Alter Everything Podcast
A podcast about data science and analytics culture.
Recorded live at Inspire 2024, we listen through the diverse experiences and insights of Alteryx enthusiasts. Join hosts Nicole Johnson and Joshua Burkhow as they listen to real customer stories, react to firsthand accounts, and provide expert analysis on what makes Alteryx an essential tool in the world of data analytics. Whether you’re brand new to the Alteryx platform or a workflow pro, this episode offers a unique glimpse into the Maveryx Community.
Panelists
- Nicole Johnson, Sr. Manager, Product Management @ Alteryx, @NicoleJ, LinkedIn
- Joshua Burkhow, Chief Evangelist @ Alteryx - @JoshuaB, LinkedIn
- Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn
Special thanks to our Community members featured in this episode: Chirag Suchak (@chiragsuchak), Emily Leung (@EmilyL), Jeff Hill (@orangebomber), Jose Manuel Lleras (@LLERAS), Mark Frisch (@MarqueeCrew), and Rachel Costa (@rachel-costa).
Topics
Transcript
Ep 165 Community Voices: What Do You Love about Alteryx
[00:00:00] Megan Dibble: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today we have a special show for you featuring my colleagues Nicole Johnson, senior Manager in product management at Joshua Berkow, chief Evangelist at Alteryx. In this episode, we hear from six users on what they love about Alteryx and share our own reactions and stories and response.
A quick note there were a lot of different recording environments in this episode, so please bear with us. Let's get started.
Alright, well, Josh, Nicole, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners?
[00:00:43] Nicole Johnson: Hi everyone. I am Nicole Johnson. I am a senior manager for the product management team that is responsible for the Designer desktop product here at Alteryx. As well as being deeply invested in some of our new hybrid offerings with cloud execution for desktop.
Um, but I have a, a varied background. I was a customer of Alteryx before I came to work here. I've used Designer for maybe about eight years now. So I've seen things from both sides of the Fed, Josh,
[00:01:12] Joshua Burkhow: so Joshua Burkhow, chief evangelist at Alteryx, and I spend a lot of time talking to customers and. Really helping our customers understand the value of Alteryx and all the wonderful things that comes with it.
Like Nicole, we're both Alteryx ACEs, both used Alteryx as a customer for many years and all have our sort of personal love stories around Alteryx as well. But I'm really excited to be here. Thank you, Megan, for inviting us.
[00:01:37] Megan Dibble: Of course. Yeah. I'm happy to have both of you on here and for today's episode, we have something really fun.
A little different. So back at Inspire in Vegas this year, I talked to a lot of Alteryx users at our podcast booth about all types of topics, but the most frequently answered question was, what do you love about Alteryx? And so today we're gonna get to hear from our users and what they said, and then we're gonna chat about things that brings up, or things that resonate and just.
Have a fun time chatting and, and hearing from our users. So with that, I will kick us off with first clip. Okay. So what is your favorite thing about Alteryx Designer?
[00:02:23] Attendee: I'm a product manager and a lot of times I have to deal with unstructured data, semi-structured data, GS ON messages. And at times what happens is there is a lot of dependency on the developers who would help me accomplish those tasks.
But with the Alteryx designer, those things have become really easy. Certain things where I used to be dependent on a developer for weeks, I'm able to accomplish that in a few minutes and I can get the structured data set at a click of a mouse and the results are amazing, and that is what we use for our reporting on a day-to-day basis.
[00:02:56] Megan Dibble: That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. That was re hearing about how he used to be dependent on developers and then. All of a sudden he has all this autonomy unlocked from using the product. I think is super cool and exciting to have like more control over your work.
[00:03:15] Nicole Johnson: Yeah, and like no one wants to wait for an IT ticket been around, like send a request.
I need a query to do that. It's such a frustrating thing to experience as a business user when you're waiting around for it to get back to you in three to 10 business days. I know as a user I was. Not super familiar with sql and so like I'm in the camp of having to go send a request to somebody to go give me the the answer I'm looking for.
