Last week, we launched Secoda’s first Customer Advisory Board. Each quarter, we’ll be bringing together a group of data leaders and practitioners from around the globe to share best practices, get to know each other, and provide an open forum for product feedback and discussion. 

Read on to find out how we’re doing this, why we’re doing this, and how the first meeting went.

Background

When Secoda started about 2.5 years ago, Andrew and I spent the first 4 months of the company’s life simply talking to the people we wanted Secoda to serve, identifying the biggest problems they were facing, and how Secoda could help. This was also deep into COVID lockdowns, so the Secoda team was working virtually, spending a lot of time on Google meet and Facetime getting to know people in data. 

We discovered early on how important the feedback loop is between our team and our customers, and as the company grows, we are always looking to find new ways to keep in touch with our customers, provide as much value as we can, and keep customers at the forefront of the decisions we’re making, both related to product and across the board at the company.

With the announcement of our Series A and our new monitoring features, and the company growing faster than ever, we decided to launch a new initiative to connect with our customers at Secoda. Last week we launched Secoda’s first Customer Advisory Board, a group of Secoda power-users and data practitioners across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Why we’re doing this 

We’re bringing together data leaders and practitioners from around the globe for a few reasons:

1. Build a community for Secoda customers to learn from each other

We’re constantly blown away by the creative ways data teams are using Secoda, and optimizing the product for their use cases and teams. Secoda is flexible, and there are many different ways to organize yourself on the platform. Whether your team has gone all in on documentation and organization, or leaned into complex and intricate API workflows - sharing wins, learnings, and lessons with other users sparks ideas for everyone in the room.

2. Create a forum for product feedback

As we develop our product, we know that the key to success is listening to our users. We use user feedback as our compass that guides us to create better experiences, and who better to tune into than our own Secoda power-users? Creating a forum for some of our biggest power-users to share their experiences, wins, frustrations, and creative solutions helps not only our team, but every other user who is part of the discussion.

3. Share future improvements and our roadmap

We ship fast. We’re releasing new features every week. Getting customers together in one place lets us demo new features, workshop ideas, and receive feedback on the direction we’re headed. Feedback from the Customer Advisory Board is taken into account by our Product and Engineering teams as we determine next steps in product development.

4. Because we love bringing people together 

It’s no secret that the Secoda team likes to have a good time! Bringing together the Customer Advisory Board is not just about building a product; it’s about building a community. We want to continue to grow the Secoda community around the world, and this board is our next step.

The Agenda

Each Customer Advisory Board meeting has two parts:

1. Knowledge sharing 

It was really exciting to hear that successes and challenges many customers were working through were aligned with problems we’re solving at Secoda. Many success stories that were shared are closely related to our most popular Secoda features, including lineage use cases, PII management, leveraging Secoda AI, and more. 

Challenges around complexities of managing their growing stack and overall data sprawl, cost containment, and enabling higher levels of data literacy were unsurprisingly brought up repeatedly by different board members. Even though our board is spread out across the world, they all face similar challenges on their data teams - a perfect opportunity for us to put our heads together, and have meaningful discussions.

2. Product walkthroughs and feedback loops

Based on the theme of the meeting, our Product team will join the board meeting to showcase features and workflows that are available in the product today that could be helpful to the board. Customers have leveraged Secoda features to build incredible workflows, and we’ll take this opportunity to show off their innovation, and share some of our own ideas as well.

With the critical combo of our Product team in discussion with our Customer board, we’ll also spend time getting feedback from the board on what they would like to see next in the product, and get feedback on latest feature releases. By bringing together our team and our customers regularly, we’re creating an invaluable feedback loop to inform our product development, and create as much value as we can for all Secoda users.

Our next steps 

The launch of our Customer Advisory Board got us all excited for what’s to come. We’ve received such great feedback and are currently in the process of implementing it. 

Stay tuned into the Secoda blog for more recaps of our meetings, and learnings that surface along the way. In particular we’ll be sharing playbooks, guides, and sharing success stories.

Until then, keep shipping!