 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet Engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Gene Farrell. He is the CPO of Smartsheet. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, thanks for being here. Great to be here, here last year and even bigger and better. We moved out of the hotel and into the Washington Convention Center. That's a good sign. We did, we did. We have almost 4,000 strong this year and we're super excited. We've been looking forward to this for a while, so. So this is the third annual conference yet. Just tell us a little bit, let's open it up by telling our viewers a little bit about what this means to you, how big the show is. Give us a few stats. Yeah, well, you know, we ran our first customer conference, our first Engaged really three years ago in Bellevue at a conference center attached to a hotel that's right next to our headquarters, which is so super convenient. And I think we had five, 700 people there and it was a great start. And then last year we doubled in size and we actually outgrew the facility in Bellevue. And so when we planned for this year, we said, you know, let's go big. Let's, you know, we felt this momentum building. We had such great feedback from customers on what they learned and what they came away and could do after coming to Engaged that we felt we could, we were ready to kind of take it to a big stage. And so it was really exciting. I spent, before joining Smartsheet two and a half years ago, I spent five years at Amazon Web Services and I was fortunate enough to be there when they did their first reinvent in Las Vegas. And it was roughly 5,000 people. And I had a very interesting deja vu moment walking into the main auditorium here yesterday and it just brought back all the memories of, oh my gosh, this is like the size of reinvent. So in three years, we should be roughly 25,000. We'll be in Vegas, it'll be awesome. So today, up on the main stage, a lot of great new product announcements. I want you to sort of break it down for our viewers. You started talking about how you really serve three core customers. And these new product announcements are really targeted at each of these three. Yeah, we kind of broke it out. And what we find, we serve customers of all sizes. So from startups to medium-sized businesses to large enterprise. And within almost every one of those customers, we really see three distinct user groups really. The workforce, which is at the core, kind of where we started. The IT teams, which many times are there to support the workforce, but also drive a lot of their own workflows. And then the business decision makers. Folks that are really looking at how do I drive overall organizational effectiveness and improve efficiency. And so what we tried to do was make sure we were delivering a set of capabilities for everybody. And so for the workforce, we announced a bunch of new capabilities. Probably the highlight was our new conversations in context, which we're really excited about. It's going to enable a whole new level of collaboration and engagement within the platform. And it was really grounded in customer feedback that said they wanted the ability to actually interact in the context of their work. And too many times, what they were forced to do is they would have a question and they would have to go send an email or they'd go send a chat. And then the response is disconnected. So it just wasn't as efficient as it could be. So we took that signal and worked very closely with customers to design the new experience. So really excited about those capabilities. We launched new forms capabilities, new multi-select dropdown. A lot of things that our customers are really excited around from the workforce perspective. On the IT front, we've introduced a ton of new things all year. The two big announcements today were around our accelerator for GDPR, which actually affects almost anybody that does business with an EU citizen. So a lot of folks don't really connect the dots. They go, hey, I'm in, you know, I'm in Redmond, Oregon. Why do I need to comply with GDPR? Well, if you sell to anybody in the EU, you need to figure that out. And then beyond GDPR, we talked about our FedRAMP offering and our new GovCloud, which is really key for government agencies, but also all the contractors that support government agencies. And so a lot of our customers are very interested in that. And then the final piece was really business leaders. And we talked there about new enhancements to control center, to really let it scale and move across the organization, rollups, the ability to do multi-tier. And then importantly, we talked about the new content collaboration capability, which is really big. It integrates our slope technology. So marketing and other types of disciplines can use content collaboration in their work. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention 10,000 feet. So, lots to talk about. There was a lot, but you clearly, this is a customer's right, because I think it was that the pasting widgets between dashboards was a standing ovation. It's amazing the power of copy and paste when you can pull that work out. But you know, it's what the people want. It's funny you say that. I am constantly amazed at the things that when you solve little problems that unlock all sorts of new use cases. And many times that cheer you here is because customers have been trying to work around those problems, right? So multi-select dropdown is a great example where they had to do all sorts of gyrations in how they configured their work to support multiple selections. And so now we've made that much more elegant for them and they're like ecstatic, because they no longer have to invest that time. And I kind of like go, wow, is that all it took? I would have done it sooner. But it is a lot of times, right? The simple things that have the huge, the huge improvement and kind of getting away from this repetitive work, which is kind of the theme we keep hearing over and over and over again. Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And it's really, little things can have a big impact or the analogy I sometimes will use is if you're creating a puzzle or if you have kids and you've ever built the X-Wing Fighter set, if you're missing a few pieces, it's just not the same, right? You can't kind of complete the work. And so sometimes just completing that play for customers, giving them that last piece they need to really go and power their workflow is really key. And I also think because we're living at a time where we have, we demand so much from technology and our personal lives and it delivers. You know, for the most part, our lives are pretty seamless in the way we can order things from anywhere. And so when we deal with these little aggravations at work, it's just that much more. So one of the things you said on the main stages is that customers are not shy about telling you what they want. So I want to hear from you how you solicit feedback and your process for making these changes and for coming up with these products. Well, we actually have a bunch of different mechanisms we use to listen to customers. And I actually call it customer signal because it comes from a lot of different places. We have, kind of foundationally, we have a process actually called an enhancement request. So any of our customers can go in our community and actually submit a form and say, I really want you to build this. And that's very intentional. Like there's no confusion and usually they're very straightforward. But beyond that, we also, we have the community in general. So we monitor that and we get feedback on kind of a free-flowing forum where they give us feedback. We have user groups that we, this year we'll do north of 40 user groups around the world, where we bring collections of customers together many times hosted at different customer locations and customers will talk and share best practices and give us feedback on things that they'd like to see. I spend a ton of time out in the field with customers just visiting with them, talking about their use cases, helping them solve problems. And then importantly, we have a product advisory council and a customer advisory board. And these are both specific groups of customers, smaller groups that we've recruited and we actually use them to consult with us very closely to give us kind of overall direction. And then probably the most valuable feedback once we know where we want to go is once we start building, we have a private beta program and then what we call an early adopter program. And both of those enroll customers in interacting with things we're building before they're launched. And that gives us a chance to get real-time feedback into what they like, what they don't and what we need to improve. And sometimes the product will stay in that private beta phase for longer than we expected because the signal we get requires that we make changes. So we think that's really important to make sure we actually hit the mark. Because if you're not satisfying a customer need or solving a problem, they're not going to buy it. Yeah, what's the point? Is there the right way to say it? Well, you're surely going to get a lot of customer signal here at Engage. They have these next couple of days. Absolutely, and they are absolutely not shy. Every time I run into somebody, it's like, oh, we love this. And here's the 10 things I want next. Exactly. Well, Gene, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Well, my pleasure. Thanks for having me and thanks for being here at Engage. Thanks for having us. Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. You are watching theCUBE. Stay tuned.