The PRQL: How to Get Business Teams Closer to Customer Data (The Right Way)

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show, you’ll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we’re going to cover. If they’re interesting to you, you can catch the full length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to The Data Stack Show. We are here with Ryan McCrary, who is a product manager at RudderStack. So close to home. And Ryan, you’ve been building a bunch of stuff that is intended to get business users closer to data. And I’m really excited to dig into that whole problem, because I think it’s been a topic of late, you know, in the last year or two in the data space, you know, or at least has reached fever pitch, you know, with venture backed companies. So, want to talk about that. But briefly, give us a background? Yeah.

Ryan McCrary 00:56
So my original background is, as a software engineer, been at RudderStack for a few years now in a number of different roles. So kind of approaching this from different, you know, phases of the customer journey. So started off with customer success engineering, working with our existing customers, moved from there into Solutions Engineering, so, you know, building higher level solutions for prospects and customers. And now I’m on the product team helping build out the actual solution that we needed this whole time.

John Wessel 01:22
Awesome. Yeah. So Ryan, one of the topics I wanted to dig into was that activation, I think I’ve had two or three conversations over just the last week around people complaining a little bit, maybe on dashboards, and like, we make a dashboard he gets to do, and then really desiring like, hey, well, what if I could have the data and the tools I already use? And I think that’s one of the big things on that activation? So happy to talk about that. And then I’m excited to hear what you want to talk about.

Ryan McCrary 01:51
Yeah, so from a data activation perspective, I mean, that’s kind of the impetus for what we’re trying to accomplish with profiles, and specifically with like that last bit of the activation piece. And so, we’ve talked about this, you know, a lot internally, but to your point, like, yes, everyone’s used to like the world of BI and, you know, here’s a view into our data, but it’s largely worthless, if it doesn’t, a align with what they’re seeing in the downstream tools, but also, just being in the downstream tools is kind of the prerequisite to that. So, you know, a dashboard is great, but unless you can act upon it in the tool, where you live, whether your marketing product, you know, advertising, anything like that, it’s really largely useless. So really, understanding not only how we model the data and visualize it, but then what do we actually do with it is kind of the key there. So that’s kind of what we’re, I guess, discussing today. Yeah,

John Wessel 02:38
I’m excited. All right, well, let’s dig in.

Eric Dodds 02:42
Alright, that’s a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Thursday morning. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.