2. #EMPOWER2015
Working on QuickBase Team since 2010
● Enterprise Sales Engineer (2010-2014)
● Sales Engineering Manager (2014-present)
Worked on QuickBase Team from 2003-2010. Roles included:
● Engineering Manager (2003-2006)
● Sales, Marketing and Support Manager (2007-2009)
● Business Leader (2010)
Been a QuickBase customer since…
● Director of Innovation @ Fay School (2010-2014)
● VP of Business Applications & Analytics @ STAG Industrial (2015-present)
Who are we?
10+ years of helping
people be successful
building and rolling
out apps...
we’ve seen it all!
...and we’re cousins!
3. #EMPOWER2015
You can’t ignore the barriers to heavy adoption…
So what can you do?
Why it matters...
New to QuickBase? New Process? New Habits?
1. Start in the
Trenches
2. Start
Simple
1. Add Value
from the get-go
4. Start in the Trenches
You need understand what is important to your end users
because they are the key to success
1
6. #EMPOWER2015
User adoption!
● Users expect to get out what they put in
● Users know what is important to them
● Users know the process
● Garbage in garbage out
● Net promoter score
Why is it important?
It’s the users that make or
break an app...
7. #EMPOWER2015
• Visibility into work
• Report up
• Better data, better insights
• More efficiency
• Save time
• Reduce rework
• Limit duplication of effort
• Improve communication
• Better coordination with peers
Managers / Team LeadersTeam Members
Team member vs. manager needs?
If solve for users first, the managers will ultimately get what they want!
8. #EMPOWER2015
• Visibility into work
• Report up
• Better data, better insights
• More efficiency
• Save time
• Reduce rework
• Limit duplication of effort
• Improve communication
• Better coordination with peers
Managers / Team LeadersTeam Members
Team member vs. manager needs…
Domino Effect…If solve for users first, the managers will ultimately get what they want!
9. #EMPOWER2015
Identify roles and key needs of individuals
● Recruit influential users and work hard to make their lives better
● Understand what is most important
● Do “follow me homes”
● Quarterly check-ins
In app feedback and change management
● Collect issues/enhancements in app
● Provide visibility and collaboration
● Let the documentation happen
How to make sure you’re in the trenches?
10. #EMPOWER2015
① Say they only had a printout of a map to figure out who is responsible…
…make a formula that calculates ownership by state
② Say they liked Bing more than google...
…make a formula url to take them right to map
③ Say they always looked at another service for information (e.g. stock tickers)…
…give them a link into that service
④ Navigable dashboards
…give them a navigation menu leveraging multiple dashboards and buttons
⑤ Build workflows into reports and dashboards
…give them buttons in key reports to update the underlining data
Examples of how can make team members lives
better...
11. Start Simple2 It’s better to learn as you go and iterate. You’re going to make
mistakes, so make them in small easy to change chunks…
Fail Fast!
12. #EMPOWER2015
“Complexity Kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it make products
difficult to plan, build and test, it introduced security challenges, and it
causes end-user and administrative frustration.”
- Ray Ozzie (Lotus Notes creator and Chief Software Architect @ Microsoft)
Why it matters...
13. #EMPOWER2015
Most fields in a table 16,389
Most tables in an app 205
Most roles in an app 597
Most records in an app 7,238,406
Most recently used apps in an account 452,523
Most recently used apps in a paying account 1,126
Guess...
What do we mean by complexity?
14. #EMPOWER2015
Are your apps too complex?
How many people
are involved in
determining initial
requirements?
How quickly are you
iterating on your
apps?
How “cluttered” are
your apps?
15. #EMPOWER2015
How can you minimize complexity?
● Start with one team/function
● Find key players & “follow them”
- Influencers
- People excited/open to change
● Find ways to say no…
- “There’s a cost to tracking…”
- “That will come, but later…”
● “Hide” irrelevant data/tables
○ “My…” reports
○ Removed “completed”
● Purge (fields, reports, etc)`
● Constantly evaluate ecosystem
- Separate apps by team
- Centralize key data when can
● Focus on small wins
- Break apps into small projects
- Get “right” before move on
● Setup “in app” feedback
- Will give you small quick wins
● Do you do quick tests before deploy?
How “cluttered” are
your apps?
How quickly are you
iterating on your
apps?
How many people
are involved in
determining initial
requirements?
16. Add value from the get go..
Focus on what is most important first and sweat the details later3
17. #EMPOWER2015
Have you made repetitive tasks easier?
Have you saved people time (e.g. automated emails they were manually sending)?
Have you given people access to information they could not easily get before?
Are you making people’s lives better?
18. #EMPOWER2015
You / Your Organization Publicly Available Domain Specific
● Use Formulas to Segment
- Use user formulas
- Managers for team
● Brute force cleanup
- Grid Edit is your friend
- Manually leverage tools
● Find internal sources of data
and integrate them
Clean and augment data
20. #EMPOWER2015
Save People Time... Offer New Ways of
Seeing Information
● Formula URLs to other services (e.g. Bing)
- Saves browsing time
● Create tools that replace spreadsheets
- Calculators that generate
- “Exact Forms” like mail merges
● Snapshotting data
- Give people a view of change over time
Examples: Pipelines, Project statuses
● Leverage “New” kinds of reporting
- Summary / Map reports / Calendar
Give people better ways of working
21. It is all about building
confidence in you,
QuickBase and the
applications you build.
Small, Incremental “Wins”
Add Value
from the
get go...
Start
Simple
Start in the
trenches...
