Challenges

• Gap between Professional Services reports and Engineering output in the platform
• Professional Services had reached the limitations of their existing toolset
• Tab and table syndrome - every new metric was being delivered to customers as either a new table on existing tabs, or as a new tab complete with more tables and graphs.
• Misaligned UX for graphs created natively in the BI tool vs. what had already been built.

Outcome

• Integrated a BI tool into the web platform to close the gap between what PS was showing customers and what was in the platform. Leverage the available functionality.
• A delivery mechanism for custom and one off reports previously delivered as PDFs
• Allowing for new views across multiple projects in an insight focused unified interface
• Went from 5 tabs with countless tables to a 2 page template design that can house countless reports.
• Free up engineering capacity from playing front end keep-up to focusing on adding value through new backend processes and metrics
  • PS requests became invasive to the product roadmap. Their ability to iterate quickly and put metrics in front of customers (hand-weeded using Excel) made us beholden to deliver that feature in product.
  • By the time it was released, customers were interested in the next big thing.

Phase 1

Reports - a white label embed

Reports with additional CSS and generic filters

Adding the first report. In order to test the functionality of a BI tool integration we added a single tab which took users to the Reports page. This page was a single page white-label embedded of a Mode Analytics report. Each user saw the same report, showing data from within their organization. This feature launched with a single report drawn from a new data lake which was populated by data synced from Sema's database, as well as a script generated csv that Professional Services generated.

Over the next few months, the report continued to grow — numerous graphs and queries, a sidebar for report navigation, and tooltips — all with minimal engineering resources. The page was extended in collaboration between professional services (who were now preparing custom reports in the same BI tool) and the product & design team (just me). I added queries and styled the report using the theming and html/css editor native to the BI tool. The embedded reports and data lake proved a big win as engineering resources were limited and precious. It became the most visited page, had the highest engagement, and user feedback was clear — more of this.

Phase 2

Engineering, Product and Professional Services all agreed on the success of this integration, but we began to notice a few issues;