customer data during that downtime.

 

In some cases, recovering from this downtime ranges from a couple of hours to days depending on the size of data. This impact can result in huge financial loss to both the customer and to Coupa while processing millions of transactions per day. Our Engineering team knows that to ensure customer success, we have to take proactive measures to identify critical issues up front and avoid downtime and financial losses.

 

Above are just a few of our many success stories that highlight how our core values impact the decisions our Engineering team makes on a daily basis throughout the product development lifecycle.


By Audree Hall December 20, 2024
What an incredible week we had! Thanks to the passion and dedication of our amazing Coupa family, we celebrated Global Impact Week like never before! With 13 countries participating and 38 local-led events, we exceeded last year’s participation with over 500 employees stepping up to make a positive change. We truly could not have done this without each and every one of you—thank you! Here are some of the highlights that made this week so special:
November 14, 2024
Q & A from our Sales Team
November 1, 2024
Most people at Coupa say they love this company because of the great culture and joy of working with “The Village,” a term referring to our global workforce. This year, we are double-clicking on what behaviors make that culture thrive by creating nine “Leadership Competencies,” or ways we want to interact with each other regardless of your title, background, team, or length of time at Coupa.
September 19, 2024
I am Maggie Mae Joy, Senior Director of Product Management, supporting our Source-to-Contract and Spend Analysis product teams. I’ve been at Coupa since August 2013, based in Port Saint Lucie, Florida. I started my career out of college as a consultant supporting the SAP implementation of a global automotive warranty system for one of the big three. Leveraging that consulting experience, I joined Coupa as a Solution Architect, supporting our customers and partners in implementing the Coupa platform before transitioning into a Product Management role. What I enjoy most about working at Coupa is the opportunity to use my time here as a professional and personal growth platform. Coming to Coupa with a background in systems implementation allowed me to hit the ground running in my first position as a Solution Architect. Those skills and a deep passion for improving the user experience helped me take my career in a different direction and join the product team. Through Coupa’s incredibly supportive culture, I found mentors & leadership training that enabled my development in product management. As I’ve transitioned between supporting different product areas over the past eight years, I’ve continued to be challenged to expand my knowledge, learn new skills, and connect with more of the Coupa community.
August 27, 2024
Hello everyone, My name is Alex Moon, AI Trainer, at AI Center of Excellence in Foster City. I’ve been at Coupa since September 2022. I started my career as a Korean Knowledge Graph Curator, curating Korean language data to train Siri model, then went onto Tesla’s Autopilot team, organizing and annotating 3D image data to train Autopilot Neural Net. As an AI Trainer, the team and I analyze and organize Coupa’s $6T anonymized data to provide spending and saving insight, supplier recommendation, supplier diversity and track emission to meet the ESG goal, and fraudulent charge detection (Spend Guard). We are also working on output testing for LLM implementation to build Coupa’s Chatbot, Coupa Navi and Contract Intelligence platform. What I love the most about Coupa is working with extremely smart PM, Data Scientists, and Engineers to develop Coupa’s AI and GenAI product. I also really enjoy Coupa’s flexibility in working schedule and location as a remote-first company, and Coupa’s diverse team makes me feel at home while having ownership and responsibility of training our AI models.
August 9, 2024
In 2021, I joined Coupa as a dual student pursuing my International Business Bachelor’s degree. In my application process, Coupa stood out as the best option for many reasons: its international presence, with offices spread across different countries; its workforce, which is composed of people from all over the world, creating an amazingly diverse and open work environment; and finally, I recognized in Coupa many opportunities for both professional and personal growth and learning. Upon joining the company, I discovered that my impressions were accurate, and the welcoming and friendly environment I had anticipated were in fact real. As part of the dual study program, I rotated through various departments within the organization, including sales, digital marketing, and HR. Each of them showed me a different perspective into Coupa’s operations; I learnt their processes and took on responsibilities myself, which allowed me to develop several skills. This valuable growth was made possible through the guidance and support of many talented colleagues, who trained me during my time in each department.
June 25, 2024
