 Live from Bellevue Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG, brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington, and pleased to welcome one of the many customers of Smartsheet to the program. We have the office of the CAIO, Jeff Cowley from PayPal. Welcome, Jeff. I've got a sandwich of Jeff's here, a Jeff sandwich. So Jeff, tell us a little bit. Everybody knows PayPal. I was doing some studying over the weekend. 244 million active users, I'm sure that grows by the minute. 200 markets globally served, and you're doing transactions in over a hundred currencies. Everybody has been using this for a while now. It's a household term. Even my mom knows PayPal, and she can use it. So tell us about the office of the CAIO at PayPal and your role. Sure, so my role specifically, I'm a program manager within that office, and my primary responsibility is to make sure that our environment is secure, that it's safe, that it's stable. That way is the other parts of the company product can focus on being more strategic. But that really involves things like hardening our infrastructure, hardening the network, making sure that we can identify all of our assets accurately. So a number of things there, just to keep the environment, like I said, stable and secure. And the office of the CAIO, I imagine, responsible for communicating regularly with the executive management team, needing to provide visibility. Exactly, I mean, our leadership, Brad Shrock is the CIO. We work, you know, hand in hand with the other leaders of the company, I think. But in addition to some of the things I just called out, I mean, you know, the CIO, that office is actually responsible for a lot of the enterprise applications. So it's basically the software that drives the company. That's customer, that's our employee-facing applications. So you're obviously a smart sheet user, which is why you're here, and we're grateful for that. Tell us about the pre-smart sheet era. How are you managing programs and projects? I think I've heard this story quite a bit here. So between spreadsheets, Microsoft Project, Trello, number of other tools, and we're still in a distributed model. But the good thing is that within the CIO, we're able at this point in this particular area to come in with a single tool to serve as a single system of record, to really facilitate bringing the entire portfolio together. So yeah, I'd say before, very distributed. Now, it's really consolidated into smart sheet being our single system, which has really worked well. So they showed a video of your case study during the keynote, and you had a real specific use case, it sounds like, for your initial smart sheet deployment, which sounds like something that many of us struggle with each and every week, which is to roll up the data to report upstairs. So I wonder if you can give a little bit of color on what did you have to roll up, what was the scale, that effort, and why you decided this just isn't really working very well anymore. Sure, absolutely. So we set off, around three years ago, we had a three-year program ahead of us, and I'd say at the end of year one, we realized just to, due to the magnitude, the number of people involved, the data involved in the overall portfolio, we needed a tool to come in and really help us be able to effectively and quickly roll up that information so that we could present and take that information to our C-suite each week. Yeah, just for effective decision-making, making sure that they're in tune, they have a line of sight to what's critical, what's not, we're working on the right things, doing the right thing. So we considered a number of tools, again, Microsoft Project, we ended up landing with Smartsheet, and it was really just word of mouth within the company. So we took a look at a handful of tools and really just tried to figure out what fit the bill for what we needed. And with a couple of Smartsheet videos on YouTube, we kind of quickly came to the decision, hey, this is certainly a flexible tool, it's easy to ramp. If you know spreadsheets, you pretty much know this, if you're a project manager, you know how to build a plan, quite easy. So the ramp time was very minimal. So made the decision, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, probably spent a month doing that, myself and the team, with the tool being intuitive in those videos, built a solution basically from the ground up. So this is without even having an engagement, this is PayPal, without even having an engagement with an account executive, you were able to find this, like you said word of mouth, implement this on your own and really enable quite a bit of transformation within the executive team and what they need to see. Absolutely, I think we look back at the end of year one, we made that decision, we realized, hey, we've got some high-priced consultants in, and we're probably using half of their time at that point, just in collating that data. So you're talking about some heavy dollars that are being spent there, just an administrative type work, if we can cut that layer out and then go straight to the source, we're saving ourselves a ton, we can redirect those funds to other areas where we actually get some work done. So Jeff, how big was the initial deploy in terms of the team size? Because you said you didn't engage Smartsheet directly, you're watching some YouTube videos, and you did see enough there that you wanted to go jump in. Did you jump all in from the beginning? Did you do kind of a POC? How did you get started? It was kind of the scope. Yeah, I kind of took a couple of demos, straw man that we just put together on the fly, shared with some of our key stakeholders, say, you know, does this look right? Does it feel right? You get to see in the information that you think we need, and just the fact that we were able to come up with that so quickly just sold itself. And so yeah, we vetted it, socialized it a little bit, but it was a pretty easy sell from that point. It was just building it out. And I'd say right from the get-go, we had already had about 14 programs as part of this portfolio in place at that point in time. So each program having between, I'd say between five, 15 projects within that. So, you know, the number of players was quite large, probably about 150 direct players in the program, you know, probably a couple of hundred more indirect that want line of sight to what we're doing. So line of sight, accountability, how was that embraced by those teams? And we talk a lot about digital transformation right off at every event, and how cultural transformation is a necessity for that. How have you been able to leverage this tool to kind of evolve that culture within the office of the CIO? