 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's The Cube at Tableau Conference 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, we're back here live in Seattle. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the civil noise. Here at the Tableau Conference, Data 14, all their users are here, the technologies are being showcased, they're partners. I'm John Furrier and our next guest is Dan Jewett, VP of Product Management at Tableau. He's the man in charge of making sure that product that everyone loves keeps on getting more love and more love. Welcome to The Cube. Perfect. Thank you, John. We're very excited to be here and help you guys out. I know you've been running around. I mean, the sessions have been great. The events have been well attended. Again, the attendance records are breaking every year. You guys are growing super fast. You have a lot of happy customers. So the pressure's on. You've got to outdo yourself. So what do you guys do? What's your job? Are you holding back the customers at this point? The growth is fantastic. How are you managing the product strategy in the organization? Okay. So, yeah, great questions, right? Growth is going really well right now and our events are great. Kudos, first of all, to our events team for helping organize our conference and getting our customers to get here and help tell the stories and be so excited on that. We love the conference from the development side, right? As you've probably heard from some of the other guests on the show, we bring everybody in development to the conference, right? This year it's in Seattle, so it's a little bit easier because a big bulk of the engineering team is based here in Seattle, but even when we have the conference at other locations, we bring everybody in development to the conference. We think it's critical to not just have those of us in the product management group or if you select people here and interact directly with our customers, it's critical for everyone in the company and everyone, especially in the engineering organization, to hear the stories directly from the customers and hear what their needs are and hear their desires. And that sparks so much creativity and innovation. We're going to go back into the office next week and the engineering group will be just buzzing with stories they heard from customers and if I could do this in a couple weeks and then we could solve this guy's problem and do these other things, it'll be a very magical time for the next few weeks. The reverence to the product and the culture is really high. Even amongst the customers and employees, it's really fun to watch. We were joking. It's the Kool-Aid injection of Tableau and they're blowing, you know, great air. We're piping things into the air. It's one of the comments that I think someone said, it was fantastic. So one of the things is to really be mindful of not overshooting on the product side. So this always comes up with feature creep and things of that nature. So how do you deal with the bevy of requests? I mean, you have a lot more, you partner with a lot of folks. How do you deal with the demand from the pressure to get the features out there? Maybe you got to cut things. How do you guys deal with the roadmap? Yeah. So that's always a challenge. There's always more things that we want to do and more things that customers want to do than you have time for. Even with your engineering team growing and growing, it's just really hard to have that discipline to focus down on what's important. We do a couple of interesting things with that on kind of bringing the engineers into the organization and helping us determine what we focus on. And we do that through kind of our boot camp process. Since we're hiring so many people, it's actually a great touch point for the folks who go in and deliver to our boot camp to refresh and keep us current on those same messages. One of the things that we really focus on is beauty and craftsmanship. Those are kind of two principles we have around the product itself. So we want to create a beautiful product, beautiful bit of output, and we want to have a very high level of craftsmanship with it. And what we found is that right there creates kind of an emotional response in the customers. People love it when the things they have work and end up making them look great because they're doing better analytics or they're looking good in their meetings. And I think that's part of the emotional connection we make. So we strive that as a mantra, really, that we give to the engineering organization and we get challenged on it, right? So me and my team will go in and say, you know, we're hearing stories and we need to add some particular capability to the product line. The engineering team, guys who've been here three, four months will challenge us on it and say, you know what? That doesn't seem to hold true to some of the principles you've talked to about it. And we'll talk it through at them. And it's like, guys, you know you're right. That one might not be the right thing for us to work on right now. And we've kind of backpedaled on some of those things in the past. So the key is the guiding principles of the organization, craftsmanship. And you know, as ironic yesterday was the Apple event. The iWatch and the innovation. You guys are very Apple-esque in your product. Some people say, you know, from a software standpoint, it's elegant, simple, easy to use and functional. So props to that. Is there a John Ivy in your organization? Is there like a, are their teams set up in a way that way? I mean, I'm getting a bit excited about John Ivy, but I'm sure there are people that you have in your team that aren't classic product managers. They might be a bit different. Oh, absolutely. We, you know, if we look at the organization we have, we have Jack McKinley, who was on the show a little earlier today. He runs the Visual Analysis Group and part of that is a research group. They bring in folks who, you know, certainly computer science backgrounds are very important in that group, but they bring in HCI experts, human computer interaction experts. They bring in folks with psychology backgrounds, folks with statistic backgrounds. On the product management team, where we're out spending a lot of time talking to customers, we bring in folks. We've got, I don't know, if I think of, you know, the team we have, there might be two or three of us who have really got a, a really long history with BI products. Everybody else who's come into the team has come in from different industries and