And honestly, designer taught me how to build equal queries myself through a combination of using Visual Query Builder and the SQL Query editor and picking the things I wanted and then seeing how it crafted a SQL statement that kind of started me on the right track. And then using all the other tools that follow those same patterns and concepts as programming languages and database query languages.
Taught myself, and I think that was really fun to be like, well, I don't need that IT ticket anymore. I can just do it myself.
[00:04:09] Joshua Burkhow: Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said in that small soundbite was first of all, that there is this idea that the it of the future and meaning the it, it now can't handle every little technical request, nor should they.
It's not effective way to to run. But there's also the, that level of technical knowledge that we have broadly across kids coming out of college and just the workforce in general is higher than it was 10, 15, even 20 years ago. We're much more technically inclined and we should take advantage of that.
And I think this is one of those things where that, there had to be a shift organizationally, but just the freedom that, you know, if Nicole or you or I have an idea that we want to explore. We can just open up Alteryx and start playing with it and figure it out versus, oh my gosh, I gotta put a request in here.
Wait the three to 10 days. Nicole had suggested like, it kind of dies on the vine and now these ideas can can grow right from the start. Maybe we get to a point where we're like, okay, now we definitely need to get this, get an IT request. We need to do something at large enterprise scale. Sure, that makes much more sense and that's a more valuable use of time.
I do love the sort of the freedom that it unlocks. There's, this is one of the things that we'll probably bring up a lot of times, but my personal journey with Alteryx is pretty emotional in the sense of, I see Alteryx through the lens of all the reactions and all the emotions and all the lies that, that are touched by Alteryx and the freedom is a big one, is being able to do that tho.
Those are not small things, you know, when you empower somebody and get them to be able to do. Things that they never thought they could do or they never thought they were capable, like sql. I was the same way. I didn't really come out of the gates writing SQL code or Python code, and some IT leaders don't like this, but Alteryx is our gateway drug, right?
It is our gateway drug towards learning how to co learning how to build. Chris Goodman and I talk about design a very software centric. Idea, but it's very persistent in Alteryx and that was the gateway to understanding those bigger higher order concept, Python, and understanding how to use scripting languages, how to use full on object oriented program, and why we would use those things and what context.
All of those things can be pretty headstrong and pretty difficult, but ultra choose sort of builds his freedom pathway towards towards doing that.
[00:06:49] Megan Dibble: Definitely everything you just said is actually a really nice transition into our second clip, which is from Emily. So we will listen to that one now. Okay, Emily, so what's your favorite thing about Alteryx Designer?
[00:07:02] Attendee: I think my favorite thing for Alteryx Designer is that I did come from starting off with sql, managing the entire database. And I just found that really intimidating. Just like one trip of a word and you could delete an entire table. That's really scary, right? So I think that Alteryx designer, it helps you visualize whatever you're doing conceptually.
You have your browse features and there's all these kelp tips that are in the interface, like it's so helpful and intuitive. Working with a lot of software companies, I don't think it's as intuitive. Right. And I also even learned about some statistical methods through Alteryx. I, I would say in college I was not a good studier at all.
I hated taking tests. So I just love the fact that I have working knowledge of this and I can learn even more. So totally. I, I think that's my favorite part about Alteryx Designer. You know, I do love data, but SQL is intimidating just with. Just coding in general. Yeah, so that's what I like about Alteryx Designer.
[00:08:14] Megan Dibble: What comes to mind hearing from Emily? I know for me in college and my major, everybody, I did engineering in college, but everybody like dreaded the coding classes. I kinda liked them, but most people it is really intimidating and it's really nice that you can create code with Alteryx without having to write it.
[00:08:36] Joshua Burkhow: There's a lot to unpack from that. The big one is this whole idea of visual workflows and building workflows that are visual. That is the single reason that I was able to get started, and very visual. Can't really get into the weeds unless I can see it. And almost on a global perspective. And I think this is another one of those things where we've unlocked a whole landscape of new users, not expecting them to write code that.
First of all, it's hard to learn. People will argue with that, but it is hard for visual people. But once you do, it's really powerful. I'll give you that. The, this whole visual construct, is it just a different way of thinking, different way of looking at the world? It's just a different paradigm. It's a different way of approaching the world, but I really like that there, there's gonna be a lot of our customers and a lot of users like us who gravitate towards this visual.
