absolutely now the and so we see upskilling and cross killing becoming more transdisciplinary so business people are becoming IT folks now and IT folks really business people you know we had this business IT divided for a long time it cracks me up I still go to big companies in the IT department teaching in its own building right but those days are going away and I was you know now is IT people over on the business side that lived there now right you know so we're seeing there's kind of this blending where digital is infusing everything and so you have to become digitally confident and this is where we have to make that simpler this is going back to the you know the the digital workplace the average user has had the number of applications they have to to learn double or triple in the light just the last five years right so it's a big challenge yeah well you know we ran our first customer conference our first engaged really three years ago and 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 seven hundred people there and it was 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 engage 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 and it just brought back all the memories of oh my gosh this is like the size of Bremen so in three years we should be roughly 25,000 we'll be in Vegas but we see a lot of interesting new technology trends and tooling that are allowing people to basically operationalize work in the seams between those legacy systems so lifting some of the data information and potentially workflow workload out of those systems and having them in a you know some of the new types of work platform that we're seeing you know which smart sheets a good example to actually operate in a much more agile way and we call that shift one from systems of record which we kind of understand to what we call systems of delivery so that two words will have a big gravitational effect on the way the rest of the business application landscape will evolve so didn't idea we know that the situation is pretty bleak right now that there are the statistics are horrible just in terms of the number of employees that are really checked out totally disengaged would would love to quit but they need the health insurance and so so we're already sort of starting from a from a pretty low place where in terms of people's engagement at work and I think a lot of the things that that drive people nuts about their work of course is a bad boss and not a great parking spot and everything but it's it's the it's the it's the little things that get in your way of doing your job and it's it's the things that just drive you nuts about some sort of process that takes forever and oh I have to keep doing this and I just already sent you that email and how come you're looking at this other version and it and it's all those impediments that really drive people crazy and that make people stressed out and and unhappy in their jobs so I do think that if you are a company like smartsheet and you have you realized this and you can slowly chip away at those impediments and the aggregate aggravate aggravations that people feel I think that's not a bad business model I think they're on to something right yeah the team is one Alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that are in flight right now and marrying those with the people and the technology and we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people ai and m/l worker replacement say whoa whoa whoa these are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for and I think there's a lot of Education that needs to take place so we plan on doing is doing research through this alliance and then publishing that work because I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence to take that step you know it was interesting when I first got the call about smartsheet I had never heard of it and the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing I realized it was one of those a category that's just not established but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing and we're not even the potential I mean it will be the next big thing and you know I met with that that was intriguing but then I met with the executive team and it was a perfect combination of a killer product but a killer company I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is and their authenticity and their passion and their Drive and their belief it's so contagious there's no way you would not want to be a part of it so I'm and then the privilege to be able to tell this company's story I feel like it is the best-kept story not only in Seattle potentially the world and I plan to tell the story and what a gift but what a great opportunity as a marketer to have this type of opportunity you [Music]

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the booth covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Anna Griffin. She is the CMO of smartsheet. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thank you, guys for having me appreciate it. So you were your pretty new to this company. Joined in April. I'd love to hear, but you've also had an illustrious career in marketing. You've worked summers and big names, including Apple and Nortel and and Saturn. And you've also worked for Land's end and a whole bunch of different varied career. What attracted you to smart? >>She You know, it was interesting when I first got the call about smartsheet. I had never heard of it. And the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing. I realized it was one of those a category that's just not established, but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing. And we're not even the potential. I mean, it will be the next big thing and, you know, I met with that was intriguing. But then, you know, I met with the executive team, and it was a perfect combination of a killer product, but a killer company. I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is and their authenticity and their passion and their drive and their belief. It's so contagious. There's no way you would not want to be a part of it. So on, then, the privilege to be able to tell this company's story I feel like it is the best kept story. Not only in Seattle, potentially the world on I plan to tell the story and And what a gift it was. A great opportunity is a marketer toe have this type of opportunity. >>Well, we're gonna get into how you're going to tell the story. Okay, See you later. But so now you've been here a few months. It is your first ever engaged. What? What does he what are your impressions? >>Well, I wish I had been thio previous engaged to have something to compare it to. But the fact that this conference has doubled in size 4000 customers here and it's only its third show. I will tell you in the industry I've worked, you know, managing events teams for many, many, many years. Not a lot of conferences grow at this size, and Soto have 4000 customers here who are zealots. They are their passion for the product and what it's doing and what it's doing for there. Not only their companies, but their own personal careers. There isn't an empowerment story through their mouse that will just inspire you. So it's It's incredible. The energy here is really, really especially. >>Feel it, too. Way See >>it a lot of the smaller conferences, early days. That's why they're fun to be. Here were last year, when those 2000 it was adjacent to the to the office across the across the water. Exactly, but it is a really passion community, and, you know, Thio here, literal, literal cheers and claps at features. Well, it's great to see, like copy paste from one road to the other because it's clearly something that means something these people and that they have asked for and the company is delivered and really demonstrates, is listening to engage these crazy people. It's a great asset >>wave. That listening thing is huge, and I feel like that's one of the things. And I think it's why there is a CMO now. That's why I get the privilege to be the first CMO is because the customers said way need more awareness of this company. We need our our executives. We need lines of business leaders. We need i t to know who you are and the magic of what you do. We need awareness is gonna make it that much easier for us to get much wider adoption across these companies. If people know who you are and they know you know what you're capable of. So listening. That is one of the number one things we've heard. It's like awareness. They wanted awareness. So because it'll help make them more successful. So I think that was the catalyst for Okay, let's get a cheap Marty Officer, Let's go build >>that about you. What are you gonna do? What it wanted? Some of your top priority is to tell the story and to build brand awareness. >>Yeah, well, um well, you're the first thing was to really kind of Titan are positioning again. It's a great great products make great brands, and this is a great product company. But man were starting to do so much ward than just killer products. We're really getting into this enablement this, um right, transforming companies. And so I wanted to make sure we're positioned properly. And we're really positioning mawr in a more transformative altitude and the capabilities of what we can do. We have found we've spent way too much time talking about technology versus people versus what technology and people are going to do together. And that is the magic of what smartsheet does. It really takes platform a common platform that basically integrates with the Czech investment that you've already made with the systems of record that you already have pools that data out and then allows the people I work with that data all in a common really time, you know, application. And when you can marry those two things together that tech and people, that's when one plus one equals three. And so we call that that three is what we really call achievement again, Like everybody in our space is work work, work, task management, project management, the capability of smart shit Yeah, we do all that, too. But when you play in that transformative altitude, we're in a bling achievement and it enterprise wide level and achieve it like what your business can achieve. But this is the more special part. And this is where I get excited. Did you feel to tell this story is the achievement happens at a personal level to like again? I'm telling you when I talk to customers and I see what they're doing right, you don't understand. You have changed my career. I'm doing more strategic work. I am. I am seen differently in my company. I champion this, like all of a sudden, I am leading big teams. I went from this to this, and there they're empowerment is so big and so really that last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. And that's what this product does. And so job one was position. That's properly so we can tell that type of story and really put our solutions in that kind of light because that's what it does on then job to is to launch the campaign launches to the world. So we just launched two weeks ago, and it's a slow roll. I mean, we have hundreds of assets, it in place. So if I love seeing us on television, you know I love seeing is deeply in digital. I love some of the new interesting things that that we could do in media. But when our customers are saying that, you know they're seeing it a CMO like you high from it. Yeah, So it's fun. So jump to launch the campaign and the campaign is, well, we call the campaign can do you know we're positioning the brand as the platform for enterprise achievement. Number one Smart sheet is a platform, I think a lot of people, you know as it's grown. I mean, it truly is a platform, and it really is enterprise strong and wide. It's skills which is important, but its scales So everybody and a company can align organizational alignment to truly achieve something bigger aligned organizations do not fill. And so that's the That's the power. But I digress. >>No question that way >>you know, one of the great legs of your of your go to market strategy and your lead jen is your licensing formula, which enables me as the Spartan sheet licensee to engage lots of people, many outside my own, not by my own team, but my own company. And let them have access to this tool. What a smart, smart waiver. Whoever came up with that licensing strategy? What a great way to introduce the opportunity to use this transformational tool to ongoing and broad audience. >>Yes, your table is so exciting. When I was in the interview process and I was riding on a plane and clearly I had met with the company and I heard somebody in front of me was a consultant, one of the consulting firms who had met a complete stranger on the plane. And somehow Smartsheet came up that she was going you got Oh, my gosh, Smartsheet. This is like she was going. This is the best kept secret. We're using it with all of our clients. We heard about it through one of our clients. That wasn't one of them. We'll use it like Oh, my gosh, this is the game changer. I'm like putting >>my here in between the wayward. I put my hand it as it did You just say smart shape. >>Literally six people on the airplane, random people like, Oh, my gosh, we use it to It was the most surreal experience, and that was when I knew, like, Okay, I've got to be a part of this Coast special. Did a lot of people are now just getting that sensation of what this thing is capable of. And, >>well, it's funny to your personal achievement story. Reminds me of any time you know you got a new software company and whether, you know, centered alloy Dorian, Why, when those guys come in, they're making a big bet right there. Some new partner's gonna bet. Bet their career on this new technology. We've heard from a number of people how betting their career internally with smartsheet has changed their position in the company. Yes, for that today, a couple of times. So clearly you know it. It is an enablement platform for someone to, you know, grab on to the to the rocket ship and ride this Marchi wave thio new and bigger, better things, >>but but also her point about just even just participating in the technology. And then they're able to, as you said, work on more strategic work, be able to do more things in their jobs that have been catapulted them to new job. So it's not even necessarily betting on smartsheet bringing in smart cheat. But it is just just using smart sheet and then therefore they have more brain time. Yes, yes, oh, engagement we're talking about, >>right, right? You know, it is because we've been talking a lot about you know, some of the really scary statistics about how disengaged people are at work and how many people are ready to quit their job. And, you know, they've got all these blocks. Is menial roadblocks in their day to day existence that are that are negatively impacting their ability to want to do their job or but actually just want to be there anymore. And so it's It's like seems maybe to the outside, looking in some of these things by seem low value, but they're actually tremendous value. If you're removing these roadblocks so I can get my job done >>totally and love your job, you love your job. But know that the work that you do matters and I think so many people have lost that feeling like there's something about working and I don't know if it's the corporate world. But it has become such a grind, and that rare opportunity would like. I love what I do, and I know that it matters. It's a gift, and this is a platform that enables bad in people. And so I think that's when the fascinating things I've been spending a lot of time on the road with customers and I was at a very big multi national, big global agricultural company. And, um, Singer, Actually, I'm watching WAY Bet with probably 200 different Just what I would call power users across seven different you know, roll types like from I t toe hsc thio, you name it. And, um, every single one of them is like art. We're doing more like we are in power, like the engagement, the employee engagement in that company through the roof because every single person felt like were hurt. I have ownership, you know. I'm doing work. I'm taking it to a new level. And so you know, sure, there is a Thanh of operational efficiencies that are gonna come out of working with smartsheet. But I think the one to watch is what's gonna happen when your workforce is truly engaged and taking ownership of the work. Those were the good. Those are the companies that are going to have a higher retention. They're gonna have you. They're going to see something in that in that talent area. So this is more than just We're getting more work done and return on investment of our our our systems, like you're going to see you know what happens when your when your employees are empowered. >>Well, the word you didn't use his innovation that I firmly believe everyone wants more innovation, their company. >>But how do you do >>it? One of those? I think it's really simple. Lever on that is you just get more people more access to more data and then the ability to do something about it and open it up to all the smart people that see problem to different prisons in different opportunities. And that's where you start to get in. A leverage is amazing talent that you already have inside your four walls. >>But what is interesting about innovation, as I think sometimes the world so over rotates that innovation is gonna be that next killer line of code or it's going to be and they forget that the power of practical innovation like it's that Siri's of small collected things at out up, allowing your entire, you know, employee population to feel like they have the power to innovate us. That every person in the company has the power because the power practical innovation can lead to something Justus Big is the big already. >>Dev. Ops has shown that that's a better way anyway, right in software development, with the grand idea with the market development plan and the product development plan and the three year build cycle that's does not win against constant religious narrative improvement. Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. Yes, >>indeed. So you and you said this earlier and I saw it on your Lincoln to the last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. How do you describe the culture at smart shape now? I mean, we've talked about the evangelical customers Yeah, about with in smartsheet itself. >>It's, um it's pretty special. Know what you're gonna say? Of course. And see him? I was gonna say special, but it is. It is rare when people everyone comes to work with this belief like this true belief that they are They have the power to influence something and touch something that's going to do something great for other people. And I think that's what eyes, the most specialised. They they're not just doing it for themselves. They know they're doing it for others, like they know they love these guys. Every single person in the company loves that customer like the love ability, They love the customer, and they feel like they've got to do their best work so their customer can do something great with it. You know, they really understand that, and that's Ah, it's an incredible place to wanna work when you, when you feel that way but toe love your customers. I think that's why our customers love us back and to be loved. You must first love and because they love you know, it's it's >>rare. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it's a great role and you're in the right place. And I can't talk to you next year and hear more about can do and and all of the wonderful things you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I'm Rebecca Knight. That wraps up the cubes. Interviews. Stay tuned for our rap of engaged 2019 you're watching the Cube

