Meeting the infinite demand for insight with Hex

Every data team knows the feeling: you're deep in the flow of solving a complex problem when the Slack notification pops up. "Quick question!" Your heart sinks a little. You want to be helpful, but these constant interruptions are killing your productivity.

This is the fundamental tension that data teams face today. You want to go deep – tackling the novel, complex analyses that create real business value. But you’re constantly pulled into a stream of reactive Q&A that fragments your attention and flow.

Self-service analytics has long promised to solve this problem, but standalone Business Intelligence tools introduce their own challenges. They “fragment” the analysts tasks between the BI tool and data science tools, and also require complex setup and ongoing maintenance. Worse, they can become a data graveyard — a sprawling mess of duplicate dashboards and conflicting analyses that leaves everyone more confused than before. How can data teams actually meet the infinite demand for insights?

Breaking the tradeoff

At Hex we've taken a different approach. Instead of forcing teams to choose between deep analysis and quick answers, we've built an integrated platform where deep analytical investigation and self-serve build off each other.

Thousands of data teams already use Hex to answer their business’s most critical questions. They choose Hex because it's flexible and fast: they can switch between SQL, Python and interactive visualizations, in one collaborative workflow.

And now with Explore, the magic is opened up to non-technical users, too. This builds off of what makes Hex great for data teams, letting them enable self-serve on their terms.

This can happen in a few ways within Hex:

Explore deeper, gnarlier insights

When data teams publish an app in Hex, they're not just creating a one-off dashboard, they're building assets that provide compounding value. Apps in Hex are deeply interactive, and can be a jumping-off point for an exploration.

Exploring from a Hex app truly expands what’s possible for what business partners can get out of self-serve. Of course you can serve your companies most important KPI’s, but with Hex, you can take it a step further and do things that are impossible in any other BI tool. Want to build a predictive churn model with a Python package to help explain a dip in revenue? No problem. Need to help marketing and sales with customer segmentation models? Can do!

Because Hex is built for gnarly data work, new possibilities for self-serve are unlocked. Anyone with the Explorer role can now use these trusted analyses as jumping-off points with our Explore features — making modifications like filters, new aggregations, or drill downs to answer their own questions. Our approach to self-serve blends the best of both worlds — a no-code, drag-and-drop interface backed by Hex’s full power.

Explore with better guardrails

Starting from an app is great — but sometimes you want to do something novel. Users can find a table and start visualizing, pivoting, and drilling to their hearts content.

But all of this freedom requires some guidance. Data teams can deploy curated tables or semantic models, empowering users to explore net-new questions while staying within guardrails.

Data teams can easily curate their data helping guide Explore users:

You’ve got dev schemas. Us too. Schema filtering lets you hide those, making things tidier and easier to navigate.

Endorsed statuses makes it easy to identify and prioritize trusted data.

Existing metadata from your warehouse and dbt flows right in providing valuable context.

When users inevitably hit walls or want to go deeper, they can easily loop in the data team without leaving Hex. That’s the beauty of having these workflows in the same pace - no more context-switching.

Exploring made easier with AI

We’ve also brought natural language into all of this in a powerful, integrated, intuitive way.

Our Ask Magic feature is a great starting point for users – they can simply ask a question and instantly see relevant existing apps - spotlighting your data team’s carefully crafted work.

If no existing analysis fits, Magic can generate a new Exploration from scratch, making it easier than ever before in Hex to get started with an open-ended question.

And all those data curation features we mentioned above? Turns out what’s great for humans is great for Magic too — giving Admins the ability to easily improve Magic.

Toward a more unified workflow for teams

By bringing everyone into one unified platform, we’re building a more efficient, scalable way for data team’s to deliver insights across the organization.

Want to see how other data teams are scaling themselves with Hex? Check out:

• Charlie Health is building data apps that combine data from TigerGraph, their Snowflake warehouse, and Qualtrics surveys to personalize treatment for their clients (tune in on Thursday to learn more about this!)

• Paytronix is using Hex for segmentation and scoring data live against Snowflake, to target the right customers for their loyalty programs

Interested in learning more about Explore? Get in touch!