CA

CA (CA Technologies) appears in Product Led Growth — The End User Era as the sales-led counterexample against which the author contrasts SendGrid’s product-led approach. The author ran the Application Performance Management product line at CA and uses the two companies’ resource allocation as the book’s sharpest illustration of how a GTM strategy reshapes a company’s org chart and budget: at CA roughly 15% of revenue went to R&D, versus 25%+ at SendGrid, where the PLG motion kept the company from needing a heavy sales investment. The two companies also ran very different team ratios — 20:1 engineers-to-PMs at CA (with a shared designer pool) against 6:1 at SendGrid (with a 1:1 designer-to-PM ratio) — producing, in the author’s words, “two very different product development experiences.”

Context: CA Technologies (formerly Computer Associates International) was a large enterprise software company known for mainframe and IT-management software, acquired by Broadcom in 2018. It is widely cited as an archetype of the traditional, sales-led enterprise software vendor.

Where this appears

• Product Led Growth — The End User Era — the sales-led foil to SendGrid; cited for its 15% R&D spend and 20:1 engineer-to-PM ratio as evidence that GTM strategy drives budget and org structure.