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside Jeff Frick. We are joined by Mark Mader. He is the CEO of Smartsheet. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So great job up there on the keynote a bit. We know this is the third annual conference, uh, 4,000 people from 39 different countries. The theme is achieved more and the theme is actually tied to a very special announcement you you've made today about the, about the achieved as one Alliance. So can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? >>Yeah. The cheapest one Alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that are in flight right now and marrying those with the people and the technology. And we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people, AI and ML worker replacement. It's like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. These are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for. And I think there's a lot of education that needs to take place. So we plan on doing is doing research through this Alliance and then publishing that work. Cause I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence to take that step. It's a different way to treat people. We're in this weird spot where where there's super low unemployment and yet so many things are services and a lot of your assets walk out the door every single night. >>You hope they come back the next day. So you're trying to give them meaning. You're trying to do more than just kind of the core function of the business. He had a great hackathon, uh, yesterday for good. So it's a really challenging people, challenging time for employers to keep the workforce engaged and you're really trying to help them kind of move some of the roadblocks and made it easier for them to keep those folks engaged. It is Jeff. And what we're seeing is, and you see the studies come out where there's never been a higher percentage of people who feel disconnected from their work. And I don't think that's just giving them good tooling. They actually want to know who is being benefited ultimately, what's the endpoint benefit. And if they can somehow feel connected to something purposeful, that is a mechanism for feeling connected to work. So we want our team, we want our customers showing up to their offices every day or organizations feeling motivated. And I think absent that human dimension, absent knowing who you're helping, I think it makes it feel a bit hollow. So that's one of things about engagement brings this together and you see it firsthand. Very invigorating. >>So talk a little bit about the customers that you had up on the main stage telling their Smartsheet stories. And what are the ones that you find most inspiring and, and most sort of life affirming to you as the CEO of this company? >>Well, the thing that that never gets old for me, Rebecca, is when somebody felt something one day was completely unattainable and then they have that unlocked moment like Holy smokes. I pulled it off and it was even more exciting is when they pull that off with very few resources. They didn't have to go to it at every turn. They didn't have to mobilize on a big budget ask. They just got it done. So one of the real memorable moments from me this year was when I visited Syngenta out in North Carolina and I spoke with the head of health and safety and she said we mobilized on Smartsheet. We enabled all of our team members to submit issues, safety concerns they had. How do you simplify that process of taking a picture of a potential issue, getting into a queue, getting it responded to, they saw a 500% increase in the number of people who were saying, I think that could have use improvement. >>I think that could use improvement and a 65% faster resolution times. So she is convinced that people's lives are being materially impacted to the positive. Because of this. I mean, how can she not feel empowered? That is a pretty big, that's a pretty amazing feeling. So that's one that really stands out to me. In terms of the other customer stories that, you know, one of the things that also struck me was just how adrenaline pumping the main stage show was. Yeah. Talk a little bit about what it means to put up the customers who have these very compelling visually interesting stories from outdoor Clothiers to travel destinations, and also what it means for Smartsheet employees to be in the audience. Hearing these stories about what they're doing to help their customers. I think, I think we all want to wake up every day feeling like whatever we do matters, right? >>Whether that's individually or with your family or with your business, and when you see someone like an arc Terrix or a Spartan race or a Vulcan, which is helping do census on elephants, elephants, and preserving that species coupled right alongside it was Cisco that is protecting our networks, which are more complex than ever before and you're participating in that site. Okay. That can again back to that connectedness. Right. And I think, I think the diversity in who we serve also keeps it interesting. You never know who you're gonna serve next one day at Cisco, the next day it's agriculture, the next day it's saving elephants. That diversity keeps things fresh. >>Mark, one of the things that struck me in the keynote is is there was a story of, of this guy gets his going to fly around the world and England and plane in five days or eight days. Um, but on the, what are the test flights are a significant change. He was trying to fly to Y, there was an equipment failure and he had to divert and you know when you see the screen grabs and people working in Smartsheet, it looks super detailed. It's like a project plan and there's resources that are tied research utilization. But in this case they had to be able to flip on a dime. They had to be completely agile and I think she said that eight teams around the world, I presume where the stops are. That's a really interesting dichotomy of, of the tool that you guys are delivering to, to have the detail to be, you know, numbers focused and AI focused, but at the same time be real in the real world. Stuff doesn't always go as planned, be >>real and do it instantly. So if we have an issue with the plane, we're not going to host a summit to talk about with how to get back on track. We've got to do it now. So the thing that sets also need that example is you're talking about eight to 10 people across multiple continents who have to work right now. There is no mobilization. There is note, as I said, summit and I think being able to do meaningful things quickly, that is a fairly rare combination, right? Very often meaningful stuff is heavy, complex takes time. So again, I'm, I'm this, that constant pursuit of faster, more meaningful, more depth, more value, right? In this kind of cross silo collaboration. You, I mean that's a theme that comes up over and over again is that you need contributions from lots of people and lots of no formerly siloed departments as is maybe what they're going to be called in the future to get to resolution so that you can move forward. >>And I think the thing that we spoke to in one of the product announcements was we are so inundated with information and Rebecca, Mark, I needed faster, I need a faster yet again and saying, Holy Rebecca, I can't actually process it all. So one of the things we're trying to do is how do you also improve the context within P within which people see things? Right? So if you asked me question and I don't have to tap out to another application, I can actually see your question in the context of that work. And that's when I think we were one of the real big breakthroughs where we're releasing this, this engaged, >>I mean, when you think about the, the, the current status of, of work and you really, and you really see it, I mean, from, from where you sit, I mean, is it almost shockingly abysmal about how bad things can get at companies in terms of how many silos there are, how the, the number of communication breakdowns, uh, the way the communication breaks down because as you said, you could just be working on a different version for someone. >>Shockingly, business, because we've been doing this for years, it's like it's the norm base, the cost of doing business. So what our job is to, how do we get people to get that spark to elevate a Busick, Oh my goodness, there is a better way. And it takes a lot to change people's behavior. You can't just say, well, there's a better way they have to experience it. Right? So we're in that, in that pursuit of how do you get more people to clear that hurdle the first time? Because the norm is, it's hard. The norm is, is distributed. The norm is, I don't know what version. So that's who we're trying to unlock for folks. >>And you said in the keynote once they get that spark and then achievement becomes the new norm that that has its own momentum too. >>Yes, it's the, you know, Jeff does something amazing and I'm like I want in, it's like well Jeff doesn't have a monopoly on that and that is, that's the viral effect and it's not so much a vendor saying, Hey Jeff did something now you should be motivated. You should feel that way. Rebecca. And that's what we see at this conference. This is 4,000 people who weren't told to go to the conference. These are 4,000 people who want in. And that is a really special part of the conference for us. Shift gears a little bit on AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Cause we hear about >>it all the time and I think everyone now has kind of figured out that it's not, it's not going to be a company delivering AI and ML. It's really applied a I in ML within an application. When you guys look at the opportunities, especially with the data flow that you have and you know your SAS application, where do you see some of the short term wins and opportunities using AI to even better, you know, eliminate some of this redundant, painful work? >>I think part of it starts with educating people on the potential benefits of it. And then I'm an experiential learner. I think many people are. So instead of talking about the theory, demonstrate how it could help. So we've already started doing sings things like recommending to people certain things based on actions they take. It's also very important as a vendor we have made a commitment to being very clear that for more advanced types of AI, people need to opt in. So again, part of this, what's happening to my data, who's working at we that that's part of our platform, right? And when I look at the future, it's the first step I think is really how do you drive convenience improvement recommendation. How do you let someone take better advantage of the systems they're already using? And what people don't have to appreciate today is by exhibiting this behavior, by intaking information, structuring and reporting out this system. >>We'll observe a pattern and ultimately should they choose to opt in the system. We'll get to a point where we'll be able to make recommendations, recommendations and derive insights. But again, a lot of this is fairly theoretical. We're in the early innings of this, Jeff. People are just starting to figure out I can automate something. So you know, I think there's a much like people said 10 years ago, the future is now. The future is kind of showing up today and then the next phase is still a couple of years out. But it's a very exciting, it's a very exciting prospect. >>So those recommendations then can become best practices because I'd like to get it back to this, this achieve as one Alliance and sort of how you're going to take that research and educate the market and then use it to implement these new technologies and best practices of this is how we can get more done and achieve more together >>by showing examples of how AI and ML can contribute to someone's performance as opposed to you did these 10 things. The machine is taking over those 10 things like, well, what's my role in it? That's not a very exciting conversation to have. So I think by demonstrating how somebody's game can, in a sense, slow down. So if the machine can help me further inspect more deeply assess, have that next moment of insight that's contributing, not taking away. And again, we need to show examples as an industry that happening until we show it. It's sort of off or not. So I'm really excited about about helping our customers through that journey. >>Yeah, there's so much opportunity in the ed. The other one that comes up in a other times is unplanned downtime. Right. So a lot of talk always about unplanned downtime of machines, right? It's completely disruptive. You don't want to schedule maintenance, but no one really talks about unplanned downtime of people, not necessarily in the way of being sick, but being distracted by often mundane, often roads, often an anticipated task, I won't even call it work that suddenly get dumped into your lap that you have to take care of. And those really, I think huge opportunities to add some automation and get those things kind of off the plate. >>Yeah. You think about the breakthrough ideas you've had in your lives, does it happen when you're like feverously working waste? No. It's usually when there's a moment of just peace where you're able to process. That's when the breakthrough happens. So one of the things we talked about today was how also as leaders, we need to empower our teams to not just drive for more yield and throughput, take that extra benefit and actually look at the board, process the board and think about what we're going to do next. And I think, again, you need to exhibit, you need to give people the permission to work that way because we're all feeling this, this pressure to innovate. You gotta give people time to do it and do more with less too. I mean, yeah. Do you think it's realistic? Do you think leaders are going to be able to, to do that? And I think the leaders of successful companies will do that and role model that too because they can't also be worried about their own true pled as you said. Right? Right. Yeah. I mean, as Gabby, as Gabby, a reset at the end of her talk, you have to exhibit the behavior. You want others to practice. Right. So I think that was a wise, a wise statement. >>Well, I really loved the, uh, the outdoor clothing company who, you know, specifically said, we want our people out doing the things that our customers are doing, experiencing what they're experiencing and really baking that into the culture. Not just saying it, but get outside and go run around, uh, and, and do what we want our customers to do and what our customers do. Do very different approach. >>It is. It is. I think, again, back to back to us understanding what our customers are doing. This is equivalent to our super bowl every year, right? We get 4,000 these people coming in here and there is no substitute for that in the flesh interaction and that's again one of the reasons why it's everyone's such a positive engaged mood right now. So they're not only interacting with the Smartsheet folks, but they're interacting with each other and learned how each company uses Smartsheet. Yeah, I mean when you think that one half of all collaboration that takes place on our platform is cross company. It's not a surprise that people interact with one another. Here it is. It is happening. We have companies who interact with hundreds of brands outside of their own, so we serve as that cross connect for companies and that's the modern company. I don't know of a company that is completely insular, so if you can help promote that safely, that's a, that's a, that's a real advantage for a company. >>Yeah. Wrapping up. What do you, what do you think you're going to be the themes for next year's conference? What is, what are sort of what's on your plate? What are you thinking about? What are the big challenges that you're knowing on right now? Yeah, I think the, I think the continued shift from efficiency to effectiveness. People. I think most people are still measured on the output goal. How many units did I do, how many sales and and while that may serve you well in the quarter and the next quarter, it does not prepare you for years two and three so you have to be very committed to the investments today. That may not pay off in that six to 12 month window. You have to, and I think stories will come out as people are learning new ways to work of examples of here's what we did in 2019 which ended up being a home run in 2021 so it's back to effectiveness, effectiveness versus efficiency. That is going to be, I think one of the themes we speak to next year. Thanks Mark. A pleasure having you on the show. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. Have more of the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet. Engage.