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, with us being able to cut out that middleman, when I say middleman, I'm talking PowerPoint slides. If we can get away from that, because a number of things happen there, but predominantly you can fat finger a PowerPoint slide, and all of a sudden, you know, a hundred turns to 200 or a thousand, something like that. So, hey, if we can just go straight to our system of record. I mean, each project within this portfolio should have a project plan, they should have a risk and issues tracker. So we really decided, here's the baseline for what we need to have in terms of our data model. We can have that, then we can produce the dashboards that just read directly from those systems of record from an accountability perspective, right? That means, you know, there's no tweak in a PowerPoint slide, right? I mean, you're reading directly from the project plan, so it is what it is. But, you know, it's reality, and that's what we need to deal with, and we ultimately stuff in front of the C-suite, right? You need to have, here's where we are, and it needs to be an accurate and timely reflection. I mean, that's another thing is that timeliness. I mean, this is real-time data that we're talking. So, you know, something changes 10 minutes before. It's there on the dashboard, we're ready to talk to it. Yeah, I don't think there's enough talk about the timeliness because it is connected directly to the database. It's not something that somebody's reporting on, and so often, right? You get these multiple layers of people extracting data, you know, transcribing it, putting it into whatever reporting tool they want, and just, it just gets further and further from the truth with each passing minute and each passing iteration. Absolutely, absolutely. And we've talked about speed so much here, and you know, so that's obviously a critical factor in decision-making, especially. So, we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest there. So, just curious your experience from a project manager point of view. You're a professional project manager. I'm sure you know all the big, heavy lifting tools. When you see something like this, which is more of a no-code, you know, kind of low-code, kind of cross-platform integration. You know, what type of skills does that open up within the teams, within the data sources, within the ability to do something a lot less, I want to say more nimble, you know, less heavy than kind of a traditional project management tool. I think nimble's a great word to describe it there because it really, it really is a tool that just is, that you can build from, you know, it's more like a grassroots effort as opposed to a enterprise kind of top-down. I'm sure it works well in that use case as well, but, you know, for us, it was something that was able to kind of fill needs that were distributed across the portfolio. Once you start building it up, filling those gaps, and you realize, hey, we've got a kind of an end-to-end tool here that really works well. And I'm just curious, Interest, as other people have engaged with your output in your organization in terms of, hey, Jeff, can you give us, can you share the PowerPoint links with us? Sure. Or not the PowerPoint links, but the YouTube links. Yeah, I joke because it feels like at this point I'm doing, you know, about one demo a week to somebody else in the company. You know, which is a great thing. I mean, leveraging best practices and sharing that information. So there's certainly a growing user base within PayPal of Smartsheet. So, you know, I try to keep up with the other teams that are using it so that we are, you know, taking our best practices from one another that we're sharing. So, and then I think, you know, Engage is really helping me connect to those other PayPal users, believe it or not. It's like, yeah, probably bent more here than I have back home, so this is great. One of the things that was funny that popped up during the keynote this morning, Jeff, was a couple of customer quotes. These were anonymous. But this, what you were saying, kind of Jeff, it sounds like, and you probably wouldn't say this about yourself, so I'll say it for you, is that this one woman who's a user of Smartsheet in her organization said that Smartsheet made her queen of the world. Sounds like there's some status elevation, but I'm curious, so you started, you found this organically, yourself, this technology, as Jeff was saying, you know, this is built for business users. You didn't have to have, even though you're in the office of the CIA, you didn't have to have ITs involvement here. But here you are, one of the evangelists now for Smartsheet at their event. Tell us about that engagement, pun intended, that you got with Smartsheet to be able to start, maybe, hey, I found this organically, do you have a sales account exact now? If so, are you having conversations with them? Are you helping to influence new features and things? Sure, I think our admin for Smartsheet at PayPal got tired of me giving them calls. So he said, hey, you do know Taryn Feinstras are your rep, right? So I reached out to Taryn. At this point, we've, you know, we've conversed quite a bit and she's brought a number of other kind of ideas and forward thinking to the tables that we're considering, you know, for next steps, what we can do. But, you know, the engagement has been great. You know, they've been very responsive, helped us out when we kind of hit a, hit a, you know, rock in the road and we needed some help. So, yeah, it's been a great relationship. Any way to quantify the benefits, one of the things I was reading on the Smartsheet website the other day was some pretty big stats on how they're helping companies save time, which in different ways translates to saving dollars. I think I read the average user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours per year. That's a lot of time. And the average organization will save over 60,000 hours a year. How, what's the impact been on the weekly rollups that you're able to do? Any way to sort of quantify how much that speed has improved? Yeah, I mean, you know, if I go back to kind of the original business case, say we're spending, you know, probably half the time of two very high-priced consultants doing this. You know, I'd say it's, you know, it's way up there. And we were able to save, I'm sure a couple hundred thousand dollars at least at a minimum. So, you know, that in itself was a big win. But if we look today, kind of where we are in the time that we're able to save using the tool. You know, given the fact that there is that, that middle layer is just really not there. We don't spend a lot of time on producing content at all. Instead, we can take that time and we can focus it on, okay, where are our troubled areas? You know, where do we need to double down? Where do we need to help? And making sure that we're actually getting material work done in the areas that we should be, rather than just, you know, administrative content task. Big productivity gains. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining Jeff Frick and I on theCUBE and sharing what you guys are doing with Smartsheet in the office of the CAO at PayPal. I'm glad to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Jeff and Jeff, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around, this Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.