How Optimal Workshop’s lean data team used Holistics to empower a data driven culture
In this case study, we explore how Guido Stark, Head of Data at Optimal Workshop, led strategic changes with a lean 2-person data team, creating a data-driven culture where everyone has the power to explore data, and achieving 90% company-wide adoption of Holistics.
The Story of Optimal Workshop
Founded in 2007, Optimal Workshop is a leading UX research and insights platform offering a comprehensive suite of powerful tools. Headquartered in New Zealand, Optimal Workshop helps companies worldwide design exceptional user experiences and uncover valuable insights. Their innovative solutions have been adopted by UX designers across 106 countries, including industry giants like IBM, Yelp, and Uber, forging paths that make our digital world more navigable and enjoyable.
In this case study, we explore how Guido Stark, Head of Data at Optimal Workshop led transformational strategic changes with a lean 2-person data team, creating a data-driven culture where everyone has the power to explore data, and company-wide adoption for Holistics is above 90%.
The Challenge: Overcoming Analytics Bottlenecks and Limited Data Accessibility
When Stark joined Optimal Workshop as Head of Data, the company was navigating a period of accelerated growth. He quickly identified that the existing data infrastructure, including their BI tool, was not just inadequate—it was a significant bottleneck stifling the company’s ability to make data-driven decisions.
Key challenges included:
- Limited data access, with only a few people able to retrieve and analyze data
- A growing queue of data requests overwhelming the small data team
- Inability to make timely, data-driven decisions across the organization
- Lack of self-service capabilities in the existing BI tool
When you’re in a company where only a few people have access to data, you end up in a position where some decisions aren’t able to be made using data. In a small enterprise, you’re always up against the issue of limited resources. And if you have only one or two people who can supply the organization with data, it’s a real bottleneck.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
The Vision: An intuitive Self-service platform available to all.
Stark and his team began searching for a self-service BI tool that aligned with his strategic vision of an intuitive, user-friendly analytics platform, where everyone could explore data and access the information they need to make data-driven decisions.
His checklist for the ideal tool was comprehensive, focusing on:
- Advanced semantic modeling layer - Powerful data modeling capabilities, allowing the data team to carry out metric building and data transformations while maintaining a clear view of data lineage and metadata.
- Granular governance and data access controls - With Holistics, the data team gained centralized oversight and controls across tables, columns, rows, and groups, ensuring data security while enabling broad access. Also required was Git integration for version control.
- Rapid Deployment and Flexibility - Enable dashboard delivery with minimal lead time, working directly with live Snowflake data without pre-aggregated cubes or complex maintenance.
- Usage monitoring - A bird’s-eye view of how data is being used across the company.
- Robust data delivery - An easy way for anyone to share reports, push notifications, and send alerts to different business teams.
- Intuitive data exploration - Data exploration with as little friction as possible, guiding users towards exploring for verifiable insights to encourage the “self-service” and “data-driven” aspects of the ideal data culture. The platform must have user-friendly features like drill-through, drill-down, native PoP comparison, filters, and custom metrics to enable self-service analytics across the organization.
- Excellent self-service layer - Business users should be able to create, edit, and explore dashboards with as little assistance from the data team as possible.
- Good visualization layer - Plenty of visualization options.
- Exceptional support and documentation.
- Friendly and transparent pricing structure.
Stark’s evaluation was not just about ticking boxes; it was about making sure the platform aligned with his belief of how a modern BI tool should function. He was particularly keen on assessing the usability of the platform without heavy vendor involvement.
We basically went to all three of our front running vendors and said, ‘Look, we want to have a trial. We want access to your platform, and we just want you to leave us alone from that point and give us two weeks to test its capability. We’ll come to your support team if we need anything
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
This hands-off approach was important for Stark, as it allowed him to evaluate the platform’s intuitiveness and documentation quality—factors that were non-negotiable in his decision-making process. “Is the platform intuitive to self-serve? Does the documentation make sense? Is it easy to work with and easy to find? How good is their support model?”.
These were the questions guiding his evaluation.
Honestly, Holistics’ ease of use was incredible.
We had a small number of questions during the trial and they were all beautifully answered. The support experience was great, the documentation was well written and complete, and the platform was easy to use.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
After a thorough evaluation of 12 different BI tools - from the most popular ones to the lesser-known, Holistics emerged as the clear winner, aligning perfectly with Stark’s vision of an analytics platform that’s both intuitive and user-friendly.