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to Seattle, Washington. We are here at Smartsheet engaged 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. You're watching the cube. We are here with a cube alum, a cube veteran, Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at constellation research at at Washington DC. Thank you so much for returning to the cube. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic but a fascinating one. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the workplace is driven by the new, the rise of digital technologies. >>Sure. I mean while it digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? And so we've had the past waves of productivity tools and then mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality are going to literally change how we perceive the workplace. And then we have just everyday trends like remote working. And now people can work from anywhere, right? It's fantastic. And that's, that's really revolutionized a lot of things. There are things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote work force. Companies like ADP have a quarter of their workforce working from home, right? Accenture, same thing. They're getting rid of office space and they, they work out of their house unless there's a client site. And because you can create a, create the experience that you want. And one of the really big trends is this is this trend towards being able to shape the employee experience the way that you want to, using the tools that you prefer. >>And some people call this shadow it, other people call it innovation, right? And so that's one of the, one of the big changes. And then we have things like the gig economy, which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms. And that's, that's really quite exciting too. So all these, this confluence of forces all enabled them driven by technology. But it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload workers that are not lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this. And that's another big challenge. >>Well, you also get this tools proliferation, which they're just not, they're just not word and, and Excel anymore. But you've got a tab open with Salesforce, you've got a tab open with Slack, you've got Gmail open, you've got docs open and you've got Smartsheet open. You might have a JIRA open. I mean, so how is that gonna sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of apps that we have to keep up >>and we need all this technology to do better work. I mean the, these apps provide value except that it's increased in the onboarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us to train people. In some companies it's hard to retain people because they feel like they have to go to work and there's this onslaught of technologies they have to have tabs open and get their jobs done. And they do. And so we're seeing things like, you know, we're at the Smartsheet conference where, you know, how can we centralize work a little bit better, streamline it by integrating the tools and creating more focus in on what we're doing. And that's a very big trend. So my latest digital workplace trends report, we say this, we're seeing these hubs form, you know like Slack is another work hub that's become very popular inside of organizations. >>They have over 1100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So we're dealing with this complexity, you know, starting to be able to do this now, but it's early days still a big challenge. So what's a, what are you seeing now? So what's the, what is the answer then? I mean we have you just described all of these trends that are taking place that are making, making the work modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers who have, they're dealing with cognitive overload leaders who want more with less. What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? We talked already about Smartsheet and Slack. We see the new digital experience platforms are emerging and low code and no code is also becoming popular. >>I'd be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamline experiences. So the CIO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, solve his problem right away there. They're knowledge workers are just being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employee experience, the 100 top moments and then he built experiences that enabled, you know, project management and onboarding and all of these key activities to be friction-free built out of their existing applications, but streamlined to just what they needed to do. And he used this as his top priority as a digital leader is to say, we've got to take as much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining and simplification. And we now have tools that allow that shaping to happen very quickly. It's almost reminds me of kind of the competition for Deb's right now. >>It's the competition for employees. And then we've talked a lot about the consumerization of it in mobile devices for the customer experience, but there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same kind of expected behavior, right? Or expected inner engagement interaction with the apps on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers. Cause I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available. But yeah, we only get 2% unemployment in the Bay area. Now it's creating effectively negative unemployment, right? Anything under 3%. So this is the challenges. Employee experience is usually low on the priority list for CEOs. They usually have analytics and cloud and cybersecurity and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet customer experience is, is one of those priorities. But how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to deliver it with? Right. We're seeing you can do with talented people, is expecting to do a great job. And then give them a bunch of hard to use tools, right. Which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that prioritization go up a little bit because employee experience is part of delivering great customer experience and it's how you, how you create that experience to begin with. So small >>and leaders are seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that their workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. >>Yeah. And now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before and I'm sure you've seen the numbers that are, most employees are disengaged at work. The majority, right between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous untapped investment that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employee experiences. And what's disengaging is, as I mentioned, you know, giving a talented person allows you tools or allows you experience, right and expect them to do great is right. It doesn't happen. >>How much do you think AAL or excuse me, AI and machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job. >>Yeah, it's, it's interesting cause there's, you know, there's two sides of the coin there. Some people like a, a job that they can just kind of phone in and it's kind of rote and they can come in, they don't have to think too hard and then they can go home to their family and some people are hired on that basis. Right. Um, because that's the challenge. AI and machine learning will absolutely automate most rote work. If you look at like Adobe sensei, I was at the Adobe conference and, and they were talking about how all of these creative types, you'll have all these mundane tasks automated for them. And I could see everybody looking at each other going, I get paid to do. >>Right, right. >>So you know, it, you'll see things like robotic process automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CIO is how they had, they cut like 25% out of their call center because they handed it over to the box. Right. You know, as bill processing, that's one of the, and sorting and matching bills, the invoices, it's a manual job even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happen about the most rote level and it just, but it's just going to climb up from there. >>What do you see down the road though? I mean in terms of those, in terms of those employees who are raising their saying hands saying weed, I kind of want that job. I are you, are you seeing what's going to happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they, are they going to be invested in by their companies? >>Well you hope so. You know, it's interesting. We see that all the big vendors now have these big education programs. Salesforce has Trailhead. SAP just announced open SAP where they giveaway massively open online courses. And you know, Microsoft has done this with Microsoft developers network way back in the day, trying to educate people. I mean you can get re-skilled for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenges. Even though every technological revolution in the past, and it looks like this one too has totally changed the employment picture. Uh, uh, by and large it creates more jobs than we lose. And that looks like it's going to happen here. But the people who lose the jobs aren't the ones that tend to gain the jobs, the new jobs, right? Yeah. The, it's hard to take somebody who's, who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new AI algorithms because that's where the next strategic jobs are going to be directing the AI to do all these things. Right. And so I think the short term is going to be dislocation and it's happening so fast that unless society, government, and enterprises really intervene that to upskill these folks, we are going to have a challenge. >>Well, we're in this really weird time too, in between, I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right? Which is perfect for autonomous vehicles, you know, to carry a lot of that freight and everyone pretty much agrees that's going to happen. At the same time, there's, there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today. Uh, like there never has been. So as these weird, and again, it's probably not the best thing for a young kid to get into, right? Because it's not, doesn't have a lot great long. >>Right? Right. >>Well, and you know, you look at Uber and their stated direction is, is they want to get rid of all these drivers, right? They want it, they want self-driving taxis. And you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen, right? Uh, and so the unskilled labor is going to be hit by far the worst. You have to become skilled labor in, in the digital economy. Uh, and so a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to, to get the skills into people's hands. You know, like Facebook and other large organizations don't even require a college degree. What they want people, the people that can deliver, they can take these things and create the, you know, the, the great products of the future. And so, you know, those everyone has to become a knowledge worker. >>And, and as Laird Hamilton said on the main stage today, it's the, it's the, the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of, wow, I don't know much about that. I bet. I guess I'd better learn about it. And then learning a lot about it along the way. We all have to be able to adapt and adopt those new, >>no, absolutely. Now the, uh, uh, and so w we see up-skilling and cross skilling becoming more transdisciplinary. So business people are becoming it folks now and it folks really business people, you know, we've had this business, it divide for a long time and cracks me up. I still go to big companies in the it departments using its own building. Right. But those days are going away. And now seeing that, you know, now as it people over on the business side that live there now. Right. You know, so we're seeing this kind of, this blending where digital is infusing everything and so you have to become digitally competent. Uh, and this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the, you know, the, the, the digital workplace, the average user has had the number of applications they have to learn double or triple in the last just the last five years. Right. So it's a big challenge. >>So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your, >>Oh, a game design. Know the gaming industry is bigger than the movie by a large, large margin. Right. And, and that, that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality really come from. And then you can go into business. Right. You know, >>even sociology majors can design games. >>Yeah. It's just, you know, it's just get, like you said, it's, it's the poor tweeners right. That get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new, yeah. I'll have to take care of. And unfortunately, uh, not a lot of great record of retraining today, but maybe that's going to have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. Right? Yeah. Well, and there's these big market places now you can build the career of your dreams. You'd go to Upwork or Gigster. I mean, these are big job markets where you can go and find work and do it from anywhere using a tablet you bought for $50 off Amazon. Right, right. You know, it just that most of you aren't even aware of that. They can do that. Right, right, right. >>So it's this fast changing world. Put a few bucks away for insurance and you've put a few bucks away in your 401k and you, yeah. You know, not just living off the cash plus a little bit to cover your costs, which unfortunately a lot of their, like the Uber drivers and the Lyft drivers are anyway, you know, they're not really banking that thing for building a, a career. Well, I've crawled to those platforms and it's interesting, entrepreneurial activities, very common in places like Asia, right? Where if, you know, they come here, they build businesses right away. Right. And they're used to that. So w and we lost some of that, but I think we were gave a economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know? Right. >>Well Deon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure having you. Absolutely. Thanks. So Jeff. Thanks Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned to more of the cubes live coverage of NJ engaged 2019.