different experiences. And that is critical to infuse us with the outside spirit, right? We're not just kind of breathing the same fumes over and over. Talk about the product. What are you most excited about? I mean, one of the things that Jeff and I were talking about earlier is I said you guys are very operating system. Like if you guys pull this visualization analytics data layer off, you are an overlay to existing systems and you're plugging into those today. That is, with cloud, that is an operating environment. So there's a real competitive opportunity there. Do you look at it that way? Or is it just, we're just doing our, you know, BI for the next generation. How do you guys look at that? I mean, you guys have that moonshot vision? Well, so, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but that brings us to the point. No, the moonshot, I was thinking about the moonshot vision part. And it's, I think it's a little, it is significantly more grounded than that, right? So the cloud deployments, public cloud, private cloud deployments, things we've done with Tableau Online, it's critical, right? That's obviously a way the organization is moving. Christian reminds us of this often, that for our own internal applications that we use to run our business with, we are absolutely a cloud-first product. So we, of course, need to focus our own products to be beautiful and brilliant to work in the cloud. Now that said, lots of the types of applications that we get involved with at customers are on-premise deployments. And they have lots and lots of good reasons why they want to be on-premise. We love the big iron deployments. We love the VM deployments. We love the deployments at AWS. So from that perspective, it's less of a philosophical belief we have on what's the right way to deploy and do that. We're pretty committed that there is no right way. It's whatever the customer needs to do on that front. Talk about what you're excited about. We saw the Elastic demo, that was pretty great. I mean, that was good. And I challenged Dave here, and I said, was that running code, or was that the demo version? No, he goes, no, it was running code. So, oh, that's good. So that's got some ways to go. So some of these products are fast experimentation as was taught on the keynote, but are really relevant. But sometimes if you're in early, you have to have a more iterative approach. And we even hear Amazon with Kinesis has the same approach. It's working, but they don't want to rush to judgment and put a stake in the ground too early because they just don't know what it's going to morph into yet. Do you guys have that similar thing with Elastic and other product features? You know, I think Elastic is a great example of this, as we recently added story points in version 8.2. And that's another good example of how we do this. We're big fans of do something, get it out there, test it, see what happens and reacts to it. We do that with our marketing programs. We do that with our products. We added story points to the product. We knew we were going to be on to something, but we weren't quite sure the directions that people were going to pull it. Tableau Public gave us a lot of learnings that made us sure that there was going to be something here. We added story points, sure enough, it's going really well in the market, but people are not shy about telling us the things they wish they had next. So you saw in our keynote the other day, we scurried around and did a lot of good things with continuing to extend that. So get it out there, try it, learn from it, and move on to the next extension to it. You know, I was a VP of product in one of my careers, and I know the pressure you're under, so congratulations for all the great work, and certainly with a successful product that you have, it's a lot of pressure. You know, one of the things that we were trying to figure out about potentially that could cause you guys to trip up would be the confidence turning into arrogance. And there's always that group think, if people think that they're drinking their own Kool-Aid too much, they might lose sight. So I got to ask you a final question is, how are you guys balancing that out? What keeps you in check? Is it Christian, is it the company? What keeps Tableau in check, not to get ahead of themselves? Yes, we talk about that quite a bit, right? So we definitely want to stay grounded in our beliefs. As you go through hiring and kind of the rapid growth that we have on the people front, it gets really important to spend a lot of time and hire and get the right people on the team. So we really agonize over that part of things as we grow the organization here. One of the other things we look at, right, is anytime we start to feel a little bit successful, we go back and look at the market opportunity that we're trying to tackle, and we have currently achieved just a tiny little sliver of that. We have so much more opportunity out there for us. So we are certainly not looking at this as saying, we've achieved something. We've achieved that tiny little baby step and we have so much more desire and plans that I think that's keeping us pretty motivated. Yeah, that's awesome. You guys have a great culture. I'll give you the final word on the segment. Share with the folks the three highlights of this show that you're most proud of from a product standpoint. From the product standpoint, I mean, obviously Project Elastic has been a big win. We've created a lot of buzz around that. So that's been very exciting. Some of the things we showed in the keynote, when we gave the demonstration of how we're going to be able to import and bring in those really dirty Excel files and turn those into usable things without having to try and cut and paste and solve your Excel problems before you get it to Tableau. I think that's going to light up a lot of people and we've been getting pretty good feedback on that. And then we've done a lot of great things around performance and you can never be too rich or too thin and in software you can never be too fast. So we're pretty excited about those things. Well, I was excited about the data prep stuff that was pretty cool. Good work there, a lot more to do there certainly in the ingestion side, right? Well, I know we got to run. We should spend more time. Dan Jew at the VP of Product Management. He's the man running the roadmap for making sure the product stays rocking and rolling and with the happy customers. Thanks for joining us. This is theCUBE live from Seattle. We'll be right back after the short break.