[00:09:34] Nicole Johnson: You know, playing around with building out solutions and solving problems and exploring new tools, it is a visual programming language and it gives you, I think, a lot of confidence because it's almost like you're leaving like a breadcrumb trail of what you're doing and what you're thinking and how you're solving this problem.
So my background is in accounting and finance. Like I started out thinking I was gonna be an accountant and go work for a, a firm. Then I started working at a construction company and I went and took like a whole bunch of different paths. And ultimately what I found in a variety of different roles was I just like solving problems.
I wanted to play around with cool new solutions to things and I wanted to build. And so this is a, I think, a pretty common path. You start out with visual basic, and you're building out cool formulas and spreadsheets and cool things, and automating some processes. Then I found Alteryx and it was like, oh my gosh, this is the missing piece.
Because what I wasn't getting out of trying to figure out how to solve this problem in Excel, like whatever was that I couldn't see the, the history of what I had done or the steps that I had taken. I had to like un nests a bunch of formulas and like trace. Cells from one sheet to another and like go try to figure out where I went wrong.
And the thing I loved the most about Alteryx and Designer immediately was that I could see the path I had taken and then down the road as I started building out solutions and exploring new tools and new ways to solve things. Then what I started to understand is that this visual programming concept is really helpful if you're trying to translate between a user in the business side of things and somebody on the technical side of things, who needs to make sure that you're not doing something stupid.
Right? And so like now I can say no. I can show you exactly the steps that I'm taking in, exactly the process I, I developed and in a world of accounting and finance where I lived prior to coming here, that was really valuable to be able to. I usually walk an auditor through, here's my process. I'm sorting my data with a sort tool.
I am filtering my data for these parameters. I'm summarizing it on these metrics, and it was so helpful and so powerful, both as a learning mechanism, but then also on the flip side, being able to help educate and communicate what you've built and how you've built it and why you built it. It's really powerful to be able to do that.
You already have a visual rather than people's eyes glazing over as they're looking at some janky, many if statement nested formula.
[00:12:08] Joshua Burkhow: So Emily mentioned in her audio that it's intuitive. Not all problems are based on, on hardcore programming, hardcore mathematics or algorithms and stuff like that. There's a vast majority of problems, don't require anything crazy.
Now we take out this sort of friction that we've artificially placed in between. An analyst or someone who can solve problems like a Nicole, and then the actual problem being solved, right? Get as much of that friction out of there and as much of the complexity out of there. It's a whiteboard. We get a whiteboard on the wall.
Everybody starts drawing pictures, diagrams, you know what they're building. They're building an altered workflow.
[00:12:49] Megan Dibble: There is value in keeping it simple, for sure, and that's been a theme that has come up on previous episodes as well. You don't always need. ai, you don't always need the most complex solution, so I love that.
Okay. Now we're going to hear, we're gonna shift gears a little bit here from Jeff about telling stories with Data.
[00:13:09] Attendee: Alteryx Designer allows you to find the story in the data and present it in a manner that people can understand and make actionable decisions. That's what I try and do every day, was can I give somebody just.
Actionable task with the reporting tool. That could be a little bit better, but it's really undervalued. I think it's undervalued. I agree. I, I think people are so wrapped up in dashboards. They miss the day to day ability to get 1% better every day. They want the home run with a big dashboard as opposed to, what do we do today?
That's better than yesterday. So how's that?
[00:13:54] Megan Dibble: That's perfect. I really agree.
[00:13:57] Nicole Johnson: A little sad that the impression is the reporting tool can be better, but I was also a user, so I agree. There's still room to grow,
hurts a little bit. No, but I think this is such a good use case and when that, I think he hits the nail in the head when Jeff says that dashboards are cool and all, but like.
Sometimes you just need a report. You gotta have like a static report that's gonna give you the information you want in a consistent way and allow you to make some consistent decision and take action based off of it. And I think that there's a lot of value in the Alteryx platform in general, in the direction that we've been taking recently to say, all right, you've got your reporting tool.
