Realpad Analytics

Context

Realpad serves B2B customers from SMB developers to enterprise portfolios. When I joined, analytics was a recurring churn and sales objection: the core product did not give a trustworthy picture of the business.

Problem

Built-in reports were outdated and distrusted. Customers exported data to Excel or their own warehouse and rebuilt views manually. Engineering kept getting pulled into bespoke report requests - slow to ship, expensive to maintain, and never quite what each persona needed.

My role

I led the product decision and rollout to replace the bespoke-report treadmill with embedded, self-service analytics inside the app.

Constraints

• Technical debt: Every custom report added long-term maintenance.
• Segments: Enterprise CEOs, finance analysts, and SMB operators need different defaults - one static dashboard does not fit all.
• Time to value: Sales and CS needed something shippable in days, not quarters.
• Trust: Analytics had to feel part of the product, not an external reporting service.

What I did

• Evaluated build vs buy; chose embedded Metabase over continuing in-house bespoke reports.
• Partnered with engineering on embed, permissions, and data model hooks.
• Designed rollout defaults by segment (enterprise vs SMB) and persona (portfolio view vs line-item drill-down).
• Shifted CS and product from "request a report" to "configure your workspace."

Key decisions

• Embed Metabase: Buy self-service and speed; stop owning every chart as custom code.
• Segmentation over one template: Flexible embed so each customer type builds what they need.
• Product-native analytics: Customer-facing analytics inside Realpad, not a separate BI tool login.

Result

Customers could explore their data without waiting on exports or custom builds. Engineering spent less time on one-off reports; new dashboards could ship in hours instead of days. Analytics became part of the product story for enterprise and SMB, not a workaround.

What this shows

This project is a good example of the kind of work I do best: taking messy customer reporting needs and turning them into a shipped product capability - embedded analytics people can actually use, with less manual work for the team behind it.