Success Story
What would you do with nearly a month of time saved every year? Learn how a fast-growing organization accelerated efficiency by automating product analytics with Data Clymer and Sigma.
Overview
Challenge
Vertical IQ had outgrown its data management approach, but didn’t have the in-house expertise to implement automated product analytics, reporting, and dashboards.
Solution
After deploying a Data Clymer and Sigma Quick Start Package, Vertical IQ began delivering automated, best-in-class dashboards and usage reports to customers in weeks.
Data Technology Stack
Key Results
Delivered customer-facing dashboards 9X faster with Data Clymer than going it alone
Gained immediate value with hands-on cloud data engineering support
In just 8 weeks, went from siloed data and spreadsheets to centralized, automated product analytics
Saved 3½ weeks of manual labor annually, enabling the team to focus on strategic analysis
The Full Story
Vertical IQ helps customers win, grow, and retain more business by providing in-depth industry insights through a robust intelligence platform. The fast-growing organization has tripled its sales volume over the last eight years and now serves more than 60,000 users across 500+ clients.
Insights are at the heart of Vertical IQ’s business. However, its data platform, strategy, and reporting efforts were lagging behind. The organization’s data was siloed, spread across various tools and platforms. Product usage reports were a key differentiator for the organization, but compiling them was a time-consuming process with high potential for human error.
And the more the company grew, the more challenging data management became.
Solving a Longstanding Product Analytics Problem
Drake Branson, Director of Product, successfully led various functions at Vertical IQ before moving to the newly created product team. As the team leader, Drake has a lot on his plate. He owns and manages the product roadmap, oversees development efforts, triages feedback and feature requests, defines product success metrics, and analyzes customer usage. In addition to that, he drives all product marketing efforts.
One project Drake spearheads is the monthly and quarterly production and delivery of customer-facing usage reports. Previously, this task required significant manual effort from multiple team members. More specifically, it involved data exportation from various programs, spreadsheet manipulation, data cleaning, design work, and manual distribution.
Altogether, the mundane task consumed more than 350 hours per year.
“We could no longer put band-aids on the problem. We needed to put in the work to add value for our customers and develop data management processes that would scale with our ongoing growth."
—Drake Branson, Director of Product
Moving to a Modern Data Stack
Drake noticed that manual reporting was consuming a significant amount of time and causing headaches for everyone involved. To address this issue, he started looking into technologies that could automate the reporting process. Deploying a modern data stack and business intelligence (BI) tool would enable them to streamline the data into a manageable format. This, in turn, could boost staff productivity, improve data accuracy, enhance the report’s visualizations, and provide long-term operational efficiencies.
Following a technology evaluation, Vertical IQ selected:
- Snowflake, a cloud data platform for data storage and query processing
- Fivetran, a data pipeline automation tool to integrate data sources with cloud destinations
- Sigma Computing, a cloud-based reporting and BI platform
Next came the hard part: implementation. To deploy the stack, several steps would be necessary, including architecture planning, tool provisioning, data integration, and dashboard development. But without a dedicated in-house data team, implementing dashboards seemed like an unattainable goal.
No Data Team? No Problem.
Drake knew that trying to figure out the technology on his own wouldn’t be efficient. Sigma suggested hiring a data consultant to get things up and running and recommended Data Clymer. Drake selected a Sigma quick start package and within weeks, the new dashboards and visualizations were receiving praise from the CEO and customers.
“If we hadn’t hired Data Clymer, we would have a very simple dashboard that didn’t move the needle much, and it would have taken us nine months to get there. Data Clymer helped us set everything up once the right way, accelerate production of our Sigma dashboards, and build automation with Snowflake.”
—Drake Branson, Director of Product
Data Clymer took care of hands-on data engineering and data visualization services such as:
- Validating the data connection
- Reviewing data to ensure it was flowing into Snowflake
- Implementing best practices for data modeling
- Creating a highly polished customer-facing dashboard in Sigma
In addition, hiring a data consultant enabled Vertical IQ to benefit from cost-effective expertise that was fast, flexible, and tailored to their specific needs.
“Having help from an expert saves me so much time. Data Clymer jumps in and mitigates any issues, but there haven’t been many. Sigma has a solid, reliable dashboard. It just works.”
—Drake Branson, Director of Product
Advice for Other Product Leaders
Drake has learned a lot about rolling out a modern data stack and automating product analytics. As a result, he shared a few words of advice for other product leaders facing a similar situation.
Lean on experts
“Leaning on the team at Data Clymer has been a huge piece in getting our modern data stack up and running. In just eight months, we went from no data strategy to a single source of truth and an automated dashboard that we can embed in our customer-facing products.”
Start small
“We decided to start with one project: improve our usage reporting process. We deployed a starter package to get things up and running and quickly saw results. There was literally no downside. Now, everyone is breathing a sigh of relief.”
Collaborate and learn
“Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I’ve learned so much through this process because I ask. Data Clymer is really good at what they do and helps me learn the right way to do things.”
Hire Data Clymer
“I’m so thankful to have Data Clymer as a resource, I would say that 100 times over. The team has made my job so much easier and made it possible to get a new data stack realized and into production.”
Product Analytics Results
The Vertical IQ team is saving more than 140 hours of manual labor annually—and that’s just by having the dashboard up and running. They haven’t yet adjusted their distribution processes, which will drive further improvements.
And the value goes far beyond time savings. For example, specific benefits include:
- Single source of truth: Instead of pulling data from multiple locations, the team brought in tables and can now rely on one single source of truth.
- Improved data quality and accuracy: As a result of eliminating manual labor, the potential for human error was also eliminated.
- Improved visuals: The data is presented in a more visually appealing and engaging manner, which adds value to both customers and the executive team.
- Faster insights: The dashboard includes baked-in comparison metrics, which make it fast and easy to understand high-level trends and insights.
“The leadership team loves it. Our CEO is big into visualizations and seeing what we could do with charts has been a big hit. Customers have actually thanked us and told us it’s much easier to understand key insights at a glance.”
—Drake Branson, Director of Product
Looking Ahead
As Vertical IQ continues to advance its data maturity, the organization is exploring more ways to leverage its modern data stack to improve business outcomes.
For example, Drake and the team are evaluating projects including:
- Evolve usage reports to deliver more insights and value to customers
- Develop a deeper understanding of customer behaviors and preferences based on data usage
- Leverage insights to implement enhancements to the Vertical IQ product and platform
- Integrate additional data sources to develop internal dashboards for goal tracking
“Data Clymer has been one of the best groups I’ve ever worked with. They’re super responsive and easy to work with. Not only did we quickly accomplish what we wanted to get done, we set a goal and surpassed it.”
—Drake Branson, Director of Product
Accelerate Your Analytics Implementation
Implementing a new analytics system can be difficult and time consuming, especially if you don’t have the resources you need. Get up and running fast with Data Clymer’s data engineering and data visualization services. Contact us today to find out how we can accelerate your analytics implementation.