I had a particular kind of user experience in mind and we measured all those platforms against that. The end-user experience was a crucial element in our decision-making. I can have the best data platform for my team, but if nobody in the company uses it, it’s not helpful.
Once we had Holistics turned on, we were able to build models, dashboards and datasets in minutes using Holistics like a live window into Snowflake. It was an incredibly fast turnaround and now everyone has visibility of what’s going on across the business.
The ability for everyone to explore was a massive win. The licensing structure Holistics has for explorers was perfect for us because our vision was that everybody should be able to explore governed data securely. Alternative platforms we considered would say “Five people can explore, and everybody else can only view. I didn’t want people just to view. I wanted people to be able to ask questions and find answers.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
Cultivating Data Confidence: A Two-Pillar Approach
Stark’s vision goes beyond merely getting the right tools - it is about cultivating a culture where data is an accessible, communal asset. This vision is anchored in two main pillars: culture building & robust tooling.
1. Culture of Continuous Learning
Optimal Workshop’s data strategy centers around building a data-driven culture, where data is embedded into the DNA of the company, encouraging stakeholders to explore data confidently.
To achieve this, their data teams organize various training and education initiatives, including:
a) Comprehensive Training: A 22-minute onboarding video introduces new employees to both the technical and business contexts of their data stack.
b) Proactive Support: A dedicated Slack channel provides real-time support and guidance, ensuring everyone can navigate and make the most out of Holistics.
c) Regular Data Sharing: Helping teams leverage Holistics for updates and reports keeps everyone informed and engaged with the latest insights, fostering an environment where data-first thinking is encouraged.
2. A Unified, Governed Self-Service Platform
Holistics has become a cornerstone platform for the data team, serving several crucial functions:
a) A Single Source of Truth
- Holistics acts as the central intelligence repository, consolidating all key metrics and serving as the go-to source for reliable data insights.
- This consolidation has reduced dependencies on other platforms, saving Optimal Workshop thousands of dollars every year.
Some system licenses can be up to USD$2500 per person. We capture that system’s data into our warehouse and can show it in Holistics, saving us having to purchase additional licenses on other platforms. When people need to see data, Holistics is the place to go because it provides a managed and secure view across all our systems.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
b) Curated Self-Service Experience With Business-Friendly Data Models
- The data team creates dashboards and data models that allow users across the company to explore data independently.
- By refining their data models to closely mirror business processes and mental models, they ensure that stakeholders can intuitively understand and interact with data, making self-service analysis a whole lot easier.
Before choosing Holistics we spent time ensuring we landed our data architecture - designing the conceptual models and building a layer in our warehouse to very closely represent that.
This means that when we wrap Holistics over that, everyone understands the concepts - these are my customers, my users, my revenue, my subscriptions, etc. This makes self-service significantly easier when data is presented as real-world concepts that everyone is familiar with. Now anyone who needs to can explore data and create reports.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
c) Streamlined Metrics For Everyone
- Important reports are highlighted in the company’s general communications to keep everyone up-to-date.
- Custom dashboards with relevant metrics are always within reach for each team, stimulating ongoing interaction and discovery.
We’ve put all of our company’s key metrics into a streamlined set of dashboards that everyone can access. We work with individual teams across the company to ensure they have what they need and now every team has their dashboards, both high level and operational.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
The Results: A Thriving Data-Driven Culture
The implementation of Holistics, coupled with Stark’s strategic vision, has transformed Optimal Workshop’s data culture:
- Over 90% company-wide adoption of Holistics
- Significant cost savings by consolidating data access and reducing dependencies on other platforms
- Streamlined set of dashboards with key metrics accessible to everyone in the company
- Shift in company culture towards data-driven decision making
- Increased confidence in data exploration across all departments
The whole culture has shifted. When we started, people weren’t asking data questions. Once we started releasing dashboards and insights, people started going - ‘oh, finally, I can understand this!’
Then they started asking more questions, and the data team could build out from there. We now have everything covered from product data, to marketing, sales and customer support - basically all the key SaaS metrics are up and available to be explored along with a ton of operational reports.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
By creating a culture where everyone has the power to explore data, Optimal Workshop’s 2-person data team has enabled a data-driven culture where company-wide adoption is above 90%.
There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not extremely happy that we chose Holistics as our platform. It was the best thing we could do to create a data-driven company. We’re super happy.
– Guido Stark, Head of Data
Other Success Stories