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Hydrow: a first data platform built while the company was scaling
Hydrow is a Boston based connected fitness company, backed by well known venture investors, building connected rowing machines and the live and on-demand experience that runs on them. Growing quickly is an engineering problem before it is anything else, and a company at that stage generates data far faster than it builds the means to use it.
LOCATION
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
COMPANY SIZE
Mid-scale Enterprise
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing › Explore solutions for this industry
Data readiness audit and first data platform
We did not start by building. We started with an enterprise-wide data readiness audit, examining whether the company’s data was actually in a state to support analytics and machine learning, and where it was not. That produced a written assessment we presented to every stakeholder in the business, including the chief executive and the investors.
That order matters. A fast-growing company usually has a long list of things it would like to know and a shorter, less comfortable list of things its data can currently support. Setting out the gap first meant the platform was built against what was achievable rather than against a wish list, and it meant the people funding it understood what they were funding.
From there we built the company’s first data platform, serving sales, marketing and the wider business. We rebuilt the business intelligence layer and delivered the analytical dashboards used for financial and customer reporting. A specific design goal was that employees would actually adopt it, so the solutions were shaped around how people already worked rather than requiring them to change to suit the platform.
With the foundation in place, the work moved on to evaluating where prediction, forecasting and recommendation could support management decisions.
The company’s first data platform, in production, with reporting used across sales, marketing and finance.
Related solution: data platforms for companies growing quickly
Companies scaling fast face a particular version of this problem. There is no legacy to untangle, which helps, but there is also no time, no established ownership of data, and a strong pull toward building whatever answers this quarter’s question. Platforms built that way work for six months and then have to be rebuilt, usually at the least convenient moment.
ThirdEye Data starts these engagements with an honest assessment of what the data can currently support, delivered to the people who will fund the work. It is a less exciting way to begin than shipping a dashboard in week two, and it is the reason the platform is still standing when the company is three times the size. We build for the company that exists now and for the one it is becoming, which mostly means being disciplined about what not to build yet.
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