The Most Exciting Product News You Should Know Coming Out of Smartsheet ENGAGE

Keith Townsend: All right. Welcome back to Six Five Media coverage of ENGAGE 2024. We’re here in beautiful Seattle. I have Amilcar Alfaro, Senior Product Marketing for Smartsheet on the show. Amilcar, welcome to the show.

Amilcar Alfaro: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Keith Townsend: You know what, we don’t get to say beautiful Seattle too often, but little rain this morning, but the weather’s been kind to us. Thank you Smartsheet for doing that for us.

Amilcar Alfaro: Absolutely. It is beautiful city. Just not beautiful weather.

Keith Townsend: You know what a lot of sunshine is actually in the show, 4,000 attendees, and it is a tech conference, but there’s a fit and finish to this show that I don’t find in other shows. And I have to say, it’s about the community. So where does this passion come from?

Amilcar Alfaro: Well, the passion comes from the fact that the product has allowed many of these attendees and many more people around the world to fundamentally change the way they manage work. So the product has allowed them to do things that would be otherwise very, very complicated or require a lot of abilities and technical capacity that most users don’t need or want. So Smartsheet allows them to really take the management of work, project management, the ability to deliver results with great simplicity and with a lot of power that is typically not available for the average end user. And most of the folks that you’ll see around here are people that are just workers. They’re not developers, they’re not technical, they’re really just project managers and the things they can do with the product really is really transformational.

Keith Townsend: So you’re marketing the product. I know you get this question all the time. It’s a spreadsheet, but it’s so much more. I think the elegance is in the simplicity.

Amilcar Alfaro: Correct.

Keith Townsend: What are customers doing with Smartsheet that they can’t do with a simple spreadsheet?

Amilcar Alfaro: Yeah, the reality is that Smartsheet is way more than a spreadsheet, and it starts with the foundation that Smartsheet is built to be able to manage work and manage projects, and spreadsheets are not built to do that. So Smartsheet gives you a number of capabilities that are really kind of unmatched. So for example, you have the ability to manage very, very large volumes of content and not just unstructured data, but you can also manage actual physical digital content like documents and the presentations and the number of other assets that are used in collaborative work. You can manage the capacity of people, so you can actually do resource planning, so you can allocate skills and capabilities to products and people that are working on specific deliverables. And you can do a lot of this stuff with automation that’s not possible with a traditional spreadsheet. So the ability is that whether you’re doing very simple resource management or advanced project management, Smartsheet gives you that plethora of capabilities that you’re not going to be able to get with a spreadsheet.

Keith Townsend: And while you can get a spreadsheet view of the data, what I refer to as a grid view of the data, a lot of great analysis from the show, from the keynote this morning. What were some of the highlights?

Amilcar Alfaro: Absolutely, and let’s start with views, even though that’s not sequentially the way it started. One of the main differences between Smartsheet and a traditional spreadsheet is that with us, you can have views and visualization of the information in your project in a variety of different ways. So you can view things either as a timeline or in a board view, or in the not distant future on a table view. So you can actually have the best representation of the work you’re doing on a very specific view, and you can switch back and forth. So that allows you to fundamentally use the same tool to visualize data and visualize work in really very different ways. And you can do that in very, very high capacity requirements like you will get in table view down the road, or you can do it for any number of projects with timeline and your traditional grid or with board if you’re doing Kanban and Agile type work.

So that’s one of the innovations that you saw in our announcements. Other announcements and other big innovations that we’re announcing and launching are our investments in workspaces and collections, which fundamentally allow individuals to work and share information at the most granular and either open or restricted level necessary. So you can now share information from an asset level all the way to a folder to a portfolio. And you can do that across multiple different individuals in the organization where your executives can see just the dashboard, whereas your peers might be able to see the entire portfolio of work. So this concept of portfolios and collections really gives you the ability to work in a distributed fashion with all the permissions, controls and access of content that you could ever require.

Keith Townsend: So a lot of talk around careers. I didn’t expect this to be a career show people talking about how smart she has enabled their career. Talk to me about this concept of enterprise grade, because what I’m seeing, I heard one woman who went from a journey of a single PMO person in the PMO office to 30 people in the PMO office. This is the smallest of size organizations to the largest. So talk to me about that journey, that enterprise-grade journey. How do small companies, large companies, benefit from this enterprise-grade approach?

Amilcar Alfaro: Absolutely. Great question. So one of the things about enterprise-grade is that every organization requires the most rigorous and sophisticated capabilities to be able to have their data secure, controlled, managed, regardless of whether they’re a small company or a multinational corporation. And this is why. You don’t have to be a giant company to have very demanding needs. You can manage very large amounts of data, or you can have a lot of customers, or you can have very specific security and compliance requirements. So whether you’re a very, very large multinational company or a small company, your requirements are probably going to be in many cases the same. And we want to give everybody the ability to have that certainty and that peace of mind that their data is going to be secure, protected, and that they can grow with Smartsheet.

