Geckoboard > Case Studies > Podio: Using Data to Focus on What Matters

Podio: Using Data to Focus on What Matters

Customer Company Size

Mid-size Company

Region

America
Europe

Country

Denmark
United States

Product

Podio

Tech Stack

Data Visualization
SaaS

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Software

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Factory Operations Visibility & Intelligence
Remote Collaboration

Services

Data Science Services

About The Customer

Podio is a platform that helps teams organize, track, and get work done in one place. It allows users to build and change what they call a Podio App, on the fly, to structure any kind of work, such as projects, tracking leads, recruiting, or design work approvals. The platform has been around for over two and a half years and aims to put people back into the center, empower them to shape their own tools and modify them as they see fit, and bring back more transparency to work. The company is part of Citrix and has a team spread across San Francisco and Copenhagen. Adrian Young-San Roessler, a Product Manager at Podio, works with a small team of designers and developers to improve the user experience from the homepage to the sign-up flow and the onboarding experience.

The Challenge

Podio, a team organization and communication platform, was facing challenges in sharing insights and tracking the impact of their work. The team was spread across San Francisco and Copenhagen, making it difficult to keep everyone updated on the company's performance. Traditional methods like whiteboards were not effective due to the geographical dispersion of the team. Furthermore, the company was missing a way to track how they were doing as a business. They had key performance indicators (KPIs) around user growth, new customers, daily active users, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn, etc., but they lacked a centralized system to visualize and share these metrics. They also wanted to track their performance in customer support, which was a crucial aspect of their business.

The Solution

Podio decided to use Geckoboard, a data communications tool, to share their core metrics. They set up a central dashboard with two screens in the office to visualize their KPIs and distributed the link to the remote team members. They started with one board and later set up more boards to focus on specific areas. For example, they created a 'beat-the-numbers' board to track important first-time user metrics. This helped the product team to get closer to being informed by data and see the impact of their work. They also used the loop feature to rotate different boards every minute, which encouraged team members to engage with the data. The data was made freely available in the office, which raised awareness about the metrics that the business tracked and provided a starting point for further data exploration.

Operational Impact

The use of Geckoboard helped Podio to share their core metrics with the entire team, regardless of their location.
The creation of specific boards for different areas of focus allowed the team to track important metrics and see the impact of their work.
The visualization of data on a central dashboard in the office raised awareness about the metrics that the business tracked and provided a starting point for further data exploration.