There's a fundamental change taking place in the way that organizations make decisions. For analysts and data scientists, the days of being forced to use conventional, monolithic data tools are ending. The individuals who answer the hardest questions within an organization can use the tools they choose. These tools let them investigate a problem, solve it, and move on.

Regardless of how agile your team might be, you're limited by how quickly you can provision a warehouse, build ETL pipelines, set up event tracking, and integrate an analytics tool. Doesn't this all take significant time and expertise to build?

Anytime you look for patterns in previous experiences, or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're analyzing something. This means nearly everyone in the workforce does some sort of analysis every day, every time they make a decision.

The need for hard data to help make these decisions in the workplace gave birth to the idea of an “Analyst” as we know it.

A few weeks ago, Google announced a new feature, Dataset Search, that aims to make it easier for anyone to discover public datasets. Journalists, analysts, and data nerds will likely find Dataset Search useful: it uses metadata to help people discover different versions of a dataset and publications that reference it.

If your company is one of the thousands using Salesforce on a daily basis, their customer-relations management (CRM) tool is a treasure-trove of information for your business. This data provides a window into your potential and actual customers— which helps explain why it's one of the first third-party tools we see Mode customers integrating with their data warehouses.

We are always looking for ways to improve Mode. Sometimes this means adding completely new features, but other times this means taking a close look at all of the little details that make up the every day Mode experience, and figuring out how to make it even better. This quarter, we have been steadily pushing out subtle improvements to refine and perfect the way Mode works. Here is a quick rundown of some of our favorites.