They're pretty cool sometimes, and we've identified those some gaps there and said, okay. What this does is makes it easy for you to show the insights that you've gathered as a developer, building out your process, like, I'm gonna highlight these things in my data. I'm gonna send these emails and these summaries and or these stats to these folks.
But then we start wring on some of the new innovations that we have, like with Auto Insight. And this is where we branch into some really cool and exciting territory where it's like you might not even know the insights you need. And so now we are taking your data and giving you the ability to play around with it and choose different metrics, different measures, different comparisons and surfacing insights that you would've had to try a thousand different combinations of filters and joins and sorts in order to get to that same analysis.
Giving you that like instant feedback that, hey, look over here, there's a bit of an anomaly that maybe you wanna pay attention to. And the fact that giving people like a hint, like, Hey, pay attention and go look over here. There's interesting things happening here that you know might not have been surfaced if you were just looking at the same thing over and over again.
Really takes Alteryx as a platform in general beyond just being about repeatability. Which was clearly the wheelhouse of our designer products over the past years. But now, like you start looking at, well, not just about repeatability, but about discoverability and being able to surface insight without even looking for them.
That I think is really what's gonna take things to the next level for users like death and being able to now have. Secret weapon and being able to identify things to pay attention to, things to look at next, things that need to be analyzed.
[00:16:27] Joshua Burkhow: You know, Nicole and I might go build this whole solution based on what we understand, what we know, what our conversations are, all the input that we have.
We'll go build that. Maybe that takes a week, a month, year, whatever. We come back to the business. We say, Hey, here's our solution. We solved this problem. We found all these cool things. Here you go. What inevitably happens? That's not what I was looking for. Oh, that's interesting. What's the next step? Mm-Hmm.
That's why auto insights are so valuable is because it gets you down the field faster. So it gives you initial insights and allows you to have these more frequent conversations to where there's not a big time gap between the task or the challenge or the solution, and some insight that can be incrementally gained out.
Because the reality is most of these insights that are produced will change the trajectory of decision making of the direction of the company where we're gonna focus.
[00:17:27] Megan Dibble: That was great perspective from both of you. Thank you. Okay, so now let's hear from Jose Manuel on what he likes about Alteryx Designer.
[00:17:36] Attendee: I love how it's user friendly. People can drag and drop and not be afraid to try different things. And I think that's the main difference. That's what makes Alteryx being so successful. So I love that part. I also love regular expressions because it just makes it very powerful and it gives you the ability to transform data in a very unique way.
[00:17:56] Megan Dibble: Definitely. Thank you. I
[00:17:58] Attendee: know. Thank you.
[00:18:01] Nicole Johnson: I'm gonna say my favorite joke out there is. If I had 99 problems and then I use regular expression and now I have a hundred problems, but I love it. Regular expressions can be hard, but what you can do with them in designer and then be able to immediately get that visual feedback about what wrong, can definitely help you get there faster and, and try to figure things out.
And so I just, I love it. I always love somebody who loves regular expressions 'cause I'm like, wow, we're a powerful wizard. It is wizardry, but like, it's also that the designer product and Alteryx suite in general is so agnostic. It can be simple and it can be incredibly complex and it can be something that you use to understand information about your data, or it could be something that you use to build something entirely new.
It can be about getting to a specific reporting outcome or just exploring information. And it can be static or dynamic. Like you can build your processes and build your solutions in an infinite number of ways to solve an infinite number of problems at any level of complexity. And I think that is really cool that the products are still flexible, that they can accomplish use cases for.
Hospitals and they can accomplish use cases for little construction companies and major accounting firms and banks and shipping distribution centers. The mere breadth of use cases you can cover because it's so user friendly and so adaptable and flexible and really just agnostic to wherever your data is and whatever you're trying to do makes it like this WI Army knife utility tool that can solve any problem.
[00:19:49] Joshua Burkhow: Many of us who have spent 20 years doing this still solve problems, somewhat inefficiently until we keep learning and growing and finding new and better ways to, Mm-Hmm. That's where, like RegX, for example, comes in, is that's a tool that uplevels your capability to tap into data that is extremely messy, unstructured, that might be easier using red J or any of those sort of capabilities.
