We’re back, and ready to recap the second Secoda Customer Advisory Board meeting. 

At the end of 2023, we launched Secoda's first Customer Advisory Board. Each quarter, we bring together a group of data leaders and practitioners from around the globe to share best practices, exchange ideas, get to know each other, and provide an open forum for product feedback and discussion.

Our Customer Advisory Board is made up of data leaders from companies like Panasonic, Chipotle, Vanta, Deezer, Remitly, Dailypay, Homebot, Catapult, and many more companies that are innovating with data.

We place immense value on the feedback loop between our team and our customers. As Secoda grows, we’re always looking for new ways to keep in touch with customers, provide as much value as we can, and keep customers at the forefront of our decision-making, related to product and across the board at Secoda.

Read more: Why we launched Secoda’s Customer Advisory Board

In February, we launched our new Secoda Automations feature, to help data teams save time by eliminating manual, repetitive, and frankly - often boring work. 

We designed Secoda Automations to help anyone get answers faster to questions like:

• Who owns this data?
• What version is this documentation?
• Is this resource up-to-date?
• Should this asset be deprecated?

With the launch of Secoda Automations and our March Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting, it was perfect timing to design a CAB session focused on how data teams are saving time, and what tools, tips and tech they use to get there.

The goals of our meeting:

• Hear customer stories of how they use automation in their day-to-day 
• Get candid feedback from customers about Secoda’s new features
• Understand what our customers are focused on, what trends and tools they’re excited about, what roadblocks they face, and how we can help

As you might know from our previous blog posts, our CAB meetings are structured around three parts: a knowledge-sharing session from customers, a product walkthrough from our technical team, and an open forum discussion on the topics we’ve been discussing.

Here’s a full rundown of the lessons that came out of our discussions and feedback from Secoda customers.

Table of contents

• What is the Secoda Customer Advisory Board?
• How teams are doing more with less: Automation and metadata management
• The focus on improving data quality and governance
• How Secoda helps teams improve data quality

How teams are doing more with less: Automation and metadata management

What we’ve heard across the board: data teams are pulled in a ton of different directions. From providing support, building data products, and helping with advanced decision-making and strategy - teams are increasingly tasked with the challenge of doing more with less, a testament to the evolving pressures of cost optimization and the need for efficient resource allocation within organizations. Leaders are navigating this landscape through a combination of strategic workflows and technology.

Adopting data management tools that emphasize automation reduces the manual workload on teams, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities that directly contribute to organizational goals.

Hearing this feedback, we focused on the functionality of Secoda Automations and shared customer stories of how data teams are building Automations workflows to eliminate manual labour and repetitive tasks. We walked through customer stories about how they had built Automations for tasks like:

• Assigning Ownership: Customers have automated the process of assigning owners to new tables added to their system. This automation ensures that as new data tables are incorporated, they will be assigned an owner without manual intervention.

• Adding to Collections: Automating the inclusion of new tables into existing Secoda Collections based on predefined criteria saved customers time, as the process was initially manual.

• Tagging: Customers walked us through workflows they built to tag datasets correctly according to the Collection they had been added to. This ensures that data is organized and easily searchable based on these tags.

These Automations all replaced previously manual processes that involved compiling a spreadsheet of integrations, names, types, and default collections, and then manually adding the owner and collection type for new tables. This manual process was time-consuming, especially as it involved copying down the owner and collecting information for each new table. Automating these tasks would save considerable time and ensure consistency in how data was managed and organized, facilitating better data governance and accessibility within their organization.

Learn more about what Secoda Automations can do

The focus on improving data quality and governance

We shared in a lot of conversations about data quality and governance - and across the board, leaders are thinking about data quality as a critical business priority that affects every aspect of operations and strategy. Understanding and adopting best practices in data quality and governance management unlocks the full potential of your data, drives innovation, and efficiency, and makes growth sustainable.

Why data leaders are thinking about data quality: 

1. Informed decision-making: High-quality data = high-quality decisions based on accurate, complete and timely information

2. Trust and reliability: The foundation of a data-driven organization is trust in its data. Data quality directly influences levels of trust.

3. Efficiency and productivity: Data quality issues result in huge amounts of wasted time and resources, with teams repeatedly needing to cleanse, validate and reconcile data before it can be used - a problem faced by many.

4. Customer experience: When customer experience is a key differentiator, and your data is feeding directly into the personalization of services and overall user experience - your data needs to be high-quality.

5. Scalability and growth: As the complexity and volume of data increase with growth, data quality practices like standardization, validation and automation ensure that data ecosystems can scale too, without compromising quality issues.

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So that’s why they care, but maybe you’re not on the data team. Why should you care?

1. Competitive advantage: The ability to quickly and accurately leverage data can provide a competitive edge - investing in data quality can help you move faster, and make better decisions.

2. Regulatory compliance: Is your industry subject to stringent data regulations? Prioritizing data quality ensures compliance with these regulations, and builds trust with customers.

3. Risk mitigation: Poor data quality can expose organizations to risks, including financial errors, strategic missteps, and operational disruptions - proactive data quality management helps identify and mitigate these risks before they can impact the organization.

4. Data culture: Emphasizing data quality fosters a culture that values accuracy, transparency, and accountability. This cultural shift is essential if you are seeking to become truly data-driven. Organizations must commit to data quality for it to become a reality.

How Secoda can help

Clearly, data quality and the efficiency of data teams are top of mind for data leaders around the world - and it’s our job at Secoda to provide solutions to these challenges.

Yes, Secoda’s Automations feature saves time for data teams, but that’s not the only benefit of automating your data team’s manual workload. By automating tasks related to data quality and governance, you create a system that works towards better data quality every single day, without having to lift a finger. 

We explored workflows with our customers that they can build to automate seemingly mundane and trivial tasks, like data cleaning, tagging and assigning ownership, but these are the base building blocks you need to build a foundation for high-quality data and systems that can scale with you.

Learn more: Understand Secoda Automations use cases

As you can tell by the length and depth of this recap - it was a fruitful session and discussion. We’re looking forward to the continued expansion of this program, and the insights provided by our customers are invaluable to our product development. Stay tuned for more updates from us about how Secoda can help you and your data team double down on data quality initiatives.

Catch you next time!