 Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG, brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington, or as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the senior director of product management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. Hi, how's it going? Great, this has been a very buzzy morning for Jeff and I here on this set. Lots of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so big growth in just a year. There's, I think, Mark Mater, your CEO shared some stats this morning. There are 1,100 companies represented here, customers, from 20 countries. There are more than 50 customer speakers, which is, I think there's no better validating voice than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, I was looking at, you guys are partners with some of your competitors. One of the things I wanted to understand is where do you have integrations with technology versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two and how does it work in a Smartsheet world? You know, I think of the integrations really are where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or I want to be able to connect to a Google Drive or a OneDrive document in those native stores. So that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization and I need data to flow between those tools. Like a Salesforce or a Jira or something like that, Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there. When something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems because those are the systems of record that my company cares about. So a connection is a much bigger step than an integration? They're just different. Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interaction. So things like Drive and Box and Dropbox and Slack and Teams and stuff like that. Or the web content widget which we just announced, right? We want to be able to embed a YouTube video in a dashboard. That's an integration. There's no data really flowing back and forth. It's just a link, right? Got it, thank you. Yeah. So a lot of customers, I think 50 customers presenting which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's awfully large. So just some of the whole chatter here. You've been here for a couple of days now and you guys had some early training yesterday. What are some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customers. Kind of what's the buzz on some of the new offerings and what are you hearing amongst the constituents here? I mean, it's always, it's always incredible. Like, you know, this is our only our second year but the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away but it's just the big list of things that we shipped this week. And, you know, as I was reflecting, I'm like, I don't remember doing all that much but then when you see it all up, you know, all in one big slide with everything listed out, it's incredible. So it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product session and we're really excited to have shipped the multi-assigned to feature which has been our number one customer request for a while. But it's not a, it's not a, like, you know, game-changing feature whereas I think some of the, you know, automation rules and updates there and the workflow builder are really, are really people are going to go back and it's going to change the way that they work and so people are really excited about that. They're really excited about dynamic view and being able to really tailor the information that is shared across their organization. The word collaboration, like symbiotic or bi-directional collaboration popped into my mind when Jean Farrell, your SPPF product who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience in that number of times you mentioned the audience broke into applause and it probably feels pretty good, like, yes, we were listening to you were doing this enabling them to have technology that allows them to collaborate within and amongst teams and functions within an organization but you're also taking their feedback directly and collaborating with customers to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had Margot Bizitacion on from Forrester and she was talking about the collaborative work management, CW as an emerging market. With perspective collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I could be a licensed user and share with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for smartsheets? Well, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative. Oh, we can both comment on a Google doc and that's great but I think where Smartsheet really excels is in this sort of free collaborator model that's not bounded by your particular organization or your team and it really allows you to spread and create connections across customers and vendors and other orgs within your team and this is where you're starting to see these sort of step function changes in these organizations where you see this Office Depot example and he talks about taking a workflow in their organization going from four to six weeks down to 24 hours and enabling people who are putting in a budget request to take action on that request the next day and those are the kinds of things that are going to fundamentally change those businesses and so that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful is you can't get that kind of compression in time unless you can really span those traditional business silos. So Robin, one of the great things that happens always with tech companies is there's the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important to get an ecosystem lost up going on but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? It's always application centric, right? I got a problem, I got to fix it. At the same time, you guys have, you do have a platform meaning it can go across a lot of different applications. So when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform priority in terms of more of kind of a general purpose underlie versus an app priority, like you said, multi, multi, how do you call it? Multi-assigning, yeah. Multi-assigning, you assign two people to the same, to the not correct product management protocol but everybody wants it because it's a real world. You know, how do you kind of prioritize that? How do you kind of look at the world when you're deciding what are you going to roll out next? What are you going to roll out next? What are you going to roll out next? I mean, I think it starts and ends with having conversations with real people. You know, we take in lots of data and we have all enhancement requests and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning actually was less than 3% of all enhancement requests in the last couple of years but it's our number one request. And so it sort of speaks. Wait, wait, wait, so it was less than 3% of all enhancement requests. But it was number one. But it's our number one. So you've got a giant laundry list. There's a giant laundry list of things, right? So we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers and dedicated user experience people that are going out. We're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them. And we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases because there's so many different ways that people use the product. There's not enough people asking for one thing. They're all asking for slightly different things. And so we really have to dig in and have a real qualitative conversation with them to understand and bring that back and say, okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves all of these problems in a compelling way. Well, there's definitely more than 3% of the people cheered when that feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other kind of dichotomy that you got to wrestle with is kind of a low