That's. Something that keeps a lot of us coming back is that there's always something new to learn and to grow and to get better at.
[00:20:21] Nicole Johnson: Well, I mean, I feel like that's the perfect bug for what you can find and learn for new use cases on the community. I can say like the weekly challenges, that's a whole lot of problems that I would never have thought to solve, and I think it's.
Possibly the most powerful way to learn, not just how to use the different tools and solve the different challenges, but also just teaches you how to think differently. Because like if you're always looking at one specific type of data and you work at a cell phone company and you're just dealing with rate plans and cell phones, right?
Like you're not really thinking outside the box about what other things you could do with designer or with the Alteryx product, you start trying to solve. You're Mark Watney on the Martian, trying to send a message from Mars using some sort of coded message like that is a problem I didn't think I needed to solve.
But you learn cool things from doing that, and I think it's a really neat way to not just learn and grow your skillset, but like also it's fine, like mm-Hmm.
[00:21:24] Joshua Burkhow: But by solving those, you come up with more innovative and creative ways to solve the problems that you're actually working on. It's super powerful.
[00:21:33] Megan Dibble: And Nicole, you said something about it, about Alteryx helping you think differently, and that transitions nicely into our next clip. You may have heard his voice, but this is Mark talking about what he loves.
[00:21:49] Attendee: Alteryx Designer rewards me for thinking, so when answering a question. You're able to look at all the data.
You're able to find out what question wasn't asked about the data and get insights around that in a way that just isn't being an order taker. You're able to actually add value and in my case, a pure brighter, then I naturally would be. So Alteryx gives me a little bit of like.
[00:22:19] Megan Dibble: So Mark. Yeah, fun fact, I, I asked him to help me test out my mic set up at Inspire, but then I really liked what he said, so figured we'd include it.
[00:22:29] Joshua Burkhow: Mark's been around a long time and in the Alteryx world we're absolutely grateful for him, and so he's really got some unique perspectives that have and grown over time. If you have someone who deeply cares about their respective area. They're very neurotic about knowing all the little ins and outs about tax law, and they want to showcase that, and they want to put in the effort to study it and learn it and everything.
And now they have this mechanism that allows them to apply that knowledge towards data in the pursuit of making better decisions. Because of that knowledge, completely get rewarded for thinking. I think that's. A brilliant perspective
[00:23:14] Nicole Johnson: and I love that it's a reward too. Like it makes it like a game and like that resonates so deeply with me.
When I learned designer at the beginning, we were just trying it out and we solved a couple problems with it at a very small company and I was like, this is cool. This does a lot of neat things. But it was when I discovered some of the other use cases and the challenges and things out there that I started to realize that it was fun like that.
It was like a game. I think that it's a really powerful tool for learning, but it's also a really powerful tool for like continuing to grow and invest in loving what you do, like when your job doesn't seem like it's a job. Because I. Just like building cool stuff and solving cool problems, and like Mark said, appearing smarter than you are.
I love that because it's so rewarding. It's so validating, and it really helps you get over that imposter syndrome of being like, I can't solve this problem if I don't have, you know, all this Python expertise, or, I can't solve this problem because I don't have an IT degree, or I'm not actually a business analyst.
I'm just the person who's trying to put together this report from my manager. None of that matters anymore because you can do it. You can solve the impossible problem, and now it's like, huh, okay, what else can I do? What am I gonna be able to do next now that I know I can do this? This thing that I used to think was impossible?
You're learning to break down the processes into a bunch of little pieces. You're learning how to think about them analytically. You're learning to anticipate what the problems are gonna be downstream. And so all of these things together, adding up to a rocket trajectory in your career and your capabilities just from playing with the tool, that's frankly just fun.
[00:25:04] Megan Dibble: I love that people can have fun with it and maybe hopefully have fun in their day-to-Day work with it as well. And so we've got one more, I think a nice one to end on here. Rachel is just starting out with Alteryx in her company, so let's hear from her.
