Optimizely Fuels Developer-First Momentum, Appoints New CTO

Lawrence Bruhmuller joins to champion product and engineering team success

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Mar 10, 2020, 09:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, March 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Optimizely, the world's leader in progressive delivery and experimentation, announced the appointment of Lawrence Bruhmuller as Chief Technology Officer, based in Optimizely's headquarters in San Francisco. Having successfully led engineering teams previously at WeWork, Clearslide, and Symantec, Bruhmuller joins Optimizely's senior leadership team to further drive the company's business momentum, and enable the most innovative product and engineering teams to deliver better code, apps, and experiences in today's high-velocity, customer-centric world.

Optimizely provides an end-to-end platform to build, test, deploy, iterate, and optimize across the customer journey. The company's solutions for product and engineering teams are known for enterprise-grade configurability, scalability, data streaming, and analytics capabilities. Optimizely's Progressive Delivery and Experimentation Platform includes Optimizely Web, Optimizely Full Stack, and most recently its free feature management tool, Rollouts. Optimizely empowers the most innovative businesses to move quickly with confidence, and validate their assumptions with real user data and statistical rigor.

The use of feature flags and A/B tests within product development are quickly becoming industry best practices for brands that want to move fast, and with confidence. In fact, according to a recent Harvard Business Review survey, firms that adopt A/B testing introduce new products at a 9-18 percent higher rate than those who do not experiment. Optimizely has observed 158 percent growth year over year in feature flag adoption, and similar high demand for Full Stack. The company is dedicated to doubling the number of new Full Stack features in the next 12 months, helping further unleash the potential of product and engineering teams and improve today's developer experience.

"Developers and engineers have never been more important to the success of a company, and Optimizely's vision marrying progressive delivery with experimentation is the only approach that can enable faster product releases with greater confidence," said Lawrence Bruhmuller, CTO at Optimizely. "I'm thrilled to join the industry leader helping the world's most innovative brands to ship software quickly and figure out what's really working, whether it's a new feature, optimizing an existing feature, or improving the experience 'under the hood.'"

"With rapid growth of our Full Stack platform and Feature Management capabilities, Optimizely is the right partner to fuel today's product-led companies," said Optimizely CEO Jay Larson. "Lawrence's stellar track record fostering a culture of innovation and operational excellence will help us extend our leadership in the progressive delivery and experimentation market. He also brings experience in building and operating large scale teams. I am confident that Lawrence will help us drive even better engineering performance and will help us make a strong team stronger."

Lawrence joins the senior leadership team responsible for driving Optimizely's developer and engineering innovation portfolio, alongside Chief Product Officer, Claire Vo, who was recently promoted from her role as Senior Vice President of Product, Jon Noronha, the company's new Vice President of Product, recently promoted from Senior Director, Product, and Pete Koomen, Optimizely's co-founder.

Optimizely's ecosystem of customers includes 25 percent of the Fortune 100 and strategic integration partners such as Segment, Amplitude, Pendo, Atlassian, Heap, and others. Leading brands, including Alaska Airlines, ClassPass, Compass, IBM, Intuit, SoFi, Square, Starbucks, Zipcar, and many more use Optimizely's platform to develop the products that matter most to their customers and launch new features confidently.

ABOUT OPTIMIZELY
Optimizely is the world's leader in Progressive Delivery and Experimentation. Its platform includes technologies for modern software development, such as feature flags, A/B testing at scale, AI-powered personalization, and streaming analytics. Millions of experiments and feature flags have been run on our platform to understand what works - and what doesn't - eliminating guesswork. The world's greatest companies choose Optimizely to power their product development and experimentation teams, including Visa, H&M, StubHub, IBM, Atlassian, BBC, and many more.

SOURCE Optimizely