How New Relic uses AWS GameDay to accelerate its pipeline

Observability company New Relic provides engineers with near real-time visibility into the performance of software systems, from mobile apps and backend services to AI models. When the company needed a scalable way to move technical buyers from awareness to adoption, it turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS GameDay, a gamified learning event, is built on realistic job scenarios and workloads in temporary AWS environments. As an AWS Partner, New Relic built a catalog of AWS GameDay Quests for gamified learning events and deployed them as a co-sell motion with enterprise customers worldwide. In 1 year, the program influenced more than USD $50 million in pipeline across dozens of events. And over 50 percent of the events were tied directly to specific sales opportunities.

For software and site reliability engineers, credibility matters more than a sales pitch. Adopting a new observability tool means instrumenting infrastructure, changing workflows, and persuading colleagues that the disruption is worth it. “It’s hard to sell or market to engineers,” says Jemiah Sius, vice president of Market Strategy and Developer Relations at New Relic. “They need to experience it for themselves—no one can tell them anything about it.”

That challenge intensified as New Relic’s product catalog grew. In 1 year, the company launched over 20 new products and capabilities, a subset of which needed to be presented to both internal sales teams and customers’ engineering teams. Slide decks and webinars could introduce a feature, but they couldn’t replicate the experience of solving a real infrastructure issue with it. Without a mechanism that put practitioners directly inside the product, adoption risked stalling even in accounts where New Relic already had a foothold. New Relic needed a co-sell motion that could scale across dozens of customers globally, generate pipelines from new prospects, and close deals with existing accounts—all without requiring customers to stand up their own infrastructure.

Providing New Relic with the foundation it needed, AWS GameDay is a structured solution for running gamified, team-based technical challenges. The solution handles underlying infrastructure, participant access, scoring, and event management, removing the operational burden that would otherwise make custom immersive events impractical at scale. Connecting weekly with a dedicated AWS Partner solutions architect, New Relic shaped Quest content, identified target customer segments, and ran test deployments before each event. New Relic built a catalog of Quests that are tied to the company’s specific capabilities: observability for Kubernetes environments, frontend performance monitoring, and AI-connected workflows.

The motion operates both at the top and bottom of the funnel, and introductory Quests support pipeline generation. At the New Relic Now road show, a series of in-person events that occur after the company’s annual product launch, an AWS GameDay session followed each product keynote. Attendees heard about new capabilities and immediately used them to solve the simulated infrastructure challenges. “Give me 2–3 hours, and get your best engineers,” says Sius. “We’re going to spin up this challenge, showing you exactly what it looks like, and it’s going to be fun and interesting.”

The sessions also help accelerate opportunities. New Relic’s sales team identifies customer opportunities that would benefit from a tailored GameDay. Instead of listening to a traditional pitch, the customer’s engineers solve real issues with New Relic tools on AWS infrastructure. This requires no setup on the customer side. “Using AWS GameDay removes the barrier to entry,” says Sius. “You don’t need to deploy or install anything.”

The New Relic Now road show, anchored by AWS GameDay sessions at 16 of its stops, influenced more than USD $50 million in pipeline. Across the dozens of GameDays that New Relic ran in 1 year, over 50 percent directly linked immersive participant engagement to qualified commercial opportunities. And the remainder built technical credibility and qualified leads that can feed future pipelines. As a result, the company’s account teams gained a reliable mechanism for advancing deals more efficiently than conventional sales engagement. “AWS GameDay is a valuable tool within our tool belt, and we use it where it makes sense,” says Sius. “It absolutely helps us create a valuable user experience.”

This bottom-line impact led New Relic to make GameDay co-sell a standing line item in the annual budget. Beyond its top-of-funnel benefits for technical marketing teams, GameDay is a recognized sales motion that account teams deploy for new prospects and existing customers alike. It works in both directions: Individual contributors who participate carry firsthand product knowledge back to their organizations, creating bottom-up adoption pressure. And where enterprises have already standardized on New Relic, a tailored GameDay accelerates engineer onboarding, compressing the time between purchase and realized value. “Working alongside AWS to run GameDays helps us get the content out to show up for our customers in a way that makes sense,” says Sius.

New Relic provides a powerful cloud-based observability platform to help engineering teams monitor software performance.