A quick note’s probably in order since I’m sort of a newbie on the team. My name’s Florian. I was fortunate to join Keen a few months ago as VP of Product Engineering. Some of you probably know me already from demos, support, calls, etc. I’ve been passionate about building analytics and metrics products for a long time. It goes back a decade or more. It started out with me trying to visualize the spread of SQL Slammer in school. It’s been a fun journey to get here – filled with time series databases, horizon charts, Holt-Winters Forecast’s, and bespoke cloud storage platforms. But I’m even more excited about what’s to come and what I can do to help Keen make our customers’ jobs easier.
We were acquired by Scaleworks a little over 8 months ago. During this time we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been building out our team, optimizing our infrastructure, and getting ready move the Keen platform forward to the next stage. Along the way we also took a bit of a detour to work on GDPR, that, of course, consumed quite a bit of time. Now we’re ready to start moving forward.
We may be a bit biased, but we think the Keen platform is fantastic (and it’s clear you do as well). Of course, we also know that like any platform it has warts and shortcomings. Good news is that we have a lot of room to improve. Analytics is not a solved problem. Implementing any analytics solutions is still hard and still frustrating. We’re working to solve that and we’ll have more exciting news about it in the coming months! Through customer interviews, support tickets, and account reviews, our users have been fantastic about helping us start to plot out our future roadmap. However, we’ve felt like we’ve only been able to scratch the tip of the feedback iceberg.
Giving users a voice
I’ve was lucky to have been able to use canny.io previously and knew I wanted something similar for Keen customers.
Building a strong relationship between our user community and our team is critical to the ongoing success of Keen. To that end, we want to make sure that our users always have a voice.
Today we’re happy to be launching our product feedback board using canny.io’s awesome platform. feedback.keen.io is the place you can go to post your feature requests, tell us about things that would make your job easier, or see what we’ve got inflight. We’ll share mockup’s and use it as a sounding board as we turn ideas into actual features. Not everything here will get built but we promise to always keep the communication going and you’ll definitely have a voice as Keen grows.
Collaborate and Engage
Using our product feedback board will help us prioritize, balance, and clarify feature requests. It’s a great way for us to spot what users need from us to make their day to day jobs easier. We can use it to validate new features we’ve cooked up internally, or get feedback on mockups as we iterate on UX. The collaborative nature means we can share and get feedback from Keen users much faster.
With API focused products like Keen, launching a new feature often means that end users have to do a bit of dev work to actually utilize them. The fact that we can give users a peek at what’s coming, as well as let them preview how new features are being structured makes consuming them much easier. One of our driving goals is going to be to make the jobs of our users easier, and feedback.keen.io will let users adopt new features with a little less work.
Honestly, it makes our jobs a bit easier as well. Product boards like this make it easy for the Customer Success, Product, and Engineering teams to keep our customers up-to-date and engaged. CS can send follow-ups when you reach out with a feature request via support, our Account Managers will eventually be able to share a living roadmap during account reviews, I’ll be able to easily see which customers I can chat with after a feature launch to see if we hit the mark, and our engineers have a much more direct line to customers for clarification.
So, come and help us lay down a path for Keen:
- We’re planning support for AMP – AMP Support
- The ability to anonymize IP Address to help you be GDPR compliant is in progress – Anonymize IP Addresses
- We’d love feedback on what sort of Spend Limits/Alerting we should implement – Spend Limits
- And there’s more (from OR Filters, to SSO Logins, to Dashboard SDK updates), and whatever else you want us to know about!
(Hint: That exciting news we’ve got in store… that I mentioned earlier? Keep an eye on feedback.keen.io over the next few weeks and you’ll get early insights to it as we start adding cards/features to the board)
