Ramp

Challenge: Influencing strategic decisions across the org

When Ian Macomber, Ramp’s Head of Data and Analytics Engineering, first arrived at Ramp, the company lacked a single source of truth. Even basic questions like, “who are our customers? and “which accounts are delinquent?” were hard to answer. As a first step, Ian guided the team to build data foundations — starting with customer definitions, multi-touch attribution models, and analysis that explained sales fluctuations.

But Ian’s ambitions were bigger: use data to explain why changes happen and help show stakeholders what to do next. He coached his team of analytics engineers and data scientists who were embedded in product, engineering, and design pods: “Your success is tied to your pod’s goals — and it’s up to us to deliver the ‘so what’ and ensure action follows.”

To influence strategic decisions, the data team brought on Hex to help analysts do advanced work tied to business goals and share it across the business.

Embedding data where teams work

Ramp's data team doesn't just build apps, they place them in the tools that their colleagues already live and work in. For example, Hex dashboards appear directly inside of Salesforce, giving sales reps access to real-time pipeline data. Product teams open Notion pages that display embedded Hex apps alongside project notes.

Meeting people in their workflow scales decisions far better than screenshots in slide decks. As Ian puts it, "Being able to scale decisions is not just about having a great data product, but putting it into places where people are actually looking and working every single day." This approach helped the data team scale decision-making across the organization.

Prototyping and iterating fast on data products

In traditional analytics engineering, a simple data question can bounce between teams for days. At Ramp, it could at times take two full days to deliver an answer; with Hex, those feedback loops shrink to hours. Product managers and data scientists now co-create inside the same Hex notebook — sketching ideas, refining metrics, and seeing results in real time.

"The number of iterations you can get in per day is extremely high," Ian says. That pace speeds learning and keeps teams from prematurely locking pipelines into production. "I've changed my mind about how much needs to be production-grade upfront — Hex lets us prove what works before we fully commit."

Ian's experience reinforces a key lesson: not everything has to be production-grade from the start. Getting to the right decision requires iteration, and Hex enables that rapid cycle of refinement and feedback.

Unifying data across multiple sources: Sentiment analysis isn’t just for ML specialists anymore

Hex is helping the data team push new boundaries. “Our machine learning engineers are building the coolest stuff imaginable.  What I am equally excited about, however, is what we can enable an junior analytics engineer to do,“ Ian said.

“If you think about things like extracting sentiment analysis from a whole bunch of emails or Zendesk tickets with LLMs — four years ago there were probably 150 people who could build this from scratch.  Right now, every analytics engineer on our team can do this in SQL and dbt without leaving Snowflake,” he continued.

In Hex, an analytics engineer built a sentiment analysis that people can explore in a Customer Feedback 360 data app. This is possible by bringing together data from Zendesk, customer surveys, Datadog, and more into a sentiment-analysis pipeline written entirely in SQL inside Hex.

Work that once demanded a specialist ML engineer now lands with an analytics engineer operating right in Snowflake. As Ian puts it, “The person who built this wasn’t our most crafted machine-learning engineer. It was an analytics engineer expanding the surface area of what they could build.”

With Hex, the team unifies structured and unstructured data — emails, call transcripts, logs, even images — and then transforms those insights into data products, all without sacrificing governance or scale.

Impact: Analytics that drive action, not just answers

Ramp's data team is no longer just reporting on the past, they're shaping what comes next. Instead of being a service-based org, the ROI of Ramp’s data team comes from the actual internal and customer-facing product they build. With Hex, they've built a culture where all data professionals move fast, work alongside decision-makers, and ship data products that live where business happens.

Whether it's unifying data sources, embedding insights in everyday tools, or enabling non-specialists to build what once required a full ML team, Hex has helped Ramp transform data into a strategic advantage.

Read Ian’s tips to drive influence across the org.