So to the point you were alluding to, oftentimes we see somebody in an organization start using Smartsheet for a very small departmental type solution, and then that solution grows and it can grow to the point that it gets scaled throughout the entire enterprise. And that solution with Smartsheet is quite elastic. So it can grow in the commensurate way to your needs. And not only in your ability to have the best performance and the greatest security and the most elastic ability to store information, but also in the ability to configure it and to give it the requirements for the multiple users that might have it. So if you have a solution that eventually goes beyond your department and you start to get a lot of viewers, or you start to get people with different permissions, you’re going to have the ability to have those rigorous controls, those rigorous capabilities, to really have that good segmentation of who uses the information.

And in addition, as their needs increase, you’re not going to outgrow the platform. So you’re not suddenly going to find yourself in a place where the performance is subpar or it’s not quite up to speed or to the needs where you need it to be. So that’s why you’ll see a lot of people in this conference really looking at how they build their careers in Smartsheet because they’ve gone from perhaps enthusiasts or early adopters to now truly being heroes in their organization by bringing these solutions at the broadest, most widely adopted level.

Keith Townsend: So you’re bringing up a pain point from when I was a consultant at PWC. We would take data out of the project management system, import it into Excel so that we could present that data to executives. This was a labor-intensive process.

Amilcar Alfaro: Correct.

Keith Townsend: Taking information from one screen, putting it in another. The information is there, why can’t we just give that information directly to the directors? It sounds like Collections solves that problem. Can you talk to me about how Collections helps present data from multiple projects or from multiple sources to executives or other groups?

Amilcar Alfaro: Yeah. So Collections essentially allow you to share information within Smartsheet and beyond with whoever it is that you need to share information either inside your organization or outside. And what collections allow you to do is they allow you to share data within Smartsheet, but you can also add links, you can add presentations, you can add other digital assets and share them at the most granular level that you need to. So you can fundamentally restrict and give access to different people depending on what they need to visualize. And with Collections, you can also curate to share, like you described earlier, essentially the experience that you want to share with somebody.

So if you want to have an executive view the dashboard that only shows the latest and greatest snapshot, you can do that without having to overwhelm them with all the stuff that’s underneath. But if you’re sharing with your working group, and there’s a lot of collaborators that have need or access requirements to all the underlying data, you can do that. And you can create multiple collections and share them with different people and still have access to the same root content, but only expose what is necessary. And then when people have the ability to collaborate, they will only be able to modify or change the data that is required at that level. So that really gives you this ability to have this truly curated, shareable experience with great security, with great control, and most importantly with the configuration that you need as a user within your working team.

Keith Townsend: So your folks are used essentially for a lot of work management, project management, but yet I saw a stat on the stage today, four petabytes of data under management. That’s a lot of text, but that’s not all texts. I saw a mix of video, all types of multimedia files. Why are people storing data at Smartsheet?

Amilcar Alfaro: Well, it is increasingly clear that a lot of the work management requirements involve assets and involve items and involve data, beyond unstructured data. So we talked about documents that are reviewed, these could be either PDFs, videos, presentations, any number of things. And as they get shared, as they get collaborated on, as they get reviewed, as they get proofed, a lot of that content sits within Smartsheet, right? It sits within our own platform. So we need to now be able to have the ability to support and store and manage a lot of that data because it will be resident to the platform.

Now we continue to work very well with other players where data might be stored elsewhere. But the reality is that in the collaboration and content management process of work management, a lot of that data is still within our platform. So we need to be able to give customers the ability to operate that data and work with it in a really high performing environment and be able to do a lot with it without having to compromise what they would be able to do in other platforms as well.

Keith Townsend: So I talked to Mark Mader and he said you folks aren’t finished on the product side. You’re still modernizing, you’re still transforming. What’s coming?

Amilcar Alfaro: Well, I think Smartsheet is an evolutionary product. We continue to innovate and we continue to invest in areas that I think our customers continue to ask for. So as you can imagine, we will continue to invest in experiences that drive faster and better results. So you will continue to potentially see more growth in our ability to do collaboration, in our ability to do content management, in our ability to do sharing, and in particular to do a lot of these things at scale. So we will continue to invest in bringing the ability to do collaboration, work and control information at a very, very large scale. We will also continue to invest in having the ability to process very large volumes of data and do it securely and do it in a controlled environment.

Keith Townsend: So Amilcar, I really appreciate you joining us.

Amilcar Alfaro: Appreciate it so much. Thank you for the time, and I hope it was useful.

Keith Townsend: It was extremely useful. If you found this content useful, stay tuned for more interviews from the show for ENGAGE 2024, I’m your host, Keith Townsend. And for my guest, Amilcar, thank you for tuning in.