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Hello, everyone. We are wrapping up one day of coverage at Smartsheet. Engage here in Seattle. I'm Rebecca Knight. Been coasting all day with Jeff Rick. It's been a pleasure sitting next to you together, and it has just been so much fun. It's a great show. >>And you've never been to Seattle before >>my time in the city? Exactly. So you've >>covered this space, Rebecca, in your in your non key black for a very long time. So first off, you know, kind of general impressions of new way to work. We hear about it every show we got to talk about new way to work. So, you know, kind of your global perspective a little bit and then, you know, kind of some takeaways from some of the conversations today. >>Well, we know that the situation is pretty bleak right now that there are the statistics are horrible just in terms of the number of employees that are really checked out, totally disengaged, would would love to quit, but they need the health insurance. And so we're already sort of starting from from a pretty low place, where in terms of people's engagement at work, and I think a lot of the things that that drive people nuts about their work. Uh, of course, is a bad boss and not a great parking spot and everything, but it's it's it's it's the little things that get in your way of doing your job. And it's it's the things that just drive you nuts about some sort of process that takes forever. And, oh, I have to keep doing this. And I just already sent you that email and how come you're looking at this other version? And it's all those impediments that really drive people crazy and that makes people stressed out and and unhappy in their jobs. So I do think that if you are a company like Smartsheet and you have you realized this and you can slowly chip away at those impediments and the aggregate aggravate aggravations that people feel, I think that's not a bad business model. I think I think they're on to something here. Don't worry, though >>sometimes is just is just additive, right? It's just another thing we talked. It's one of the interviews. And when I'm at work, I have three big monitors, each one split into two screens. I've got mail open calendar, open sales force open, slack open asana open YouTube. Twitter. Um, it's probably a couple. And then if I have to, like, look something up and and you know there's this kind of constant confusion is what it what is the screen that's open when you work? And it used to just be e mail, which is not a good solution at all. So I think if if you know, they can become the place that people do, their work right, and we talked about all the integrations like it's that integrate with slack. So maybe you know, the people that work primarily and slacker primarily there, and maybe the people in some other department are primarily on spark cheat, and somebody else is primarily on another tool. But it just seems still like keep adding, tourists were not necessarily taking a lot of them away. >>Well, that will be the job for Anna Griffin, who is the first ever cmo this company. You just started in April, and she's got her work cut out for her because you're right. There are a lot of screens. That's that does not describe my work day. But I know it describes a lot of people's work day, Um, and that that that will be. What she needs to figure out is how to be your number one You're going to the one that you rely on to get your job done. >>The part that I took away from her interview is really She talked a lot about engagement, and you just talked about engagement, an empowerment, you know, not only not only getting the obstacles out of the way, but making me feel like what I do matters, matters to me, matters to my boss, matters to my clients and matters. And then I think that does finally drive to innovation, which is the Holy Grail that everyone talks about. But it's really not that easy to execute. >>Everyone wants more innovative, of course, >>and then the last thing which she talked about, why part of the reason why she came here? His leadership. But I think the way we really can't have this conversation around engagement without talking about leadership, because it's such a critical piece to the puzzle for everyone to rally around, you know, a mission. So this is the execution details. But you also need some type of a mission that you can feel good about, as well as feeling that you can contribute to. >>Absolutely. And I think that what you were just talking about with the ownership piece and so these air these employees, as we said, they're removing the impediments to their job. But then they're also able to then focus on higher level tasks, assignments, thinking, strategy. They're able to use their brains for what they were hired for, not thinking about certain tasks and other files that are old versions. And so if they if they could do those things and then, as you said, feel like they matter, feel like that work, they matters to their boss. However, you are right in that if you got a bad boss, all bets are off. If it works, still gonna stink and you're there. There's nothing you can do about it. >>The other piece that came up, which I was interesting, is really about prioritization. What and what do you optimizing for? And my favorite part of Clayton Christian since Innovator's dilemma, is the conversation about that you must prioritize. You cannot engineer for everything equally, and you have to force up. That pressurization, I think, is interesting here about Smart Cheat is for all the talk about digital transformation. Most people talk about the products, and service is that they sell. They talk about the engagement with their customers. They don't talk about transforming the life of their employees and the way their employees get stepped on and the way the employees actually engage with the company through the applications. And I thought that was a really interesting and insightful take, especially in the day where everything is a service. And again your people walk out the door every night and you hope they come back the next day. So I think, you know, spinning the digital transformation story into more of an employee enable men and engagement story is pretty powerful. >>You I could not agree more because because that that is the critical piece. If you have a bunch of people coming to work every day who hate their jobs, they're not gonna be giving your customers the experience that you want their customers tohave. So it really does start with Happy workers, right? Andi, I think that I think smart. She really gets that. So that's that's what I am struck by today. >>Yeah, it's just those other ones that we're going to bring along. And Dion may have made a good point and said, You know, some people don't want to be engaged work. Some people don't want >>you >>next level things like that they like their roads in the routine gives him comfort. They come to work, they do the road in the routine and they go home. So it's gonna be interesting. Time for those peoples can reach it in time for people to not necessarily have expertise in a broad range of categories formerly siloed categories like product marketing, product management, finance sales, biz, Dev production. But you least have tohave in a kind of an inch. De Milo gave those teams. So you put together a SWAT team, if you will, to accomplish the task. And that's what I'm curious to see. Some of the 4 51 research that how how he was pointing to kind of a restructuring of the silos of teams and organizations within it within a company that We don't hear much about how that's going to restructure on kind of a dev ops, fast assembly, fast, complete kind of assemble and disassemble around projects, which is what Dev Ops says. We'll see you know how that how that impacts organizational structure. >>And I think that could be very cool and very different, particularly with different. I mean, we know that diverse groups make better decisions than lone geniuses. And so if we have a bunch of people who have different perspectives, different levels of expertise and even if it's not expertise, it's just sort of a general knowledge about a lot of different things, right. We know that if we can get those people working together on a task, it's got a lot of potential. So I think I think you're right, right. >>Last thing is that I think really interesting. Here is the is the acknowledgment of team beyond even the company walls. So you've got your core team, you know, cross departmental collaboration, and then was a mere it over and over here here today, collaboration outside the walls to external teams. And it was Mark talking about putting on these big events mean there's so many external stakeholders in place holders and vendors involved in this humongous dance that becomes our enjoyment of the Final Four event. I think that's really insightful. Kind of take that. You have to have the ability to engage, collaborate with a large group or an extended group for any particular project. And And that really changes the way you think about what the application is high share information >>and that they all have to feel ownership in the process to yes, very >>important. All right, Rebecca. Well, >>this was so much fun. I Jeff, I had a great time working with you, and we had a great team. We had Andrew in Jay and Brendan and Taylor Welcome Taylor to the to the show. It was great. I can't wait to come back and do it again. >>It will be big next time. All right, >>Thanks. That is wrapping up our coverage of engaged 2019. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick. Thanks a lot for watching

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the booth covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of smart. She engaged here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Anna Griffin. She is the CMO of smartsheet. Thanks so much for coming on the Q. Thank you, guys for having me appreciate it. So you were your pretty new to this company joined in April. I'd love to hear, but you've also had an illustrious career in marketing. You've worked several big names, including Apple and Nortel and and Saturn. And you've also worked for Land's end and a whole bunch of different varied career. What attracted you to smart? She You know, it >>was interesting when I first got the call about smartsheet. I had never heard of it, and the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing. I realized it was one of those a category that's just not established, but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing. And we're not even the potential. I mean, it will be the next big thing and you know, I met with that was intriguing. But, you know, I met with the executive team and it was a perfect combination of a killer product, but a killer company. I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is and their authenticity and their passion and their drive and their belief. It's so contagious. There's no way you would not want to be a part of it. So on, then, the privilege to be able to tell this company's story I feel like it is the best kept story not only in Seattle, potentially the world on I plan to tell the story and and what a gift. But what a great opportunity is. A marketer toe have this type of opportunity. >>Well, we're gonna get into how you're going to tell the story, okay, a little bit later, but so now you've been here a few months. It is your first ever engaged What? What does he what are your impressions? >>Well, I wish I had been thio previous engaged to have something to compare it to. But the fact that this conference has doubled in size 4000 customers here and it's only its third show. I will tell you in the industry who have worked, you know, managing events teams for many, many, many years. Not a lot of conferences grow at this size, and Soto have 4000 customers here who are zealots. They are their passion for the product and what it's doing and what it's doing for there. Not only their companies, but their own personal careers. There isn't an empowerment story through their mouse that will just inspire you. So it's It's incredible. The energy here is really, really especially. >>Feel it, too. Way See >>it a lot of the smaller conferences early days. That's why they're fun to be. Here were last year, when those 2000 it was adjacent to the to the office across the across the water. Exactly, but it is a really passion community, and you know, Thio here, literal, literal cheers and claps at features. It's great. It's like copy paste from one road to the other because it's clearly something that means something these people and that they have asked for and the company is delivered and really demonstrates, is listening to engage these crazy people. It's a great asset >>wave. That listening thing is huge, and I feel like that's one of the things. And I think it's why there is a CMO now. Why get the privilege to be the first CMO is because the customers said way need more awareness of this company. We need our our executives. We need lines of business leaders. We need i t to know who you are and the magic of what you do. We need awareness is gonna make it that much easier for us to get much wider adoption across these companies. If people know who you are and they know you know what you're capable of. So listening. That is one of the number one things we've heard. It's like awareness. They wanted awareness, so because >>it'll help make them >>more successful. So I think that was the >>catalyst for OK, let's get achieve, Marty. Officer, Let's go build that about you. What are you gonna do? What were some of your top priority is to tell the story and to build brand awareness. Yeah, well, um well, you're the first thing >>was to really kind of Titan are positioning again. It's a great great products make great brands, and this is a great product company. But man were starting to do so much more than just killer products were really getting into this enablement this, right, transforming companies. And so I wanted to make sure we're positioned properly. And we're really positioning mawr in a more transformative altitude and the capabilities of what we could do. You know, we have found we've spent way too much time talking about technology versus people versus what technology and people are going to do together. And that is the magic of what Smartsheet does. It really takes a platform, a common platform that basically integrates with the tech investments. And you've >>already made with the systems of record that you already have pools that data out and then allows >>the people I work with that data all in a common really time application. And when >>you can marry >>those two things together, that tech and people, that's when one plus one equals three. And so we call that that three is what we really call achievement again, like >>everybody in our space >>is work work, work, task management, project management, the capability of smart shit. Yeah, we do all that too. But when you're playing that transformative altitude, we're in Ebeling achievement and it enterprise wide level and achievement, like what your business can achieve. But this is the more special part, and this is where I get excited. Did you feel to tell this story is the achievement happens at a personal level to like again? I'm telling you when I talk to customers and I see what they're doing right, you don't understand. You have changed my career. I'm doing more strategic work. I am. I am seeing differently in my company. I champion this, like all of a sudden I am leading big teams. I went from this to this, and there they're empowerment is so big and so really that last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. And that's what this product does. And so job one was position. That's properly so we can tell that type of story and really put our solutions in that kind of light because that's what it does on then job to is to launch the campaign launches to the world. So we just launched two weeks ago and it's a slow roll. I mean, we have hundreds of assets it in place. So if I love seeing us on television, you know I love seeing is deeply in digital. I love some of the new interesting things that that we can do in media. But when our customers are saying that you know they're seeing it, a CMO like you gonna get a high from it. Yeah, So it's fun job to launch the campaign, >>and the campaign is, well, we call the campaign can do you know we're positioning >>the brand as the platform for enterprise achievement. Number one Smart sheet is a platform, I think a lot of people, you know as it's grown. I mean, it truly is a platform, and it really is enterprise strong and wide. It's skills which is important, but its scales So everybody and a company can align organizational alignment to truly achieve something bigger aligned organizations do not fill. And so that's the That's the power. But I digress. >>No question that way >>you know, one of the great legs of your of your go to market strategy and your lead Jen is your licensing formula, which enables me as the Spartan sheet licensee to engage lots of people many outside my own, not by my own team, but my own company. And let them have access to this tool. What a smart, smart waiver. Whoever came up with that licensing strategy? What a great way to introduce the opportunity to use this transformational tool to ongoing and broad audience. Yes, >>your table is so exciting. >>When I was in the interview process and I was riding on a plane and clearly I had met with the company and I heard somebody in front of me was a consultant, one of the consulting firms who had met a complete stranger on the plane. And somehow Smartsheet came up that she was going you got Oh, my gosh, Smartsheet. >>This is like she was going. This is the best kept secret. We're using it with all of our clients. We heard about it through one of our clients That wasn't one of them. We'll use it like Oh, my gosh, this is the game changer. I'm like putting my here in between the wayward I put my hand in as it did You just say smart shape. Literally six people on the airplane, random people like, Oh, my gosh, we use it to. It was the >>most surreal experience, and that was when I knew, like, Okay, I've got to be a part of this Coast special. Did a lot of people are now just getting that sensation of what this thing is capable of. >>And, well, it's funny to your personal achievement story. Reminds me of any time you know you got a new software company and whether you know, center Deloitte or even why, when those guys come in, they're making a big bet right there. Some new partner's gonna bet. Bet their career on this new technology. We've heard from a number of people how betting their career internally with smartsheet has changed their position in the company. Yes, we find that today a couple of times so clearly you know it. It is an enablement platform for someone to, you know, grab on to the to the rocket ship and ride this Marchi wave thio new and bigger, better things, >>but but also her point about just even just participating in the technology. And then they're able to, as you said, work on more strategic work, be able to do more things in their jobs that have been catapulted them to new job. So it's not even necessarily betting on smartsheet and bringing in smart cheat. But it is just just using smart sheet and then therefore they have more