A Year of Change – How 2019 Realigned Runtastic

By Anna Nußbaumer, Talent Scout at Runtastic

At Runtastic we believe that the only constant in life is change, especially in our fast-paced industry. We’re quite used to continuously adapting and adjusting our products and the way we do things. Nevertheless, saying goodbye to some of our founders and products, finding a new CEO, and coming up with a new design for our Runtastic brand has been a lot to digest – even for us. With 2019 rapidly winding down, it’s the perfect time to reflect upon our recent developments.

We changed our approach: Focus

One of the things we realized was that we had too many things going on at the same time. Therefore, when we kicked off 2019 it was all about focus. We decided to fully dedicate ourselves to developing two of our main apps and had to gradually let go of beloved projects and apps.

To get to where we are now, we invested a lot of work and team effort. But the road was not always smooth. We faced some setbacks, like critical user feedback along the way. As tough as it was to hear, it gave us a better understanding of what our users care about as well as the chance to analyze what we could have done differently. 

We changed our look: Brand Alignment

Along with coming up with new ideas to improve our apps and services while gradually fading out existing products, creating a new brand for our users kept us quite busy throughout the past year. Even though aligning our apps with the adidas brand was the most significant change for the outside world, this has not influenced how we operate, tackle problems, or collaborate with our parent company. Since we were acquired by adidas in 2015, we decided it was time to make our connection to our parent company more visible.

Find out more about our adidas Running and adidas Training apps and what we have improved.

In alignment with the launch of our newly designed apps and our new app colors, we also had some fun with teal in our office.

We changed our set up: New Management Team

Our Management team went through major changes, as Mathis Gerkensmeyer joined as CFO, and three of our four co-founders decided that it was time for them to pursue new opportunities. While we were able to fill both Christian Kaar’s CTO role and René Giretzlehner’s Head of Data Engineering role internally, we found the perfect person to take over Florian Gschwandtner’s position in Silicon Valley: running enthusiast Scott Dunlap joined as the new CEO in May 2019. 

Scott not only understands how we roll and what works well, he also challenged certain structures. One result of this restructuring is that we can again welcome a woman into the management team. Our visionary colleague Christina-Anna Stenz has developed from her role as Head of Content Marketing to VP of Content. 

Does anything ever stay the same at Runtastic?

We love that Runtastic is a living entity and that almost nothing ever stays the same. This enables us to constantly improve ourselves as well as our processes. Still, with all the change that is going on, employees shifting roles or departments, or sometimes moving on to a different company altogether, we know that we can always count on a few things: our team spirit, getting to spend time with amazing, intelligent, and caring colleagues, and our passion for doing our best to provide our users with incredible products.

…and together we will keep evolving. We’re excited about 2020 and what lies ahead. 

Interested? Join the Runtastic family now!

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