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HOW PRODUCTBOARD HAS INCREASED DATA TEAM PRODUCTIVITY BY 80% WITH SELECT STAR



‍Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps
companies efficiently develop and deploy their products. Over 5,000 brands rely
on Productboard to build roadmaps, prioritize features, centralize feedback,
validate ideas, and integrate workflows all in one place to get clever products
off the drawing board and into the market.

80%
Productivity gain for data team
2x
Faster data analyst onboarding



Industry:
B2B SaaS
Company size:
500+ employees
Integrations:

Integrations:



CHALLENGE

Struggling to find data across different domains

As a company that helps customers make smarter, more streamlined decisions on
software product development, Productboard needed to do the same—and becoming
data-driven was the first step. To support their growing analytics effort,
Productboard needed a centralized data warehouse to store data that was
currently siloed throughout sales, marketing, product, and engineering. To that
end, Engineering Manager Adrian Toman helped lead the creation of a data
warehouse to serve as a single-source-of-truth for everyone at Productboard—but
something was missing.  

“Since we’ve grown, the data warehouse has too, and now people don’t always know
where the data field is coming from,” says Adrian Toman, Data Engineering
Manager. “People simply know their (business) domain, but if they want to pull
data from other domains, it’s hard. They need to know where to look and how to
access it.” 


OVERBURDENED DATA ENGINEERING TEAM

When users couldn’t find what they wanted, they turned to Adrian and his
five-person engineering team for answers. “We were stumped by questions and were
spending significant time looking for answers,” explains Adrian.  As the go-to
team for data inquiries, they are the primary resource for users with data
requests, but they were looking for datasets and reports that weren’t
necessarily created by their team. 

Without a way to easily understand data lineage and provenance, they had to
painstakingly make the connections themselves. They were fielding as many as 50
questions a week through Slack, and it was becoming a major distraction for
Adrian’s small team. The hours spent tracking down ad-hoc questions and context
slowed the team down and prevented them from working on other important
initiatives.


OPAQUE DATA PIPELINE

To support the company’s increasing data consumption, Productboard was hiring
data analysts, and it was up to Adrian and his team to get them up to speed on
the data architecture. 

“Training new data analysts and our citizen data analysts throughout the company
about our data model was difficult mainly because we have quite a lot of tables
(more than 3,000) in our data warehouse. We are combining the data from multiple
domains and tools to create our data mart, and explaining this model and process
took a lot of time. As a result, data analyst onboarding was taking 2-3 months
in most cases.” notes Adrian.

Productboard needed self-service capabilities so that employees could find the
information and answers they needed across domains without getting lost or
leaning on the engineering team. What they needed was a data discovery tool with
a robust and fully-automated data catalog.

“The choice was obvious; Select Star was one step ahead in all the important
categories compared to other vendor solutions on data cataloging. It fits our
needs very well,”

Adrian Toman

Data Engineering Manager




SOLUTION

Select Star for data cataloging

As engineers, Adrian’s team wanted to have their documentation linked to their
data models to develop their ETL pipelines—and typical documentation tools like
Confluence or Google Docs weren’t good options for them. So the next
consideration was if they should build their own custom data catalog. But doing
so would have been a massive undertaking requiring more time and resources than
Adrian’s team had available. 

So they opted to evaluate existing data catalog tools in the market instead -
both open source projects and vendor solutions.

It had to meet certain criteria: easy to maintain, priced reasonably, and user
friendly. The catalog also had to connect their existing data stacks, including
Looker and Snowflake.

Toman’s team went on all-hands-on-deck to research all the available options and
compare their features and pricing. Three catalogs made it to the final round of
deliberations: two commercial, and one open source. The open source option
didn’t include the Looker to Data Warehouse lineage, and the hosting and
upgrades that would be required to have data lineage would be a major time sink
for the team. When they compared the two remaining commercial products in terms
of the features that mattered most to them, they had to make their decision.

“The choice was obvious; Select Star was one step ahead in all the important
categories compared to other vendor solutions. It fits our needs very well,”
says Adrian.

During the trial period, Select Star automatically cataloged all tables in
Productboard’s Snowflake data warehouse and transformed how Adrian and his team
work with Productboard data.

Furthermore, as more data consumers at Productboard start getting onboarded to
Select Star, the main use cases became the following:

1. FILL IN DOCUMENTATION GAPS

The engineering team first used Select Star’s data catalog to identify where the
data warehouse lacked necessary descriptions and metadata, so they could
efficiently locate and correct those gaps. Now that their data warehouse is
well-documented, it serves as a rich information resource that facilitates data
discovery and analysis for everyone at Productboard. Additionally, Select Star
has added automation to the documentation management process by pulling in
existing documentation and suggesting missing documentation automatically based
on lineage.

2. UNDERSTAND DASHBOARDS WITH UNDERLYING DATA

Users no longer have to wonder where the data in their Looker visualization tool
came from. Select Star's automated column level lineage makes it simple for
Productboard to track metrics from dashboards back to their source data,
providing important context and clarity into what metrics actually mean. Select
Star’s lineage also makes it easy to understand what dashboards are downstream
of which tables, and do impact analyses for potential changes to the data model.

3. WORK FROM A SINGLE-SOURCE OF TRUTH

With the data catalog serving as the definitive entrypoint into data, Adrian’s
team doesn’t have to waste time looking for specific data and sideline other
priorities during the search. They have a single-source-of-truth, plus a roadmap
to find exactly what they want. 

4. EXPEDITE DATA ONBOARDING

New analysts get up and running significantly faster because Select Star makes
the complexities of the data warehouse easy to understand. Productboard is
putting fewer resources into onboarding, but seeing new hires ramp up in less
time. 

5. ENABLE SELF-SERVICE ANALYTICS

Across the company, users are starting to embrace self-service analytics instead
of always relying on Adrian’s team to produce reports.

“When we’re answering data questions on our internal Slack channels, our first
thought is ‘Can we use Select Star to answer this question quickly?’ and then
point people in the right direction to look for it in Select Star.” says Adrian.

“We got 30-50 questions before, and now it’s close to 10 a week—leaving our data
team with more time to do higher value work.”



As Productboard grants data access to more business stakeholders including
product managers and operations analysts, Adrian envisions Select Star taking an
important role of making it easy to find insights of domain data and act upon
them. It also allows his data engineering team to remain at a similar size even
as the company (and data warehouse) grows rapidly. 


RESULT

Engineering team estimates recovering 80% more time with Select Star

Productboard is already seeing so many positive changes with Select Star. The
most obvious improvement is how they dramatically improved efficiency from the
reduced number of questions in the data team Slack channel. “We got 30-50
questions before, and now it’s close to 10 a week—leaving our data team with
more time to do higher value work.” 

Toman projects that his engineers will be more productive than ever now—with up
to 80% more time to allocate to other important projects. At the same time, they
can now quickly onboard more data analysts to keep data-driven insights flowing
to the company’s growing workforce. 


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How Productboard has Increased Data Team Productivity by 80% with Select Star
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