Insights from Mode empower a company-wide strategic transformation

The remote work revolution changed the way teams across the world work together – and Freehand by InVision is meeting the challenge head on. With the shift to remote and hybrid work in the wake of the pandemic, many companies needed to find new ways to work cross-functionally without losing the momentum of being in the same space. In addition, they needed a better way to collaborate — to recapture the magic of brainstorming, ideating, and sharing ideas.  The team at InVision met the moment with Freehand by InVision , a visual collaboration that uniquely increases productivity by more easily turning ideas into action workflows on the canvas.

With the growth of Freehand as a new focal point of the organization, the team had to reorganize their vision and work towards new goals and metrics, which meant that the Data team needed to be able to access that information quickly and easily.

The team behind Freehand by InVision needed to rethink its approach to data – the key metrics that drive this new line of business and data is used to empower teams across the business, especially sales and marketing.

The data team, led by Lead Data Scientist Bala Vejju, was responsible for spearheading this effort, with Mode as the primary modern business intelligence tool.

With the adoption of Freehand as a new North Star metric, teams across the company needed new queries, reports, and dashboards to understand how their work was driving towards this goal. They needed critical data, quickly and at their fingertips, to know what was working – and what needed work. To deliver modern business intelligence to these teams when they need it, Bala relies heavily on Mode. As he put it: “With Mode, I felt like I had wings.”

“I use Mode every day. On day one with Mode, I was able to  run a query and do my analysis in the same tool. It was incredible. Mode is the bread and butter of any kind of analysis or reporting at InVision,” Bala said.

In this way, Mode has been the business intelligence tool that enables Bala and his team to fuel decision-making across the company.

To drive this transformation, the company’s leaders needed the ability to assess progress against the new strategy every step of the way. Using Mode, Bala says: “I’ve worked with the leadership team to create weekly recurring reports needed to do everything from informing the board to making sure sales incentives are performing as expected. Their easy-to-understand format enables leaders to make quick and effective decisions.”

“If the finance team wants to understand product usage information alongside revenue, it's all in one big database connected to Mode, accessible with a one query,” Bala adds. As new questions come up from leadership, Bala’s team can respond quickly and flexibly – running a query in Mode, conducting an analysis, and then adding the results to the collection of data that leadership can refresh and access on demand.

A vital part of Freehand by InVision’s shift was changing the marketing and sales motions around a new key metric: the share of ARR, or annual recurring revenue, attributed to Freehand usage. This required completely new customer segmentation, and the development of fresh campaigns and tactics for those new segments. The complexity of this task was particularly high as many customers are more familiar with InVision’s classic prototyping and design specific products, and measuring the effectiveness of cross-promoting Freehand presented challenges around measuring attributed ARR and product usage by accounts.

With Mode, the data team was able to support these growth teams with relevant data right when they needed it. They began by defining the new customer segmentation. “I used Mode to write a query to find the usage for each account. Then the go-to-market team used the data to create customer segments,  so they could develop distinct marketing strategies for each category. Then, I put their segmentation logic back in Mode and created a recurring report so they could see how activities were impacting the revenue of different segments. Now, that's the main dashboard they review.”

In this way, Mode made it possible to unify Bala’s data expertise with the go-to-market expertise from business leaders, developing key business logic to drive the InVision’s strategic transformation.

The sales team also updates its customer segmentation regularly to ensure they’re targeting the right accounts in the right way. Legacy business intelligence tools rely on rigid data models to maintain their logic, which makes these iterative changes difficult. Now, using Mode’s Datasets tool, Bala is excited to streamline this process. “With Mode’s Datasets feature, if the team adds a new field in Salesforce that they want to see in reports, I can just go to the dataset, add a new column, run it, and get them the new segmentation.”

As Bala’s team grows, he sees Datasets as an important way to provide more insights, more efficiently. “As we hire analysts in the future, Datasets will help us avoid duplicating work,” he says. “One person can create the Dataset, and the other analysts and teams can use it for their reports, rather than re-writing the same kind of SQL.”

Using Mode, Bala and his team are working to ensure that, from top to bottom, the Freehand by InVision team has the information they need to grow their line of business in a rapidly transforming environment.