Calendly’s Go-to-Market analytics team responds to business partner requests fast, but it was starting to come at the cost of investing in reproducible analytics and their own team stamina.
The analytics team was at a tipping point of wanting to continue to deliver on speed, but also start to build reproducible output as the company grew. They still needed to deliver on complex analytics quickly, and wanted an easy way to collaborate on analysis with business partners and build foundational data assets.
Faster workflows for the analytics team, and for stakeholders with AI prompts
With Hex, Kate’s analytics team became twice as more efficient than they had been working in BI tools. This was largely due to Hex’s multi-modal approach, where analysts could easily switch between SQL, Python, and AI prompts all in the same project. “Hex’s multimodal approach also helped from a hiring perspective — we didn’t have to have different tooling infrastructures to bring on more analysts,” Kate said. With Mode, the team was having difficulty with scalability and change management. Hex’s Magic AI also let the project managers that have basic SQL knowledge jump in to make edits by switching between their SQL skills and AI prompts. “They can use existing code, and when they get stuck, they can use Magic to tell it what they want to do, and then learn from the differences. It’s just such a faster way.”
Collaborating with stakeholders, and busy execs became easier
Hex made it easy for analysts to bring their business partners on board and collaborate. With easy permission toggles and in-line commenting on charts, business partners could see the progress on a report without going through complicated hoops. ”If there were too many points of friction for business users they may just entirely skip out on reviewing the data and charts altogether,” Kate said. Targeted sharing is also easy for busy execs. “If I want the CMO to see just one specific graph, I can copy its unique link and send it directly to her. She can pick up on the comments and we go from there.” Kate said.
A company-wide KPI glossary and new data storytelling
Kate’s team also built a Standardized Metric Library in Hex that is driving greater analytics alignment across the org. The Standardized Metric Library is part of their core documentation and houses definitions for multiple KPIs that the entire company can access. “We’re updating core metrics in one source which is driving consistency across functions and is especially valuable for those cross-functional metric checks.” To drive more data storytelling and share new insights, the team is posting summaries of their latest findings in Slack — and Hex reports make much easier to execs to follow along. “In a Hex report, there is the context, commentary, and the ability to investigate on the spot. Some teams still report out Tableau findings, but it doesn’t immediately mean the insights will be there or that viewers can explore.” They are getting a lot of positive c-suite commentary on the value of this channel and enabling institutional knowledge across the company.
With Hex, the go-to-market analytics team has become twice as efficient and is delivering on their broader goals of driving trust and use in their data.
“We’re regarded as top performers because the work we are doing is deemed more credible and more widely surfaced than before Hex," Kate said.
Hex’s multi-modal workflow lets analysts answer questions faster by switching between languages and AI. Hex’s visuals, text, and UI make it easy for anyone to see trends and make more informed decisions with context. The new Standardized Metrics Library documentation, hosted in Hex, lets the team tie-break reports with different numbers and, additionally, ramping new hires faster.
Overall, Calendly has been able to maximize the output of their decentralized data team model without moving to a centralized one. “I’m so grateful for this product.”
Kate Urquiola, Senior Manager, Go-to-Market Analytics
Calendly