brain time. Yes, yes, oh, engagement we're talking about, >>right, right? You know, it is because we've been talking a lot about you know, some of the really scary statistics about how disengaged people are at work and how many people are ready to quit their job. And, you know, they've got all these blocks. Is menial roadblocks in their day to day existence that are that are negatively impacting their ability to want to do their job or but actually just want to be there anymore. And so it's It's like it seems, maybe to the outside, looking in some of these things by seem low value, but they're actually tremendous value if you're removing these roadblocks so I could get my job done >>totally and love your job, you love >>your job. But know that the work that you do matters and I think so many people have lost that feeling like there's something about working and I don't know if it's the corporate world, but it has become such a grind and that rare opportunity. We feel like I love what I do, and I know that it matters like it's a gift and this is a platform that enables bad in people. And so I think that's when the fascinating things I've been spending a lot of time on the road with customers and I was at a very big multi national, big global agricultural company. And, um, Singer, Actually, I'm watching WAY Bet with probably 200 different Just what I would call power users across seven different you know, roll types like from I t toe hsc thio, you name it. And, um, every single one of them is like art. We're doing more like we are empowered, like the engagement, the employee engagement in that company, through the roof because every single person felt like were hurt. I have ownership, you know. I'm doing work. I'm taking it to a new level. And so you know, sure, there is a Thanh of operational efficiencies that are gonna come out of working with smart shape, But I think the one to watch is what's gonna happen when your workforce is truly engaged and taking ownership of the work. >>Those were the good. Those are the companies that are >>going to have a higher retention they're gonna have >>They're going to see >>something in that in that talent area. So this is more than just We're getting more work done and return on investment of our our our systems like you're going to see you know, what happens when your when your employees are empowered. >>Well, the word you didn't use his innovation that I firmly believe everyone wants more innovation, their company. >>But how do you do >>it? One of those? I think it's really simple. Lever on that is you just get more people more access to more data and then the ability to do something about it and open it up to all the smart people that see problem to different prisons in different opportunities. And that's where you start to get in. A leverage is amazing talent that you already have inside your four walls. >>But what is interesting about >>innovation is I think sometimes the world so over rotates that innovation is gonna be that next killer line of code, or it's going to be and they forget that the power of practical innovation like it's that Siri's of small collected things at out up, allowing your entire, you know, employee population to feel like they have the power to innovate us. That every person in the company has the power because the power practical innovation can lead to something Justus biggest the big already >>Dev Ops has shown that that's a better way anyway, right in software development, with the grand idea with the market development plan and the product development plan in the three year build cycle that's does not win against constant religious narrative improvement. Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. Yes, >>indeed. So you and you said this earlier and I saw it on your Lincoln to the last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. Yes. How do you describe the culture at smart shape now that we've done talked about the evangelical customers Yeah, about with in smartsheet itself, it's, um it's pretty >>special. Know what you're gonna say? Of course. And see if I was >>gonna say special. But it is. It is rare >>when people everyone comes to work with this belief like this true belief that they are. They have the power to influence something and touch something that's going to do something great for other people. And I think that's what is the most special is they? They're not just doing it for themselves. They know they're doing it for others, like they know they love these guys. Every single person in the company loves that customer like the love ability, They love the customer and they feel like they've got to do their best work. So their customer, I can do something great >>with it. You know, they really understand that. >>And that's Ah, it's an incredible place to wanna work when you, when you feel that way but toe love your customers. I think that's why our customers love us back and to be loved. You must first love >>and because they love you know, it's it's rare. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it's a great role and you're in the right place. And I can't talk to you next year and hear more about can do and and all of the wonderful things you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I'm Rebecca Knight. That wraps up the cubes. Interviews. Stay tuned for our rap of engaged 2019 you're watching the Cube

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff Rick. We're joined by Main McCutchen. She is the program director at Oval V. Oh, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. So movie is a huge name in the advertising industry. But why do you give our viewers a little bit of background about what you do and and the company itself? >>One of the fun little stories that that I like to tell is something that our founder said so many years ago. If you are. If you hire people that are smaller than you, you end up with tiny people in your company, right you want you want to hire someone bigger than you, and you end up ah, company of giants and I feel like that really, like, kind of sums up will be. It's such a big name in the industry. 70 years we've been around, I'm program director. I work in operations. I also work in resource management um, I like to think that I'm utility player, you know, like wherever. Wherever the fire is, I'll go and try to help out. Smart sheets made that a lot easier for me in the last couple of years. My origin story of Smart cheat is I was working with an account and someone had to leave suddenly and they asked me to step in and do some of the account executive duties. I know it here. What? You know, some of those were I am lifelong operations. I'm not lifelong advertising, So it was like trial by fire. But I had recently been introduced to Smartsheet. So I had this tool and I went to meetings for like, two weeks, and I gathered every piece of data I could. And then after that, time, like images came out of the mist and suddenly, like the world made sense. And, um, my boss one day was walking by and saw like a pie chart. What's that like? Oh, I just made this because it's helping me learn about the account. Right? And he was like, you were making appointment with my boss and like on it went from >>there, so you should have been in operations forever. So what brought you to smart? She clearly you've worked with other tools. You've worked in complicated projects before. What was so different this time? >>I would say of the ease of use and the instant adopt ability with other people and the functionality being able to attach a file. And this is long before before they were dashboards, before any of that stuff. Just attaching a file. Um, the comments on the line really ease of use. >>That's a big one. >>So in your in your line of work, there are so many different assets that you need to work on and the way that the the advertising industry has changed so much, you only have so much time to get the customers attention. Can you talk a little bit about just those changes and then how that's changed, what you need to do and what your team needs to do on a day to day basis? >>We spent a lot of time tracking. We still spend a lot of time tracking, and customers will say You guys talk to us too much, and then they'll say we didn't get the right information. So I think I'm talking to other people here at the conference, and nobody really wants to say my company's having a difficult time grappling with, like this torrent of data that we're all living with, You know, I miss things for my kid because I missed the email in my in box about the school, even though I'm looking for it. So I think it's a large problem that a lot of companies we're dealing with and nobody really wants to admit it, admit it. But we're finding that we're changing the way we work, and it's making a big difference. Like the tools that we used to use don't apply anymore because they don't make any sense. Like, you know, if you have, like, a shared folder on a drive, Good luck. You know, with a flashlight like you're never gonna >>find so >>thes kinds of tools. Marchi is helping us. Is helping us really change the way we >>work the >>other >>thing to the complexity of which you guys deliver. You made a nice customer video for the Sparky team and really goes through on some campaign for a shoe or something, you know, you kind of got your core theme that you develop, that >>you >>guys were making so many derivative Platt the rid of assets for so many derivative platform speeds and such different ways. That kind of the variation, I assume the version control variants based on geo or whatever speed, Completely different working situation. >>Yeah, we're very excited about Slope, the asset tracking software that that smart she has purchased. And we've I think we've started a pilot, and we're really excited to see how that works out, because that's something that all of this stuff that we're building it smartsheet will then be able to talk thio this other system So the tracking system will be able to talk Thio revenue projections or whatever else you wanted to talk to, you know of capacity planning, resource management and, yes, of all all the virgins that we have to deal with, there's two pieces of the version. Ing one is like what we need to deliver to the client today. Do we have the right version? We got a ship this out. It's going to print. You don't want the wrong one going out, But then also 23 years from now, If somebody comes and says, Hey, can you give me the version that ship and everyone's like, Oh, I don't know what It's one of these. I don't know which one Because in our industry, people rotate off accounts. You work on one account for a number of years, and then you decide you want to be to be expertise or some consumer products. Good expertise in the company's very good about enriching people's careers that way, moving them around. But that means they're taking their knowledge with them. So one of my favorite things about smart cheat is not only does it help us track and there's transparency and automation and all that stuff, but when we finish a project that we've used it correctly, it's beautifully archives. So not only can you find all of the assets, even the little 80 bitty ones, but you can see a chat trail on which one was used this time, and you can. I like also, you can right click on a cell and see to sell history like who made that? No, you know who put that number in it? It's perfect. >>It's a mini handbook that you can hand over into the on ramp someone onto a new project. Like >>if you could talk to the person that was there that did it. You know it's there. The intuition that there is great. >>So what is this do in terms of changing the culture of your organization and the ways in which employees air interacting with each other? >>I'm really excited about this. I'm really excited about the culture piece because I'm gonna talk about it >>internally and >>then I'll talk about it with clients internally. If you're a business leader and you need to get your revenue projections from five markets are regions or whatever you want to call them, you need thes numbers like every month. Give me these numbers so we go down to them and we say, This is it. I need you to fill out this column and the months that's it. >>They can. Then, with smart, she do whatever they >>whatever else they want with the sheet, they can add columns like some of them track quarterly and some of them tracked by the half and some of them weekly. They can do all that as >>long as >>my numbers Aaron and and I have that report. So all >>of these cultures were slightly different. Old movie has >>a culture, but so do our clients. And >>when you work with a client closely, you >>adopt part of that culture. So I >>don't want >>to say to anybody in the company, this is how it's gonna be and this is how you have to do it. I think that kills morale. I think it kills creativity, a think it kills innovation. So that's one thing that I love about Smartsheet is. It helps you preserve culture. It helps, even like underscore it. >>And do you think it's made you as a team? Also, Maur uh, wanting to lean on each other in different ways and in the sense of wanting to be unlocked. Creativity pieces? What I'm what I'm trying to get. Creativity >>and accountability. Yes, I think it's much easier to define who's responsible for what with that clearer communication. You know, you could get a card view and you feel like that's your literally your lane. That's what it's called. It's called your Lane, so I think that helps people like I know what I'm accountable for and I know what I need to dio. And so, um, I'm gonna be better at it. I also I'm gonna have a better picture of the whole project instead of just what I'm doing. So knowing where it's coming from and where it's gonna go after and that contacts makes me better. >>And are you seeing one of the big themes for all these types of software is that, you know, it frees up people from doing less mundane, less routine, less wrote kind of your example of rolling up the numbers so that it frees you up to do higher value activities. Are you seeing that house? It manifest itself in your guy's ability to deliver >>the automation. Uh, let's see. Let's see how that >>we haven't. >>I was talking about what I said. I would get back to the client a minute ago and I didn't. We haven't >>I can't think of >>a time when we use We use automation a lot. Internally. I'm trying to think about what we do with clients. Cause client facing is obviously a little bit different, but eternally >>is probably harder challenge, though, right? It's easy to get excited about a new client. It's, I think, it's harder to get excited about another day on, you know, Week three on an eight week project that you're just >>I kind of >>love them. I don't know why I love the internal stuff. I think because of the camaraderie and because of the team building I sent out, I used a form recently. Thio. Ask some people that I've been working with how they feel about this new project, and it was so easy. I mean, it was like I had fun making the form, you know, and I'm happy to say that I'm also having fun reading the responses because they're mostly good and some of them are critical. But they it's it's it's delivered so well the comments like >>we needed to hear that we >>can actually make this better now. >>Seeing the big picture, though, I want it. I want to hear as a business leader what that means to you and in particular what it was like before when you didn't have full information and you couldn't exactly get the real time status report and understand what needed to be done and what wasn't working so well. We had >>people working off of a different sort of playbooks, right? So you have one department, and they know what they're focuses, and they know what they're doing. And another department has a different responsibility. They go to a meeting and they >>kind of >>hear different things, right, because they're thinking about what am I gonna be doing with this? And the other was thinking about how my could do and so that you can really run into problems because any of people that are on divergent paths. And so now if everyone's working off the same document, you don't have that problem anymore. It's your question, >>right? So I don't want to shift gears a little bit, name on and talk about where we are kind of society in terms of the attention economy, right? That's the hardest thing to get these days is people's attention. I think in your little video you guys talked about, you know, the number of impressions per day, which of course is infinite. And the time for impression is just basically zero plus a little bit more and you guys are right at the leading edge of trying to capture that attention. Facing that challenge is I wonder if you can just kind of speak generally is the evolution of that in the way that messaging and images and kind of types of engagement have to change when your your opportunities are very, very short. But they're spread across a lot of different things. And, you know, if it's targeted, right? Thea pertinent ese for a match on a good target, someone said, If it's a good match, it's magical on. And how you kind of look a challenge in the opportunity of operating in 2019 where attention is so hard to get, >>I think to give you a really good answer to that question, I would need someone from the media department strategy, someone from creative and someone from the CEO's office, Um, but in >>New York in two weeks, >>we oh, there's so much that goes into it and clients are so different. You know, some want this really long, long list of different deliver bols that they want and it's on a tight paste and then some or more inches like >>just like an >>overall brand. You know, we just want some brand strategy, one thing that we do well and that better that is our core is we make brands matter. That's that is the oval. Vito's right there. So no matter what's going on with the industry as it's changing and you know this week it's banners. Next week it's social or whatever. We were always focused on the brand first and whatever makes sense on that day. In that era, we will choose the platform and the software and whatever else that helps us best service our clients, >>but still staying to that core mission around the brand brand representatives. >>That is the number one thing. Yeah, >>So what's next? I mean, when you when you're here at the Smartsheet, engage and you're talking and hearing about how other companies use it and how other teams are finding new collaborations and what are you going to come away with? What are you gonna bring back to your team? And in New York, I think the >>most exciting thing for me so far has been I mean, I love the multi select drop down, and I mean, there's a lot of great things, but when they talked about a little bit of touch on a I and how the platform will be watching the way you work and I don't want to use language. People get so creeped >>out, you know, like watching it. >>What do you want? You know, it's just like, you know, following a pattern that it will suggest things. So I think that's gonna help search. And then it's going to know, like, well, every other time you ran that report, then you wanted to dash would want me to kick it off for you. I am really excited about that. I think is right now the automation is good and it's