Reviews: A Better Way to Work Together
Being a great analyst isn’t easy — you need to deeply understand a business, its data, and write high quality code. That means remembering how to use that complex window function, which tables in your warehouses are produced by which system, and the difference between “contracted” deals versus deal “contractions”. With all of this going on, it’s easy for mistakes to slip through.
The solution? Treating data like a team sport — reviewing each other’s work to produce the best output possible.
But analytics tools aren’t really built for this. Sure, you can check the code into Git, but it’s hard to review something inherently visual out of context. Most of us are left relying on informal asks and comment threads that aren’t enforced, recorded, or delightful.
Introducing: Reviews
Today, we’re introducing Reviews, a new way to (you guessed it) review work in Hex — let’s dive in.
Read on for all the details, or watch Caleb and Amanda from the Hex data team explain how they use Reviews:
Request a review when you want a second pair of eyes
Any time you publish a project, you now have the option to request a review to get feedback. You can add as many reviewers as needed, or add a group to review.
We’ve seen teams adopt this workflow seamlessly, adding a peer as a reviewer for bigger changes, and trusting their own judgement for smaller tweaks.
Protect business-critical projects with required reviews
You can also mark a project as requiring reviews, ensuring only approved changes make it in front of stakeholders. It’s a great extra check before publishing updates to an important project.
A delightful UI for reviewing
Reviewing data code is near-impossible unless you can see the context of what it produces. Our review interface is built to make this easy — a side-by-side logic diff highlights the changes that have been made, allowing reviewers to see both the code and the output it produces at the same time.
Reviewers can leave comments on cells with feedback, as well as request changes or approve the new version to be published.
Close the loop with stakeholders
Feedback and change requests often come from the stakeholders viewing a Hex app, but these users have traditionally been excluded from the review cycle, only able to comment on the changes once they’re live.
Reviews have been built with stakeholders in mind — anyone with view permissions on the project can be included as a reviewer, and can use a review to ask for more changes, or sign off on the outputs.
While we were here:
Keen-eyed Hex users might notice a few other improvements we made to our publishing flow:
Editors can now compare the current draft to the published version using our side-by-side logic diff, making it easy to see what’s changed!
We’ve made it easier than ever to view past versions of a project. Version History shows all the changes to a project over time, including links to past reviews, to help you keep an audit trail over time.
The publishing flow got a glow up, even when you aren’t using Reviews.
LGTM!
We have a bunch of customers who have been using Reviews for the past few weeks, and are loving it. We've also been using it ourselves internally, and our data team has been delighted at how easy and low-overhead it is to enforce or request reviews. Our Head of Enterprise Sales even requested (and received) a review on some pretttty technical changes the other day 🤠.
Reviews are available for all workspaces on our Teams and Enterprise plans. If that's you, you can try reviews now in any Hex project! Don't have an account? Sign up today for free.