[00:25:22] Attendee: We've only had Alteryx for about six months now, but it's just like the opportunity it holds because we're doing everything in Excel right now.
So just knowing how much we can automate and improve and create efficiencies within our organization, which not only takes some stuff off my plate, gives me a lot more free time, but. It helps me think outside the box, outside of my day-to-Day work and how we can continue to improve our business and really take it to the next level.
So I've been like super geeing out all week about all the different possibilities, so I'm really excited to really take advantage of it. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:26:02] Joshua Burkhow: You know, my gosh, this is exactly my story as well. I was working at a tiny little shoe company in Beaverton, Oregon. You could figure that out for yourself.
And. I had a team of analysts. We were in Excel Hell, which is exactly where it is. I had a whole bunch of SQL running as well. And we had an application that was built entirely on BBA code, couple hundred thousand lines of it, like pull out application just to build all the supply chain metrics and analysis that we needed.
And I had a demo one day of of Alter, I literally remember it. It is awkward to say this, but I'm telling you, it was nothing short of, you know, a light being shining down on my desk and the clouds breaking, and doves flying out at like angels singing or something because from that moment on it, I couldn't go back.
You've been doing something one way and someone shows you an another way that it's just much easier, much more fun. More than anything frees you up. We talked about this whole idea of freedom and Rachel was talking exactly about this, is that it frees me up to do these things that either I want to do more of or I'm, my job is to do more of these sort of things, not the Excel hell work that, that I'm stuck in.
And being able to open those doors, I literally was able to start automating stuff. I was able to simply take the work that I was doing. Put it into a workload. I was doing things for year, two years, twice or three times more complicated than they needed to be. By putting it on this visual interface, I was able to see, wait.
I don't mean that. I don't need to do that. That part's not route anymore. Why do I add that in there? It is such a thrilling ride and exciting discovery that a lot of us look forward to. I almost need my aha moment fix every once in a while.
[00:27:56] Nicole Johnson: Well, I mean, it's great because Joshua worked at his little shoe company in Oregon.
I worked at a tiny little cell phone company that really likes Magenta, and it's the same story. It doesn't matter what the industry or the size or the company is, it's the same story every time you start automating these processes and now you're taking month end close down from six days to three, and you're saving hundreds of hours of extremely tedious manual processes.
And now you get the concerns every once in a while, like, oh, this is gonna take away my job. No, it's not. It's gonna make your job more enjoyable. Gonna allow you to do things like upskill and learn how to better communicate with your DBAs, and it's gonna allow you to spend time building self-service apps so that other people can quickly get to the insights that you're able to generate.
I think it's really cool to see that incremental value provided by every one workflow that you develop. Like, I solved this one problem and took a two hour process down to two minutes. Now I have. An hour and 58 minutes left that I can use to build my next process. That'll take that one down from five hours to 30 seconds.
And I think you mentioned the aha moment, Joshua. And I think that's one of my favorite things, like when you get to the point you're like, I know how to build some things and now I'm teaching other people how to build some things. And it's my absolute favorite part is when you see the light bulb go off and they're like, I get it.
I see why this is such a powerful tool. I see why it is. So interesting in how it's can be so beneficial for my career.
[00:29:29] Joshua Burkhow: We're not forcing humans to be coders and write in languages that are really difficult and challenging. We're simplifying this and making our humans more powerful so that they can do big, bigger, and better things.
That's where I think Alteryx has continued to shine this whole way.
[00:29:48] Megan Dibble: Thank you both so much. I really enjoyed hearing all of your takeaways, all of your perspective and experience, and also big thank you to all of our users who contributed to this and talked with me ad Inspire. It's really encouraging to hear all the different ways that people.
Are getting value out of our products as well as advancing their careers continuously learning tons of cool stuff here. So thanks again for joining me today.
[00:30:19] Joshua Burkhow: Thank you so much.
[00:30:20] Nicole Johnson: Hey, it's Megan. It was fun.
[00:30:22] Megan Dibble: Thanks for listening. To learn more about topics mentioned in this episode, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast.
We'd also love to hear from you in the comments on what you love about Alteryx. See you next time.
This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.
