Every product team wants to ensure that what they build drives the right business outcomes—this is a core tenet of being product led. Your business invests significant time, energy, and resources into building a product; that product should also be a key driver of business decisions. From brand direction, to R&D investment, to sales forecasting, product data should be a key input—alongside other crucial business data—to inform how leadership runs the business and sets its future direction.
Pendo exists to help organizations understand their product usage, and then take action on that data to influence behavior. But the adage, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” applies to your data, too: If you gather product data and nobody uses it, does it make a difference?
Pendo’s Kellet Atkinson joined Workato’s VP of Product-led Growth, Tridivesh Sarangi, to discuss this idea and share ways that teams can make their product data work for them—to drive better business outcomes.
How Workato drives product-led motions across their business
Making strategic decisions isn’t possible without the full picture. This means you need to connect data across platforms so the entire organization can benefit from the insights each team is gathering. Your product is the crux of your customers’ experience, but they will still interact with your business in other ways. Teams need to combine product data with other touchpoints—from marketing, support, and more—to build the right end-to-end experience.
At Workato, one of these end-to-end experiences was onboarding. By combining usage data from Pendo and transactional data from their product database, they observed a high drop off rate for new users. Workato’s existing generic onboarding was not designed for users with diverse skill sets and goals. This resulted in loss of opportunity to convert newly signed up users into active users of the product.
Using data to develop a better understanding of users
The first step in solving the drop off problem was getting to know users so that the Workato team could design an onboarding experience that’s tailored to match users’ skills and goals.
The team accomplished this by creating in-app guides in Pendo that led with discovery questions to understand the roles of the users in their organization, what type of projects they look to automate first, and what will make their first experience with Workato a success.
These three simple questions to discover user intent allowed Workato to gather insights that were unavailable previously. The Workato team knew that their low-code/no-code automation platform was simple and easy to use for a diverse set of personas: from business savvy HR and people operations, to marketing, to more technically savvy IT teams. The data from the onboarding guides helped them quantity the distribution of these personas.
Knowing that IT and DevOps teams constitute almost half of the new user population, Workato could now prioritize the personalization of the onboarding experience for these two segments first before moving on to the others. Using data to prioritize their onboarding improvements helped them focus on the most impactful start instead of choosing to personalize for every persona at the same time.
Personalizing experiences with data-driven automations
Taking action on these insights was the next logical step for the team. They used Workato to load all the insights from Pendo into their data warehouse that is hosted on Snowflake. The team queried the product usage data for the most common personas, IT and DevOps, to identify the first automations they were most likely to build.
Additionally, the team created multiple user segments based on the user intent data collected from Pendo guides and user journey data available in product usage. This user segment data was stored in Snowflake tables, and pushed dynamically to Pendo and Marketo using automations with Workato.
By doing so, the team was able to ensure a hyper-personalized experience for each user by showing them the right guides and sending them the right content in emails.
Without an interconnected data ecosystem, Workato would not be able to achieve the product-led initiatives that have driven such impactful growth across the business. By connecting Pendo data with other key data sources across product, marketing, and customer success, Sarangi’s product-led growth team has been able to introduce key initiatives.
These initiatives have ranged from onboarding to email marketing campaigns, but they’ve all hinged on personalization—which is driven by the visibility they get from connected data sources. By being able to see the full picture of a customer, Workato is able to build a personalized experience across channels that drives adoption, retention, and growth.