getting better, right? You have, like, you can set by time you consent reminders by by date and lots of great things that you could dio with the forms. But I think that a eyepiece is really what's gonna make a change. >>How did you say that your team feels about that? I mean, you hear that? People have so much trepidation around. Aye, aye. And the robots are coming. I don't just pretend like it's just something you don't have to dio, right? Right, right. Yeah, I did. But did they see it as the as the potential benefits that could come from it of Yes, I think a >>lot of people already in a recent project. Everyone's like the drudgery is gone. It's just gone. And sometimes I feel like one thing. I asked him, Do you feel like you're spending more >>time on this? Or >>do you feel like you're spending less time? And do you feel like you're spending more time? But you're more informed and better to do your job right? So sometimes it's boat. Sometimes some things that I spend less time now that I'm using smartsheet, >>some people spend more >>time because they're getting Maur information that they needed. You know, >>right? I love it. I love your example. How you just need that one cell filled in, and whatever it takes you, the individual to get to that number, you don't really care. >>I don't have the flexibility. >>You can organize your thoughts, your way of working your way of organizing information. Whatever makes sense for you to get to that that answer >>that flexibility is so important. And I see it every team that I give this you know, the one document. I need six numbers a month. It's only need $6 a month, and every sheet is different. And I've told them I'm like, Well, not your the admin. And you could make all these changes that you wanted to, And >>it's a little >>bit risky. You know? What if they delete one of my columns? Well, then I'll go and put it back and tell them. Don't do >>that. But, hey, everybody does it differently. Somebody took the name >>calm and put it on the end. I mean, whatever floats your boat, you know? >>Did you bring him together at some point to say, Here's how you did it here. So you did it. You know, here's best practices. Maybe. You guys, you know, Susie over here did it this way. Seems to work really well. And I want I want >>I do one on one whenever I can't. Okay. I really like it, but I I like the engagement. You get to know someone. I also say my sick file has my cell phone. You can slack May. You can call me. You can text me in middle of night. Doesn't matter. We're here like I have two clients. You know, there's there's the clients that we service in the world. The other companies But then for me, my clients are the little employees and employees that are they're servicing those clients. >>And as you said, when the drudgery is gone, that makes for people who want to come to work and who are more satisfied. So then they give more of themselves. And during the work day, and it is, it does become a there. Aren't you a circle there? Also, Maur, relax, you know, because >>I think we were alluding to this earlier. It's like before we were using smartsheet. You >>weren't >>always sure like some, like project was gonna jump out from behind a lamppost >>anyway, home at night and ruin your life for a day. You know, now >>we can see that guy from far off. I got my eye on >>you. You're >>not gonna get may. And it gives us what I call this Marchi calm, you know, like we know, like everybody knows what the schedule is from here to the end of the year. Maybe even for into 2020 and 2021. So we're starting to scope for the next year, and we're setting the smart sheets up for you like, Oh my God, there's the There's >>the view. It's beautiful, right? Right. I think we need to create a new smartsheet yoga pose, you know. Let's do it. Let's do you know what? I'm always >>on the hunt for the weirdest use of smartsheet. >>What's the weirdest you found so far? >>The weird Somebody mentioned something about a writer who uses smart cheat to track all the ways they procrastinate from writing >>Pretty good. That is. Another woman >>used it for her Thanksgiving shopping. I'm like, Okay, that's like, next level cooking. And then also on the way home from the grocery, shopping for Thanksgiving, the wines she was gonna buy. So he's tracking her wines and her food. >>That's good for the pairings. And which I like that. Yeah, >>you do like a little imagine that with your card view. Like, Oh, the mail. Well, look, we put it over the turkey or whatever >>it is you can use ice, maybe Cochin. Thank you so much for coming. My pleasure. >>Thanks for having me. >>Thank you. >>I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick, Stay tuned. You are watching the Cube

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone. You are watching the cube and we are here in Seattle, Washington at Smartsheet engage 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We're joined by Mark Klein. He is the principal at populace. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thank you. So you have a very cool job. Tell our viewers a little bit about populace and about what you do. Sure. So populace is actually an architect firm. Our main focuses architecture. We one of the largest sports architecture firms in the world. So we build stadiums and arenas and convention centers and airports and places that people gather is our bread and butter is over 500 worldwide employees that work on that. But we have an event office out of Denver, Colorado where we take our architectural principles and apply them to major gatherings of people in the sporting world and other areas. >>And these are sporting include the includes include the final four >> in the Olympics and all of your NFL major events that are not a regular season game. All of your inner NHL events that happen in stadiums outdoors, all star games, things like that. Any major event, it's a nonstandard event. They really call on us to help make sure that that goes off without a hitch. Yup. >> All right, so talk a little bit about what it was like before you believe what it was like before you use Smartsheet and entered the, the headaches and the problems and that and now what life is like now. Sure, >> so a little more than 10 years ago when I joined the firm, we had a good stable of events and events. We're still kind of just operating off spreadsheets and back in napkins and drawings and things like that as security and to nine 11 was actually a major factor in kind of the growth of our industry where events now had to be planned a little more with more scrutiny. >>We needed a way to better pull our information together and get everybody to to, to, to collaborate on one set of drawings, one schedule who's doing what and when. And Smartsheet has become that prime resource for all of our event planning >> and for in for an event, there's so many outside contractors that you guys have to orchestrate with, whether it be the teams and the associations and the security and the venue and the concessions. The list goes on transportation, on and on and on. So to be able to bring outsiders into your project, >> and that's a new set every year with every event. So you think of the final four, we're going to a new city every year. So EV, I have literally eight months to work with a team to plan a major event that's going to be seen by hundreds of millions of people. And then I've got to pick up and do it again in another city and then another. >>And we're doing that across dozens of events across our team every year. So we may have a vendor that touches the system once. We may have someone who sees us once every third year. So within our environment we have extremely high turnover of people. We have very short period to get them up to speed and working with us. So Smartsheet has been really, really a big part of Hey I need you to better get in here, get your information and work with the tool, get us the information and guess what, you're going to get some feedback on this one too. So it benefits them. >>Right. It's just interesting to me that the level of granularity and detail, you know, we get, we go to a lot of events, obviously there's so much minutia that you have to keep track of from printing on the napkins, you know, to signage, etc. But at the same time, especially in the sporting world, you know, there can be huge changes, you know, especially at the same plow who wins a game, changes the venue. Right? So how do you, how do you use a tool to manage the boat? The tremendous detail when you have the opportunity to plan versus the change of plan a we got to got to shift, >>he hears well so, so we use a lot of the tools that Smartsheet is has built into it for automation. So for example, at the final four, we don't know our teams until Sunday night and that that that Monday we have decor going up, team specific decor. So locker room assignments. As soon as the game is final we send out notifications in Smartsheet to the decor printers that you're printing this graphic, this size, these a locker room assignments, these are the bus assignments. So all of that is, is queued up and ready to go. Um, so a lot of those last minute things that you may think of, we've thought through them and are ready to trigger as many as we can. You're never 100%, but if we can get that 80% 90% triggered and out the door as soon as the decision is made or the team has decided that lets us deal with those others that are a little less planned. >>So, but those are ones where, you know, those are sort of the known unknowns. What about when you have the unknown unknowns, when things like bad weather can affect an event or, I mean, how do you, how do you use Smartsheet into change on a dime when that happened? >>So, um, we, we plan and we plan and we plan. So for example, bad weather is something we have multiple plans for. But where Smartsheet comes into play as I have real time scheduling information sitting on my screen in a control room at an event. So if we have a weather event, we have two or three options that we can pick from. But I'm now looking at the realtime Smartsheet schedule going, all right, if we select option one, be aware we're going to affect these items. If we go with option two, these are the items. So it's the information that has been gathered through that planning phase and everybody's put their information in. So I know what our action is going to cause and the ripple effects of those. >>And Lindsay, the smart, the choose your own adventures when you were a kid reading those, choose your own adventure, want to open >>a door and guess what's there. I want to open a door of a decision and know that this is the follow on effect and I can look at the schedule and the vendors involved of who I'm about to impact with my decision. Right. And do you have the car, you have the comms and all that stuff dialed in there as well? Correct. Yeah. So we're on radio and we're, you know, these, these events, we run control centers. So there's eight or nine of us sitting in a control room. I, I send Mark meter a picture every year of my Smartsheet screen with some field of play behind it, beautiful ball or basketball field and go smart. We're ready to go, keep it up, keep it running for the next few hours. So, um, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly intense time. Um, when, when we opened doors or we turn on the cameras if those events, because let's face it, there's 70,000 people sitting there and there's usually three triple digit, a hundred millions of people watching on television. >>So it has to go right. That's a lot of pressure. Yes. How do you deal with it? How does your team deal with it? I mean you're used to it of course, but is there, uh, it's the confidence in the plan. I think that has really shaped how we get to that point and don't and don't overreact or get too caught up in the moment. So, um, what we do within the planning of, of our events and with our staff and is we put everybody's tasks in in Smartsheet of course. So my tunnel captain only has to focus on the 40 things that he or she is responsible for. So he may be standing at a team tunnel and we've extracted from the schedule are Austin, here are your 40 items. Don't worry about every, all the chaos going around you. Cause I've got 40 other people out working those items. >>So we filter schedules by either location or staff member so that they can put their blinders on and stay focused on their tasks. And that's really how people can focus and stay. Stay in the moment. What's coming next? What do I need to worry about? Cause there's 4,000 line items in that schedule. I can't have him trying to figure out what are his right at that moment. Mark, I would shift gears a little bit cause you guys came from an architectural bet, the company's architectural background and buildings, venues and stadiums. We just had the new chase. Then you just got finished in San Francisco. Beautiful new facility as the way you guys think about, it's kind of people centric. It's Vinnie's for people in its events for people. What are some of the kind of the guiding principles that make for a good event? A good venue from the people experience point of views. >>There's really multiple sets of customers that I look at at every venue. Obviously we always started the field of play. You gotta get that right? It's gotta be a hundred yards long. It's gotta be. And I thought they broke that rule the other day. We won't go there. Um, so feel to play out. So you've got your competitors, your spectators, and then your operators. All three of those. We focus on all of them equally because if one piece of that triad doesn't work, then the overall experience doesn't work. So obviously the field of play honestly is the easiest part to deal with. But it's an important part. So you look at how a team is going to arrive at a venue bus, whatever the case may be, so that they get to their locker room, get to their services that out to their field and back and forth to media obligations. >>So you don't want to put a media work room halfway across the stadium because then they're making a long Trek. It's a little things like that in the, in the team component, spectators, obviously theirs could be 50 to, if it's a baseball park, 50,000 up to 70,000 in a stadium. We want to ensure that they're going to fully enjoy their two to four hours in that building. Um, so we work on scheduling with our vendor. The one of the biggest things we found in the, in that area is we have really engaged with our contractors, the concessions folks, because they were kind of operating on their own. So engaging concessions to say, don't be moving product when there are people in the building, no one, the timeouts are, we'll call you from control based on the schedule so that we're synchronizing building operations so that they're, the customers are running out of water. >>Well we didn't run out of water, we couldn't get it to you. So things like that are really important to our planning. And then the group that really gets overlooked at, I spend a lot of time on is the people that helped build and get the building ready. Because if my vendors are having a rough time getting their things in the building or building the platform I've asked for or setting up the stage, they're just not going to be in a good frame of mind when the lights turn on. And I want everybody to be, yeah, let's go. We've had a great experience in the five days leading up to this event, whatever it may be. I'm ready now to put on a show. So we use Smartsheet IX so much with our vendors to help guide them through the build process, scheduling, deliveries, getting their credentials where they're going to park and where do I take my breaks? >>Everything is there at their fingertips. So even the mom and pop vendors that I deal with, and there are quite a few of them from city to city, feel like they're as important as my Avi company. So they're excited. They do their load in there like, Hey, this is a great experience and now they're here to help support the event. And then when I call and go, guess what? We have a problem. I need your help. They're going to share, Mark, what can we do? Right? Cause they're there, they're enthusiastic and they didn't feel like I beat 'em up right during that load in great, great insight. People centric. But you're talking about it's treating people like people, not just that they are some cog in the wheel that they are to to execute this task. Right, right. Yeah. No happy staff deliver happy events. >>So what's next in terms of, in terms of a broader adoption in terms of more improvements that you're seeing on the pipeline? Um, so I'm really excited about the collaboration component that was announced today at the keynote. Um, we are an architect firm, so the base of all of our plant, all of our events is a set of drawings, drawings that show what we need, where it is, when it's gonna happen. So all of our non drawing material has lived in Smartsheet for 10 years. I'm now gonna be able to bring those drawings in and get the collaborative information to feedback. So we take a drawing, we'll send it to CBS and say, please Mark up how you think we've drawn your broadcast compound. That has all been email. Now with this collaboration tool, it's going to live in Smartsheets. So I cannot tell you how excited I am about the collaboration component. >>It's gonna. It's gonna really streamline how we do our business. I, I'm kinda lost for words to get in there and try it. My staff is gonna probably go Mark. You can't go to any more conferences, but, uh, I think it's really going to be a great addition to our work process. Um, the other one that has been a personal part of mine, a personal goal that I've seen is the adoption by our staff are the to day work process. Um, I listened in the office, we have a big open work plan space and I listened for my staff going, I've got to put this plan together, attract this and I go, I literally will stand up and walk over. Have you thought about using Smartsheet? And half of the time they haven't. And um, I will say, let me help you through it. Let me get you started and see if it works for you. >>Um, so that organic growth with Smartsheet, um, is, is the big step that we're doing on a day to day basis, um, to get staff introduced to a new way to work and be more collaborative of how they, they manage your information. So, um, just that that kind of growth is, is, is ongoing. Um, but after I've been to the conference, I can say I've got a little more knowledge about it. Let me, uh, let me, uh, help you out a little bit and get you to use it. Right, right, right, right. And you're even finding ways to use it in your personal life, you said? Sure. I use it for home tasks. We plan, we plan our kid's birthday celebrations in it. So my wife and I will share a sheet about who's visiting for graduation. My daughter's high school graduation is coming up. We actually post a forum on Smartsheet coming where they staying at the tag that I put up on the wall over there as people think I work for Smartsheet with how much we use it. So yes, it bleeds into the personal life, but why not exactly a word. I don't fix it. Thank you so much for coming on. The show is a lot of fun talking pleasure. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. Have more of engaged 2019 here in Seattle. You're watching the cube.