In February, many of my colleagues in Bogotá and I had the chance to participate in the 1.5-day in-person experience program Coupa Camp. This program, led by Matt Dack, is designed for employees who have been in the company for a few months or less, making it a valuable step in the onboarding process and, for some of us, the last one. Why Coupa Camp At Coupa Camp, we didn't just learn about our company and its values; we also had the opportunity to forge deeper connections with our colleagues. Whether working in the office, hybrid, or remote like myself, the camp provided a perfect setting for us to interact and bond as Coupanians, fostering a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Coupa Camp was about learning about our company and each other and embarking on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Such activities can be daunting for introverted types like me, but Matt Dack created a safe and comfortable environment encouraging everyone to participate and share their unique perspectives. This emphasis on individual strengths and the value of diverse backgrounds was genuinely inspiring. First-Day Activities On the first day, we learned about our core values, culture, and company vision and the impact each of us makes on its success and that of our customers. The sessions were dynamic and exciting, with presentations, activities, and tasks that taught us the importance of listening and learning from everyone we work with, from colleagues to clients. We also gained a solid understanding of tools and resources to help us in our daily routines. We collaborated with people from different areas, hearing and learning from their voices about the aspects of their roles and departments. This experience was insightful, as we recognized how each of our roles is meaningful and how each of us contributes to Coupa’s success.
June 25, 2024
Hi all! My name is Ralph Barsi, and I’m a Sr. Talent Acquisition Coordinator here at Coupa. I began my journey as an intern with the Talent Acquisition team in the summer of 2021, an experience that remains one of the most rewarding I’ve had thus far in my career. Misconceptions Before Starting When I applied for the Coupa internship program, I did so with confidence because I was already familiar with the company name, and it was local to my home in East Bay. As a college student, I was initially concerned about working in the corporate world since it seemed so different from school and appeared cold, intimidating, uncompromising, and unwelcoming from the outside. However, I knew I had the required skills and capability to work for a prominent company like Coupa, and I was eager to prove myself and gain valuable experience. My Experience in the Village My experience at Coupa exceeded my expectations. From the first day, I felt comfortable and valued as a team member. My supporting manager guided me through the onboarding process and continued to check in regularly throughout the summer. I worked on meaningful projects and could see the impact of my actions, which gave me the confidence that I could contribute significantly to a large company like this. My well-rounded projects exposed me to several facets of Talent Acquisition, setting me up for success during and after my internship. The highlight of my summer was analyzing our job descriptions for implicit gender biases using a bias decoder program and presenting my findings to leadership. I owned the project myself from beginning to end and was trusted to articulate my findings to senior leadership. After Graduation After finishing school in January 2022, I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to return to Coupa as a full-time employee! I’m still here over two years later, and I can confidently say that my internship built a strong foundation for my career. I highly recommend the Coupa internship program to anyone considering it! You’ll meet many amazing, hardworking people and get opportunities to contribute immediately to the Village! It was a fantastic experience to see the impact of my work, and I felt proud to have contributed to the company's success. Overall, my internship experience at Coupa was invaluable and gave me the confidence to succeed in the corporate world.
June 20, 2024
Embarking on an internship can be a transformative journey filled with learning and growth, but also presents unique challenges. In this blog post, I will share my experiences as a Talent Operations Intern at Coupa, focusing on my challenges and how I overcame them. This narrative will be particularly relevant to interns navigating similar paths. These experiences are not only about personal growth but also about making substantial contributions to your team and advancing in your career Embracing the internship challenge When I started interviewing for Coupa, I was excited and nervous because I didn't know what to expect. I was enrolled in a Master's in HRM at the time and wasn't sure if I could manage both work and studies simultaneously. However, I kept going, and landing the internship was huge. Coming from Pakistan and being the first one amongst my classmates to land an internship seemed enormous to me. I knew my passion for HR and was ready to invest my time and effort into learning about the Talent Operations Intern role and its ins and outs. Back home, my parents were overjoyed seeing me managing work and studies in a foreign country alone; they couldn’t have been more proud. Without second thoughts, I accepted the opportunity and had the chance to work with amazing, talented people who were so supportive and kind. I couldn’t have felt luckier.
January 4, 2024
Coupa's Head of Talent in EMEA discusses how to be successful in interviews with Coupa's Leaders.
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