Great job with the UI. Looks really clean. One concern many data teams might have with this is around how something like verifies that the queries are correct before sharing it with the rest of the company. Have you thought about a solution for that?
You're spot on. One thing we're doing to deal with the long tail of integrations is opening up an API to customers.
We're also considering open sourcing that part of the product, but haven't made a firm decision on that yet. Would love to chat if you're open to it. We're definitely looking for people in product. Feel free to send me an email to [email protected]
We have pretty advanced RBAC in Secoda. You can make anyone a viewer, guest, admin or editor in the workspace. Viewers and Editors are only able to see the information. Secondly, we allow you to create "groups" for different functions in the organizations (ie. marketing, sales etc.). You can choose to share any resource with a specific user or group. This works similar to the RBAC that Notion uses, which only means that the right people are seeing the right information in Secoda. Lastly, we allow data teams to create "collections" of information, which can be shared with specific groups or specific users. Without sounding bias, I think this is where Secoda excels as a product.
2. What about PII? Some data needs to be stored, but cannot be viewed except for very, very few people and with a strong audit tail. This is a more specialized case for #1.
We have an ability to auto tag PII on a table and column level. Any PII data won't be viewable without permission from the admin.
3. How do you see the tool "spread" the most within companies? I would assume that easy sharing is how people learn about this, then try it themselves... but would love to hear what you actually see.
Usually the Slack integration is the best way to spread Secoda. With our Slack integration, any employee can search for information by pressing /secoda in Slack. You can also push information from Slack to Secoda and vice versa. This exposes Secoda to new employees in the place they work.
Ideally, no team has to answer the same question twice once they start using Secoda. In reality, there's times when are question looks similar but is defined differently. We're trying to suggest resources to people who ask questions so they become more self service. Similar to Intercom knowledge hub for data.
We're happy to help you or whoever would set it up and show you how other teams have been using the tool. Feel free to shot me an email at [email protected] if you'd like any help along the way
Hey HN, I’m Etai, together with Andrew a co-founder of Secoda (https://www.secoda.co). Secoda is a collaborative workspace for data teams that makes it easy to share metadata, queries, charts and documentation with any employee.
Companies store a growing amount of knowledge in BI tools, data warehouses, data pipelines, queries and documentation. Because these tools are not connected, it has become more difficult to manage all of this. Even with great practices, organizations still struggle to get value out of their data - up to 73% of all enterprise data goes unused. One of the big contributors to this problem is that organizations create data silos by not documenting and centralizing their data knowledge in a single place where every employee can access information about data.
Today, most data teams end up documenting all this data with Google Sheets or Confluence, which get outdated quickly. Because data documentation is outdated and hard to find, employees struggle to discover, understand and use it. This overwhelms data teams with repetitive questions about how to use and where to find company data.
In our last roles, Andrew and I had a hard time understanding context around different data resources. It was difficult to understand which table to use, what dashboard to trust, who to talk to about a particular metric or why we changed our pricing model. All of this data knowledge was in our data teams head and it made it really difficult to try to work with data. It would take around 2 weeks to get an answer to any data request because the data team was so backed up with questions. This sucked.
Secoda is unique because it's focused on helping the data team curate knowledge for the less technical employee. Data teams can use the tool to curate knowledge for specific departments or roles so that only the right people are able to see the data knowledge that they should see. We currently integrate into data warehouses, BI tools, dbt as well as Airflow and once teams connect their data to Secoda, they can get a comprehensive view of all their data knowledge in one place.
We’d love to hear your feedback or experience with the problem that we're solving and would be thrilled if you would sign up at https://secoda.co to let us know what you think!
Over the past year, our team experienced how difficult it was to discover data first hand in our last roles. Data was stored in siloed warehouses, visualized in multiple BI tools and only a few employees knew what data was trustworthy or even what different tables/columns meant.
There was a real appetite for data driven decision making across the company, but there was no good way to share tribal knowledge that had been built up over time, so people's intentions fell short. We realized that other mid sized tech companies were also creating a tremendous amount of data (we had over 500 different tables, visualizations and reports across the company of 25 people), but they didn't have a great way to make all that data accessible. This problem was so frustrating that we decided to leave our roles to solve this problem for other companies.
Secoda's product is an automated and collaborative data discovery platform that breaks down data silos within an organization and makes it easy to find, understand and use data. The product integrates with a company's existing data stack, such as Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift, Mode, Airflow, and builds up a graph of metadata that can be easily searched by employees in the organization.
We are building collaborative documentation tools such as discussions, tagging, and Slack integrations to make it simple to build up a knowledge base around company data.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by and we would love to hear any feedback you might have!