5 Things We Learned in Year One of Our Product

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Being an early adopter of a new platform or product is not always easy, but when done right it is a great way to gain competitive advantage. Year One of a product is always going to throw some curveballs. That’s okay. We’re fortunate to be working with a great set of OEM partners who this year adopted, or converted to, the new 7 Series of our self-service analytics platform.

A year into our new product has confirmed our belief that users want more from their analytics; that, in fact, when it comes to BI & analytics, they will opt for more self-service functionality every time. What’s key is tailoring analytics to user roles and seamlessly integrating into their daily workflows.

Here are a few other things we’ve learned this year.

1. Purpose-built for embedding is easier to implement than bolted-on embedding

Many of our 7 Series customers have had painful learning experiences of their own in the form of unsuccessful BI implementations. And this year that’s included a number of new customers who have struggled when embedding a competitor’s solution – and as a result have a solid understanding of how Izenda makes it easy to embed and scale analytics. They see the value of being able to integrate at the code level for a superior UX and easier maintenance over time. And, ultimately, that’s translated to faster success in their BI implementations.

2. Iframes really are terrible

Once they learn about the shortcomings of iframes, customers don’t want them. A lack of responsive design, security issues and the overhead of two distinct applications rather than one integrated experience is the reason why interfaced solutions are inferior to integrated solutions. Customers understand that truly embedded analytics offers them a deeper and more seamless integration that is more secure and requires less developer support.

3. An open and customizable platform is key for delivering a tailored analytics experience – and driving user adoption

The need to better meet the diverse analytics needs of each client – and a variety of different user personas – are drivers for many BI projects. Every one of them can pose unique challenges, whether in the form of UI customizations or reporting from different data sources. Clients who have embedded 7 Series like the fact that its fully open REACT front end lets them modify or hide objects for customization that goes beyond styling to meet the diverse needs of their users.

And since Izenda is now a single page app, it’s easy to break out page components and embed them into different places in user workflows. Enterprise clients with many RDBMSs appreciate that they can easily connect to other databases in real-time, and create unique views on the fly, without a DBA. Both Enterprise and SMB clients like having the option of deploying Izenda out of the box as a BI Portal.

4. Focused training and superior documentation makes operationalizing easier

With a new product, user success often comes down to two very basic areas: training and documentation. It’s not enough to simply update existing materials.

We continue to work to craft documentation for our product that is effective both for beginning users as well as for developers. There’s a wide range of what customers need to see, from Report Building 101 to examples of how to deploy inside various tech frameworks.

Similarly, we’ve had to institute a new training program for 7 Series. Although not every customer needs training, we’ve found that success often boils down to fundamentals like providing a full product overview and scheduling training to coincide with their BI project. Giving developers an overall map of the product, for example, all the customization options in the administrative UI, makes working with the API easier. Training at the start of a project helps users retain processes like report creation better, minimizing frustration and improving adoption.

Even when a client doesn’t need training, our process can help software teams easily repurpose our training and documentation materials for their users, and understand how to more efficiently maintain and scale analytics in their applications.

5. Customer collaboration is priceless

Getting feedback is essential when evolving your product. One way we did this was by giving a demo of 7 Series during our user conference last January. We’ve also relied on input from customers about the prior version of our platform. For example, in Series 6, the ability to schedule reports was not as robust. That was something we clearly needed to improve, so in 7 Series we’ve made report scheduling completely flexible.

It takes years to develop and refine a software product. We’ve built on over a decade of knowledge of embedding to create our 7 Series, and it’s exciting to see this first wave of adopters put it to use. Izenda has successfully integrated in CRM, EMR, HR and many other types of applications and portals.

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