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering Smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet >>Welcome back, everyone to Seattle. Washington. We're here at smartsheet engaged 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff. Rick, You're watching the Cube? We're here with a Cuba Lama Cube veteran Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research at a Washington D. C. Thank you so much for returning to the Cube. >>Absolutely. Thanks for having me. >>So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic, but a fascinating one. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the work force driven by the new the rise of digital technologies. >>Sure. I mean, well, it digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? So, you know, we've had the past waves of productivity tools and mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality. You're gonna literally change how we perceive the workplace on then We have just, you know, everyday translate remote working and now people can work from anywhere, right. It's fantastic, and that's that's really revolutionized a lot of things. Things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote work force. Companies like 80 p have 1/4 of their work force working from home, right X century, something to get rid of office space. And they work out of their house. Unless there's a client site on because you can credit, create the experience that you want and one of the really big trends is this is this trend towards be able to shape the employees experience the way that you want to using the tools that you prefer. And so people call this shadow I t. Other people call it innovation, right? And so that's one of the big changes. Then we have things like the gig economy, which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want. We're doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms on that's that's really quite exciting to use all these. This confluence of forces are enabled him driven by technology, but it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload workers. They're not lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this, and that's another big challenge. >>But you also get this tools >>proliferation, which they're just not. They're just not word and excel anymore. But you've got a tab open with Salesforce. You've got a A tab open with slack. You got Gmail open. You've got Doc's open. He got smart cheat open. You might have Jiro open. I mean, so how is that gonna sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of AB? So we have to keep in our >>way. And we need all this technology to do better work. Thes APS provide value, except that it's increasing the on boarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us, the train people. In some company. It's hard to retain people because they feel like they have to go to work. And there's this onslaught of technology. They have to have 30 tabs open to get their jobs done, and they do. And so we're seeing things that you know we're at the smartsheet conference where how can we centralize work a little bit better? Streamline it by integrating the tools and credit more focused on what we're doing. And that's a very big trend. S Oh, my latest digital workplace trends report. We say that we're seeing these hubs for me, like Slack is another workup that's become very popular inside of organizations. They have over 1100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So we're dealing with this complexity starting to be able to do this now. But it's early days still a big challenge. >>So so So what are you seeing now? So what? So what is the answer then? I mean, we have You've just described all of these trends that are taking place that they're making making the modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers who they're dealing with, cognitive overload leaders who want more with less What? What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? >>Boys, we talked already about smartsheet and slack. We see the new digital experience platforms are emerging on low code and know code is also becoming popular to be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamlined experiences. So the CEO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, you solve this problem right away Their their knowledge. Workers were being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employees experience of the 100 top moments, and then he built experiences that enabled project management and on boarding and all these key activities to be friction free, built out of their existing applications. Streamlines, too, just what they needed to dio. And he views this as his top priority as a digital leaders and say, We've got to take much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining the simplification on. We now have tools that allow that shaping that happen very quickly. >>It's almost reminds me it's kind of the competition for Deb's right now competition for employees, and we've talked a lot about the consumer ization Oh, I t and mobile devices for the customer experience. But there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same kind of expected behaviour writer expected in her engagement interaction with the APS on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers because I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available, but we only got 2% unemployment in the Bay Area. Now. It's crazy, >>effectively, negative unemployment, right, right? Is that anything under 3%? Yes, so you know this is the challenges employees experience is usually low on the priority list for CEOs usually have analytics and cloud in cyber security and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet customer experiences is one of those priorities. But how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to do it, deliver it with right? The worst thing you could do with talented people is expected to do a great job and then give him a bunch of hard to use tools, right? Which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that privatization go up a little bit because employees experiences part of delivering great customer experience. That is how you how do you create that experience to begin with so small progress >>and leaders air seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that they're workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. >>Yeah, and now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before, you know? And I'm sure you've seen the numbers. Most employees air disengaged at work, the majority right between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous untapped investment that that that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employees experiences and what's disengaged. As I mentioned, giving a talented person lousy tools are allows the experience and expecting the two greatest. It doesn't happen. How >>much do you >>think? A. L Excuse me. Aye, aye. And machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job. >>Yeah, it's interesting because there's, you know, there's two sides to a coin there. Some people like a job that they could just kind of phone in, and it's kind of wrote, and they can come in. They don't have to think too hard and then go home to their families. So people are hired on that basis, right? Because that's the challenge a I and machine learning will absolutely automate. Most wrote work if you look at like a dill bee sense A. I was at the adobe conference and they were talking about how all of these creative types you have all these mundane tasks automated for them, and I could see everybody looking at each other going. I >>could pay to >>do >>that creative rate. >>So you see the things like robotic process automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CEOs how they how they cut 25% out of the call center because they handed it over to the box, right? You know, Bill processing. That's one of the, you know and sorting matching bills, the invoices, a manual job, even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happen about the most wrote level and just, but it's just gonna climb up from there. >>What do you see down the road, though? I mean in terms of those in terms of those employees were raising their saying can saying I kind of want that job. Are you? Are you seeing what's gonna happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they are they going to be invested in by their companies? >>We hope so. You know, it's interesting. We see that all the big vendors have these big education programs. Sales force has trailhead s a P just announced open ASAP where they give away massively open online courses on. And Microsoft has done this with Microsoft Developers Network way back in the day, trying to educate people. You can get Reese killed for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenges, even though every technological revolution in the past it looks like this one, too, has you are really changed the employment picture. By and large, it creates more jobs than we lose on. That looks like it's gonna happen here. But the people who lose their jobs, not the ones that tend to gain the job, gets a new job. They often it's hard to take somebody who's who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new way I algorithm because that's where you have executed jobs. They're gonna be directing the eye to do all these things right on. So I think the short term is gonna be dislocation. And it's happening so fast that unless society, government and enterprises really intervene that toe up skill, these folks, we are gonna have a challenge. >>We're in this really weird time to in between. I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right, which is perfect for autonomous vehicles. T carry a lot of that freight, and everyone pretty much agrees that's gonna happen. At the same time there's there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today, like there never has been. So is he's weird, and it's probably not the best thing for a young kid to get into right, because doesn't have a lot of great long term, >>right? >>Well, you look at uber on their stated direction is they want to get rid of all these drivers they want. They want self driving taxis on, you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen right on. So the unskilled labor is gonna be hit by far the worst you have to become skilled labor in the digital economy on a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to get the skills into people's hands on Facebook and other larger. They don't even require a college degree what they want people to people that can deliver that could take these things and create the, you know, the great products of the future. On DSO, you know, those everyone has to become a knowledge worker >>and in as layered, Hamilton said. On the main stage today, it's the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of Wow, I don't know much about that. I guess I better learn about it and then learning a lot about it along the way, we all have to be able to adapt and adopt those >>absolutely no the and so that way see up Skilling and cross killing becoming more trans disciplinary. So business people are becoming I t folks now and I t folks really business people. We had this business I t divide for a long time. It cracks me up. I still go to big companies in the I T department using its own building, right? But those days were going away. And I'll see that, you know now is that people over on the business side that live there now, right? So we're seeing this kind of blending where digital is infusing everything, and so you have to become digitally confident on this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the digital workplace. The average user, as had the number of applications they have thio to learn double or triple in just the last five years. Right? So it's a big challenge. >>So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your >>Oh, uh, game design gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry by a large large margin, right? And that that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences and virtual reality and augmented reality >>a come >>from and then you can go into business, right? You know, >>even sociology majors, design games. >>Yeah, it's just, you know, just get like it's the poor tweeners, right that get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new. And I want to take care of it. Unfortunately, not a lot of great record of retraining to date. But maybe that's gonna have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. >>Well, and there's a big market places now. You can build the career of your dreams. You goto up work or gig stir. I mean, these are big job markets where you go and find work and do it from anywhere. Using a tablet you bought for $50 off Amazon, right? You know, just that most you weren't even aware that they could do that. Right? So >>the world put a few bucks away for insurance and you put a few bucks away in your for one k and you, you know, just living off the cash, plus a little bit to cover your cost, which, unfortunately rather like the uber drivers in the lift drivers are Anyway, you know, they're not really thinking that thing for building a career. >>Well, I've crawled to those platforms and it's interesting. Entrepreneurial activity is very common in places like Asia, right? Where? Where you know, they come here, they build businesses right away, right, And they're used to that and we lost some of that. But I think we gave economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know. >>Great. Well, Dionne, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It was a pleasure having you. >>Absolutely Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for >>I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick. Stay tuned For more of the cubes. Live coverage of NJ engaged 2019.

