Condé Nast transforms data culture globally

Condé Nast has been using Mode for more than five years. In that time, the business intelligence (BI) team was responsible for delivering data solutions to all internal teams across the business, building out things like sales pipelines and A/B testing for product launches. The team was pulling off a lot of quick wins by simply fulfilling business requests, but was operating in a reactive way.

In order to become more proactive, the BI team did two things: created an extensive data intelligence process and developed an internal data product called Dash. Through collaboration with the data engineering and data product teams, Dash became the central data analytics platform that provided data products to various business units through a unified data layer. The data intelligence process was made up of a series of creating, vetting, and approval steps that any dashboard or report meant for Dash had to go through before the data and findings could be utilized or published.

Homepage of DASH, Condé Nast’s internal data platform that provides a single source of truth for employees company-wide.

The challenge was that this process was too slow for data-savvy teams like product analytics and audience analytics. These teams are highly skilled in data analysis, and already used to running their own experiments and doing their own analysis, so it would slow them down too much to go through the full data intelligence process. However, the BI team also wanted to ensure the right amount of governance so that their analytics were based on the same source of truth as the rest of the organization’s reporting.

Damir and his team began to think through how they could leverage Mode to help teams quickly access and analyze data without going through the extensive data intelligence process that less data-literate teams required.

The BI team used Mode to build an internal data platform, called the Mode Portal, to provide a single, organized, and searchable place for the product analytics and audience development teams to begin their analysis and share their results.

The Mode Portal, which is embedded into DASH, provides a place for data-savvy teams to begin analysis and share results.

The reports in the Mode Portal, like product launch performance and A/B testing results, have been built by product or marketing leads using the governance set up by the BI team. This ensures that the analysis has the domain expertise of the subject matter experts, and the data expertise of the BI team.

As a result, these reports became highly trusted sources of data that product teams could build and act on without being slowed down by the full data intelligence process.

Report of a product launch in the Mode Portal, utilizing Mode’s embedded analytics.

A different type of report in the Mode Portal, utilizing parameters to allow users to easily see relevant results for them.

Once the Mode Portal was created, the BI team used Mode’s White Label Embed feature to incorporate this portal into Dash (the company-wide tool). This turned Dash into a one-stop shop for the whole organization to access their data, regardless of technical capabilities or data expertise.

Democratizing data by building a one-stop shop for all business questions has led to the development of a data-driven culture at Condé Nast.

Since the launch of Dash and the Mode Portal, 50% more users are coming back to view reports on a daily basis. This means that more employees than ever are using data to make everyday decisions. Additionally, the number of different types of reports has increased by 3x, which means that users are using more reports and are therefore making more sophisticated decisions with data.

Lastly, the data team gains bandwidth by focusing on the projects that need their support the most, knowing that the work they are not directly involved with is accurate and trusted.

With Mode, the data team at Condé Nast has democratized data and taken the data practices of a large media company to the next level, allowing them to move faster and make better decisions as a business.