code, no code. We want to be for everybody. Yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So again, that's kind of a delicate balancing act as well because you want to let everyone have access and be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those priorities? We just try to hide as much of that as possible. Smartsheet's always been this tool where it's like it sort of looks like a spreadsheet and it sort of looks like project management, but it's got this underlying flexibility built into it, right? We don't force you to, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there, right? If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD, whereas a lot of purpose-build applications, they're like, oh, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format or it doesn't work. And we've always had this sort of flexibility and complexity trade-off. The trade-off is if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more robust than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so we've always sort of danced this line with like making the tool super flexible and letting it just, assume the users knows what they're doing, right? When they're interacting with the tool, we assume they have an intention and they're trying to do something and we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that sort of plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do is, like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers and we put stuff out there well in advance of releasing it in a situation like this. You know, we announced a bunch of capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And I think that it's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board than any feature I've seen at this company. But it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever built as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sitting in a room go, oh, we know the perfect solution to workflow management. Most of our customers don't even necessarily use the term workflow, right? And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say what work is. It says alerts and actions, you know? And little things like words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement, it's when this happens to this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this to try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. You can't avoid it, but you know. So in hiding it, the last thing which you get to do going forward is machine learning and our official intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in that field is for you to leverage that under the covers to hide the nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer, to help suggest the right path. So I imagine that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap, integrating those types of capabilities underneath the covers. Yeah, and you know, there's been a lot of, we have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot company back in January. And that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. Like we feel that we have a lot of really good information but at the same time, we know there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI and the reality is like that relies on huge data sets and it relies on a lot of analysis and that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customers' data security and data privacy very seriously and we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens than say a consumer product that's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data and you don't really have a lot of recourse other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it but we want to enable you to turn these types of features on. So we need to look at more like an off-end model where a customer can say, oh, if I'm a big enterprise user, a smart sheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users knowing that that information is going to stay in our, it's going to comply with our data governance and our data privacy rules that our IT team puts forward. So in the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, hiding it, abstracting it, I'm curious when you walk into a customer, because here we are in Bellevue or not Vegas, but we're neighbors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced teams about 18 months or so ago. You partner with both, you compete, also you're competing with teams. When you walk into a customer in an enterprise likely has a mixture of tons of different software applications, right, they probably have Office 365, Power BI, Excel. Why would a customer who has such familiarity with, say, on Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus this way? Well, we'll just extend our Microsoft expertise and bring in something like Teams. I'm just curious what you've seen in that. You know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And there's a lot of tools out there where you're having conversations and a lot of the tools out there where you're creating content. And there's not a lot of tools out there that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together in an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of gene, Gene will sometimes use this term shared fabric. The Smartsheet really provides this shared fabric that ties a bunch of these tools together. And we really, we want to partner with all of these people because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You know, you talk to some customers and like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of 10 apps. And you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later and they'll be like, I love Smartsheet. It allows me to work with all the tools I've already got. It's very different and they just have different corporate goals and objectives there. And so I think that the reason people like Smartsheet is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about that. So it's going to say, look, oh, if you want to use teams for your communications vehicle and OneDrive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet? Great, we're not like, we want that to be the case. We do that internally, right? We use all those, you know, if you look at us internally, we're just like every other modern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using and it's different from team to team and department to department. So it's all about just embracing the reality that is modern business and modern application, you know, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1,100 companies represented here at this event, 2,000 people or so, 50 plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We need, we want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better. I don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah, no, I'm trying to think of a good, I don't know that I have a good, you know, standout example, I think that, you know, we hear little tidbits of that from everyone and it's not, it's a very common theme. So I don't know that, it's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Like nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, you know, I hear things, you know, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this or I'm going to now pull the, integrate with this tool because you've added this. So, you know, you should sort of take some and give some on the same sentence almost. Yeah, you can do both. Yeah. Well, Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time or excited to be here. This is our first Smart Sheet event and we have some customers coming up. So looking forward to hearing some more news cases in action. Great, thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smart Sheet Engage in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I. We'll be right back with our next guest.