Transforming data management: 6sense's partnership with Secoda

6sense, the leading B2B revenue marketing platform powered by AI, has a rapidly expanding team and customer base. As their operations grew, 6sense recognized the need to optimize the management of their internal corporate data to support this expansion. With vast amounts of data spread across multiple warehouses, they needed a solution that would allow team members, both new and experienced, to easily access and efficiently utilize the data. This article explores how 6sense is leveraging Secoda to streamline their data management, enhance collaboration, and accelerate their data-driven initiatives—all while maintaining a clear focus on internal data management, separate from customer data.

Situation

As 6sense expanded to over 1,200 employees, the complexity and volume of their corporate data surged. With data stored across various systems, teams found it increasingly difficult to locate, trust, and effectively use the information they needed. This created bottlenecks in collaboration, slowed down onboarding for new hires, and made data management cumbersome. It became clear that they needed an organized, scalable data catalog to manage their data more effectively and keep up with the growing demands of the business.

Goals

With the need for a structured data solution clear, 6sense set out to achieve three primary goals:

• Enhanced documentation: As the volume of new data tables and pipelines grew, 6sense sought a way to make their documentation process more efficient. This was key to reducing onboarding time for new employees and ensuring that teams could find and trust the data they needed to do their jobs.
• Unified tools and processes: Multiple teams had adopted different tools to manage and share data, including Confluence for documentation and Slack for collaboration. 6sense wanted to bring these processes together into one cohesive system, streamlining the way they shared queries, knowledge, and documentation.
• A single source of truth: The overarching goal was to create a single, trusted source of truth for all internal data. This would ensure consistency, trust, and accuracy across the entire company.

Secoda onboarding and implementation

Recognizing Secoda as the solution to their growing data management challenges, 6sense embarked on a partnership to overhaul their internal corporate data systems.

From the outset, 6sense knew that improving documentation and making data easily accessible would require a centralized, scalable platform. Secoda provided just that—a robust data catalog that helped organize and document every asset in their data landscape.

Comprehensive data catalog‍

With Secoda, 6sense was able to create a unified platform for all their data assets, making it simple for teams to locate the data they needed, whenever they needed it. The centralized catalog reduced confusion and improved collaboration across departments.

Automations and notifications‍

Secoda’s Automations feature allowed 6sense to create reminders for data owners, ensuring that documentation was regularly updated and accurate. This automated process was critical in keeping data up-to-date as the company scaled.

Data lineage tracking‍

Tracking how data flowed through the organization became far more efficient with Secoda’s lineage capabilities. By visualizing the impact of changes to their data pipelines, 6sense was able to proactively prevent errors and improve data quality across the board.

Enhanced query sharing‍

One of the major pain points for 6sense was the lack of consistency in how teams shared queries. Secoda addressed this by enabling the standardization of query sharing. This ensured that all teams were working with verified, trusted data—eliminating confusion and reducing inefficiencies.

Documentation strategy

6sense is in the process of developing a comprehensive documentation strategy to enhance their data governance efforts. By integrating Secoda into their existing tools and workflows, they aim to streamline documentation across the organization. A key part of this initiative has been the involvement of their VP of Engineering, whose leadership has played an instrumental role in aligning the documentation strategy with the company’s broader goals. This leadership buy-in has facilitated smooth implementation across teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page as Secoda becomes central to their data governance approach.

The Analytics Engineering team has taken the lead in building out this strategy, beginning with high-level documentation in Confluence. While Confluence remains their go-to tool for overarching documentation, they recognized the need for a more detailed and specialized approach for documenting data assets such as tables and pipelines. Secoda, with its robust cataloging capabilities, has emerged as the ideal solution for this. By using Secoda to catalog detailed data assets, 6sense ensures that their documentation remains accurate and consistent without overcomplicating their current processes.

To integrate Secoda seamlessly into their existing technical documentation workflows, 6sense has focused on ensuring that context is continuously updated across the organization. This integration makes it easier for teams to maintain consistency, ensuring that everyone can access the most relevant and up-to-date information.

As part of their rollout, the Advertising Product team has been selected to pilot the new documentation process. The initial goal is to refine the workflow within this team before extending it to other departments. By automating certain parts of the process and incorporating logs for improved data analysis, 6sense aims to significantly enhance the accuracy and efficiency of their documentation efforts.

Conclusion

The partnership between 6sense and Secoda has proven mutually beneficial, with both companies working closely to drive innovation and improvements. 6sense has been a valuable partner for Secoda, providing feedback and suggestions that have shaped the platform’s growth. For example, they collaborated closely with Secoda’s product team to build custom integrations such as Apache Hive and SingleStore—enhancements that will benefit other Secoda users moving forward.

By implementing Secoda, 6sense has not only optimized their data governance but also empowered their teams to be more productive and collaborative. The comprehensive data catalog, automation features, and data lineage tracking have transformed how 6sense manages its corporate data, reducing inefficiencies and strengthening data governance.

As 6sense continues to innovate and expand, the strong collaboration with Secoda ensures that both companies can achieve their goals and deliver enhanced value to their users. This partnership has not only strengthened 6sense's data-driven strategy but has also contributed to the ongoing development and success of Secoda’s offerings, benefiting the broader user base.