Chartio Previews Visual SQL at ProductCraft: San Francisco
Posted by on March 17, 2020 Chartio
On February 25, Chartio attended ProductCraft, a conference dedicated to product managers, as a premium sponsor. 200+ product professionals from around the world all got together here in San Francisco to talk about the future of product management.
Chartio at ProductCraft: San Francisco.
There were talks on ethics, career progression, and systems of innovation, and amazing breakout sessions on leadership, customer empathy, and collaboration. However, one topic stuck out:
Data
Everyone wanted more data, and wanted help learning how to best utilize it for their company. Chartio attended ProductCraft to help all of these product managers see how effective they could become with the right data product in hand. We set up a booth, demo-ed our brand new Visual SQL, and talked with product managers about their data problems, including:
- How to blend & clean their data
- How to set up a modern data stack
Blending and cleaning
Most of the product managers we spoke to struggled with blending data to test the impact of their work. Many times they had access to the data they needed, but the data lived in multiple different systems. It was difficult using the BI tool they had to combine data from multiple sources without having to ask the data team for help. Even when they were successful at getting the data, they needed to clean all of that data in different ways for each query and chart.
Chartio was built for this.
Chartio created Visual SQL, an intuitive new interface for exploring all of your company data. By selecting columns and choosing from dropdowns, you can generate the SQL code necessary to pull and blend all of this data together. Chartio then provides sophisticated pipeline steps to further refine and prepare the data. This newly-combined clean data can then be visualized with Chartio any number of ways. While most tools provide a single part of what a product manager needs, Chartio provides all pieces.
Modernizing the data stack
Some of the product managers we spoke to had even more systemic problems they were trying to fix. We met with a ton of great people who were battling legacy systems and procedures. There were a lot who were not given access to important data sources they needed for their job. All of them also faced having so much data they didn’t know where to find it.
We gave them practical advice about how to evolve their data stack to enable product analytics based on the book Dave Fowler (Chartio’s CEO) and Matt David (Head of The Data School) has written: Cloud Data Management. The book walks through how to extract and load data securely into a cloud data warehouse engine and then restructure database permissions to enable more of your organization to leverage the data. The book then explains how to build a single source of truth and use modeling to build useful data marts on top of it. All of this can now be implemented by product people and the book shows you how.
Conclusion
Overall, we had an amazing time at ProductCraft: San Francisco. We had great conversations about blending, cleaning, and democratizing data. The talks were inspiring, the food was delicious, and most importantly we met amazing people who are trying to better their craft. We hope more product people get involved in their data and make the best products possible.
