Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify and former co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude), joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss the evolution from data quality to decision quality. Patrick shares his experience building data contracts solutions at Atlassian and later developing analytics tracking tools. Patrick challenges the assumption that AI will eliminate the need for structured data. He argues that while LLMs excel at understanding unstructured data, businesses still need deterministic systems for automation and decision-making. Patrick shares insights on why enforcing data quality at the source remains critical, even in an AI-first world, and explains his shift from analytics to CRM while maintaining focus on customer data unification and business impact over technical perfectionism.Tune in!

Summary

With the rise of the web and digital business came the need to understand how customers are interacting with the products and services that are being sold. Product analytics has grown into its own category and brought with it several services with generational differences in how they approach the problem. NetSpring is a warehouse-native product analytics service that allows you to gain powerful insights into your customers and their needs by combining your event streams with the rest of your business data. In this episode Priyendra Deshwal explains how NetSpring is designed to empower your product and data teams to build and explore insights around your products in a streamlined and maintainable workflow.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Join in with the event for the global data community, Data Council Austin. From March 28-30th 2023, they'll play host to hundreds of attendees, 100 top speakers, and dozens of startups that are advancing data science, engineering and AI. Data Council attendees are amazing founders, data scientists, lead engineers, CTOs, heads of data, investors and community organizers who are all working together to build the future of data. As a listener to the Data Engineering Podcast you can get a special discount of 20% off your ticket by using the promo code dataengpod20. Don't miss out on their only event this year! Visit: dataengineeringpodcast.com/data-council today! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Priyendra Deshwal about how NetSpring is using the data warehouse to deliver a more flexible and detailed view of your product analytics

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what NetSpring is and the story behind it?

What are the activities that constitute "product analytics" and what are the roles/teams involved in those activities?

When teams first come to you, what are the common challenges that they are facing and what are the solutions that they have attempted to employ? Can you describe some of the challenges involved in bringing product analytics into enterprise or highly regulated environments/industries?

How does a warehouse-native approach simplify that effort?

There are many different players (both commercial and open source) in the product analytics space. Can you share your view on the role that NetSpring plays in that ecosystem? How is the NetSpring platform implemented to be able to best take advantage of modern warehouse technologies and the associated data stacks?

What are the pre-requisites for an organization's infrastructure/data maturity for being able to benefit from NetSpring? How have the goals and implementation of the NetSpring platform evolved from when you first started working on it?

Can you describe the steps involved in integrating NetSpring with an organization's existing warehouse?

What are the signals that NetSpring uses to understand the customer journeys of different organizations? How do you manage the variance of the data models in the warehouse while providing a consistent experience for your users?

Given that you are a product organization, how are you using NetSpring to power NetSpring? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen NetSpring used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on NetSpring? When is NetSpring the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of NetSpring?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

NetSpring ThoughtSpot Product Analytics Amplitude Mixpanel Customer Data Platform GDPR CCPA Segment

Podcast Episode

Rudderstack

Podcast Episode

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Sponsored By: TimeXtender: TimeXtender is a holistic, metadata-driven solution for data integration, optimized for agility. TimeXtender provides all the features you need to build a future-proof infrastructure for ingesting, transforming, modelling, and delivering clean, reliable data in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

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Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack to sign up for free today, and snag a free T-Shirt just for being a Data Engineering Podcast listener.Data Council: Join us at the event for the global data community, Data Council Austin. From March 28-30th 2023, we'll play host to hundreds of attendees, 100 top speakers, and dozens of startups that are advancing data science, engineering and AI. Data Council attendees are amazing founders, data scientists, lead engineers, CTOs, heads of data, investors and community organizers who are all working together to build the future of data. As a listener to the Data Engineering Podcast you can get a special discount off tickets by using the promo code dataengpod20. Don't miss out on our only event this year! Visit: dataengineeringpodcast.com/data-council Promo Code: dataengpod20Support Data Engineering Podcast

Marketing teams need analytics. Product teams need analytics. There are marketing analytics vendors like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. There are product analytics vendors like Amplitude and Mixpanel. But what are the real differences between marketing and product analytics? Do organizations need different teams for each? Should organizations use both types of tools? Will one replace the other or will these disciplines converge?