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engage here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We have Chris Marsh on the program. He is a research director of workforce productivity and compliance at four 51 research. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you have just completed a massive report that really looks at the future of work and, and the premise is that the future of work is changing dramatically because of the rise of digital technology. It's, it's, it's changing the way companies think about employees, the way employees think about their jobs. Give us, give us sort of the high level findings here. >>Yeah. So yeah, a big report took me most of my summer so I kind of hibernated for a good month and a half to do it. Um, and yeah, it crystallizes a lot of our views around how, you know, protest technology and culture coming together to, to ground new ways of working. Um, and I guess the basic premise is that, uh, we all know this pervasive friction across day to day work. I mean we've sort of dysfunctional accepted that as the status quo, but actually we seen a lot of our survey research that it's being regarded increasingly in the upper echelons of management within companies as a priority that needs to be, that needs to be addressed. In fact, we had some survey work, um, that came out of failed recently. It was to base it in line of business decision makers and it was what should IUTs priority be when it comes to transformation initiatives and number one was improving the productivity and collaboration experience. >>Now if you put that in the context of all the other things on its plate, the fact that that's number one when traditionally it hasn't been, it's insignificant. And actually we did the same question, same survey September last year. It was number one then. And that was the first time it blips on the radar. So this is, you know, written up the agenda, exec management, it leadership, um, and now looking at ways to address that pervasive friction. So, I guess the basic premise of, of our thinking is that a lot of the legacy technologies on, I mean, they've led to that friction in some ways, right? So most companies have organized in one way or another around the silos that applicate traditional applications have created. And that's created organizational silos and, and hence all of the friction. But we see a lot of interesting new technology trends and tooling that are allowing people to basically operationalize work in the seams between those legacy systems. So lifting some of the data information and potentially workflow workload out of those systems and having them in a, you know, some of the new types of work platform that we're seeing, you know, which Smartsheet's a good example to actually operate in a much more agile way. And we call that shift one from systems of record, which we kind of understand to what we call systems of delivery. Um, so that two, we'll have a big gravitational effects on the way the rest of the business application landscape evolve. >>So didn't, uh, it, uh, kind of grow up to support the silos that were defined before. There was it, there was always sales, there was marketing, there was the executive suite, there was accounting. Um, and, and the it and the apps grew to be aligned. So do you think now that the actual collaboration apps like Smartsheet can actually pull, can pull the silos of the organization into this more hybrid structure? >>Yeah, I think, I think that it certainly looks like, I think that's what companies want to happen. Um, I think it's still early days. I mean the w the way most companies are set up in know actually has a lineage going back a couple of hundred years. The industrial revolution and mechanization leading to standardization, leading to compartmentalization. And then you have lines of businesses we kind of currently understand it. And that's why this is such an interesting time at the moment because a lot of that is breaking down relatively quickly. Um, and obviously the competing area has been the prime catalyst for that. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, other things that come out of our survey research, massive appetite from senior managers for more collaboration across departments. Right? So, not just within teams, which in and of itself is a challenge, but across departments. Um, so you know, marketing, speaking more often and more purposefully with finance, legal speaking more often with operations. So there is an appetite for higher order types of, not just collaboration but actually work, design, planning, work, execution, um, not just sitting in those departmental silos. >>What is driving this at this appetite? Because I mean it would seem like it was always there and maybe there's just a recognition that we have the tools and the technology to actually execute or is there something that's actually fundamentally changing about the global world that we're living in? >>Yeah, I mean, so we talk about it in the report about this era of personalization, right? Which is just everything we've seen explode in the consumer domain around technology and the climatization we've all had to new kinds of digital experience and how they are coming into the workforce. People want new people will have expectations when you come to digital experience as part of their day to day work. Um, and so that's one thing. The, obviously the related element to that is that companies need to be much more agile in responding to disruptions in their own market. And this is obviously vertical agnostic now. So if there's one thing that you really need to make sure you're good at in the digital age, it's being agile, right? Spotting the sort of signals in the market, understanding what they mean in terms of customer demand, and then you know, catering to that demand quickly with some kind of new products or service or experience. >>So I think it's that need to be able to respond really quickly because there's so much disruption that technology has brought to us. That means that companies are saying, okay, we can't any longer wait six months for this just project life cycle is work life cycle to, to, to run its course. We need to respond more quickly. We need to organize much more agile. We all need to be on the same page when it comes to what we're supposed to be doing. Right? So there's a big demand for a clear line of sight across work. Um, so I think that's, that's probably where it's coming from. All companies realizing we need to act quicker, respond quicker. >>I'm curious, you know, it took a long time for dev ops to really be accepted as the optimal way to create products. Right. Versus a PRD and an MRD and then a PRD and then we define it and we take these when we build in and shoot, we miss the market. Right. It changed in terms of actually running the business though. I mean, do you have any kind of point of view on how long it will take for people to figure out that yes, we can make micro adjustments on our strategy based on speed, competitive threats, but at the same time I've got to be executing on some of these longer term objectives as well, which I would imagine would be a push back on that, on that technique. >>Yeah. I mean it will take as long as the technologies need to have to emerge to support companies really operating in that kind of agile way. Um, I mean one of the things we talk about, um, is the, what we call the three A's, right? So the imperative to be agile operationally, I think there's growing realization that that means that there needs to be tooling to support more autonomy, which is the second, a while more autonomy for more of the workforce to do higher order types of thing. So rather than having the centralized teams of process specialists or you know, technical experts, that needs to be more capability in the tooling, the everyday tooling for, for people to design work and execute on it. But that really is dangerous if you don't have the alignment piece, which goes back to kind of what you were saying about we can't just have a distributed set of teams who are going off and doing their own thing. >>There needs to be alignment back to strategy. There needs to be alignment potentially back to governance and compliance and there needs to be alignment potentially also to work that's adjacent but relevant. It's happening in other teams maybe in other departments. So I think that's really the sweet spot. How do you balance those three things? Um, which is driving a lot of the new interesting technologies that we're seeing emerge. But you know, we're still in relatively early days I think. Um, so you know, give it some time to, to play out. There's different layers of abstraction I think in software that that needs to happen for organizations to really be able to operate in that agile way. There's resource management, this planning, this process automation. A lot of these things have been resident really in discrete kinds of tooling, but the broadly being democratized and Smartsheet's actually a good example of the type of company that's beginning to offer those kinds of capabilities. Workforce wide to Smartsheet users where as they were may, may be previously just to preserve certain types of specialists. User >>I want to ask about what you, what this means for the individual employee in terms of it sounds as though he or she will be more empowered to do more and execute a but also expected more of a moral be expected of that employee in terms of what his or her skill levels are. And then I also want to ask what you're seeing here at Smartsheet engage that is most interesting to you, particularly as it relates to the report. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I guess it's inevitable that more will be expected of employees, but I think, you know, in a, in a sense what we're seeing is the balance of power shift, not in an absolute terms, but, and, and you know, relative to how, how it's looks historically towards the employee. So at definite strand of inquiry amongst our clients and four or five, one has been how do we create an employee engagement narrative, right? There's growing realization that we've talked about customer experience for a long time, but we've, we've, we've neglected the idea of an employee experience. Um, so more companies are realizing that happy employees tend to be the more productive ones. So how do we introduce the right combination of tooling technologies and then compensation and then career opportunities to allow people to feel more engaged and empowered so that they can do those higher order kinds of things. Um, and this, yeah, this is, this is happening in a very kind of organic way. So, um, you know, I, I don't see this as companies saying, you know, you need to now achieve more. It's a little bit more, we need to provide you with the ability to achieve more. That's really the role of anybody who's making a decision around technology and an enterprise at the moment. >>But it's interesting because the, because the company has so much more data than they had before on kind of execution and some of the demos in the, in the keynote in terms of what are utilization, how many hours are you applying to this task? So it almost feels like there's more of a, in a treating people like a resource versus treating people like people. And I'm just curious how that, you know, kind of place, cause you, you want to do that, you want to measure, you want to know how your resources are allocated. At the same time there they're people, they're not machines and they're motivated as people and that's how you keep them or lose them a lot of times is the people part, not necessarily the job or the tasks. So how does, how does that map end? If I'm aggressive and I'm feeling good, yeah I like doing more but there's probably a lot of people that aren't necessarily up for that. I mean there's been a lot of all of >>'em talk in this conference already. Um, but more broadly in, in other forums of, um, the implications of more data in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the degree to which, you know, by automating things that may previously have been done manually, is that going to upset people? I think on the whole, um, you know for a lot of types of work that may be Smartsheet is enabling, that's not so much of a concern cause you'll see here from their users very engaged, very enthusiastic. They want to get as much value in leave, which out of the platform was possible because they realized that's allowing them to do things that previously hadn't. But there is that sort of dichotomy of um, at what point do we automate things and not give you a choice in the fact that that's been automated. But I think these guys and another, the industry broadly is, is very conscious of that. So where you see all the kind of data being leveraged to do intelligent recommendations, intelligent notifications, there's going to be a wary eye on doing that without either an optin aware. An optin maybe isn't required, at least having permission from the end user to accept the implications of whatever's being recommended to do. So. I think on the whole, you know, people are sort of trying to figure out what that balance, >>what do you think this means for the war on war for talent? Because, I mean, this is the, this is the topic that the technology industry in particular, it's really grappling with, particularly when there are so many, uh, high level skills that are needed skills in, uh, AI and ML and other kinds of specialized technology. How do you, how do you put your, your findings in that context? >>Yeah, I mean it's, it really came on the agenda, this theme, um, couple of years ago, if not a little bit sooner than that as, as a really strategic issue. And in fact we see that in our own survey research where we asked the question to, um, employees across the workforce manage non-managerial to C suite and it was, you know, strategically one, what one thing do you need to improve on? And it was, um, uh, it was basically recruiting, developing and managing talent. And that's a head of, you know, everything else, like improving our, um, product differentiation, improving our customer experience, um, coming up with a strategy that's more fit for purpose, right? It was all about talent and people and managing people. So it's definitely risen up the agenda. I mean, I think one of the things that companies definitely, uh, beginning to think about is how to um, increase the acquisition of skills in the existing workforce and their way that's quicker than the way that's being done now. >>So actually one of the other areas we cover in our research is the shift from like traditional learning management systems, which have been kind of compliance oriented. You need to do this course or training because we need to show that you've done it to the kind of new generation of Alec speeds. We're learning experience platforms which provide much more agile ways for people to understand skills gaps and take on those skills. So I think that's gonna be a big driver actually of of the agile ways of working that we're talking about. But also how people address talent. The talent was, if you can't find that externally or you can't find enough externally, um, you can look internally of course, to existing employees and make sure that they have the platform to, to acquire new skills. >>And it's almost by a rule, you can't find it externally. Cause right now, just the, the, just not that much labor out there to go get, it's just so competitive. So you've got to develop a lot of that inside. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, and it's not just sort of technical skills, it's other kinds of skills. Right. Um, but I think there's a, I think there's a nascent appetite amongst a lot of the workforce just to do that from a career progression point of view. Right. If you know, and I think that's one of the implications of companies trying to find ways to be more operationally agile, manage resources and more kind of agile ways. You know, it might be the case that people who maybe wouldn't be considered for a particular role, um, might now be considered because they re they, you know, saw that there was a capacity problem, a resource problem. They learnt the skill they can be assigned to that kind of project. Whereas previously maybe lines of department lines of business prevented that visibility into who has skills across the workforce. >>That's interesting. Do you have a point of view about kind of workforce transformation and you're giving a talk tomorrow how to avoid the Frankenstein workforce experience just for effective workplace transformation. But it's an interesting play that digitally transform your people to digitally transform your business. People talk about doing it to the business, but they don't talk about doing it to the people. I talk about the workflows and the customer engagement. You're taking it down, you know, start at the base, start at the bed. >>Well this is, I mean this is a, a lot of the reasons as to why companies like Smartsheet came about. I mean digital transformation I think is a kind of narrative has done a good job of, of making companies realize they need to change and they need to change quickly. Technology is a big enabler of that, but it's tended to be kind of top down way of thinking about it. It's tended to be sort of, do you have like a center of excellence? Do you have a technology council? How do we sort of transform from core outwards? It's not really been grassroots from the bottom up, but increasingly tooling like Smartsheets enabling that to happen. Right. How do you get people really engaged using new kinds of tooling to do higher order things? How do you connect that with work that's being done elsewhere? So it's a much more bottom up movement. How I think about workforce transformation and digital transformation has been, and I think more more people are cutting onto the fact that that's the way you need to think about it. >>What's your number one advice for an executive who doesn't have time to read the 47 pages? >>Yeah, I mean I guess it goes back to the, to to maybe the um, those three A's I was talking about earlier. I think my, you know, certainly progressive companies, but I think it's mainstreaming that companies are realizing they need to be more agile. Um, you know, in a broad brush and obviously depends on the context that company, who their customers are and what they're trying to achieve. Um, but really I think it should be a consideration, especially when thinking about workforce tooling and like knowledge worker tooling. To what degree is that giving more autonomy to those people to do higher order things and but also, you know, again, can you tie that back to your goals as a company, right? Because we've had certain technologies in the past of decade that have created a bit of a wild West, right? People go off and do different things and then there's, there's a lack of visibility, a lack of line of sight back to strategy. But if you get the sweet spot in your technology choices between do that, do they help us be operationally agile? Are they giving people a highroad, you know, more ways to do higher order work. Can we tie that back in the way that we need to? Then I think you're at least thinking about it in the right way. >>Really analogous to shadow it is. As you're sitting here talking about kind of the ground swell up of people finding tools to enable them to do their job better and get around kind of the hierarchy that existed in got in their way before his son. You know, there's a lot of parallels to what happened there before. Finally the corporates figured out, okay, we actually need to do dev in public cloud. There's a lot of advantages, et cetera, etc. >>Yeah, there is, but it's kind of like a legitimate version of shadow it. Shadow it was like we call it, we don't like the tools we've been given. No, we don't have them. Let's go and find ones. Yeah. >>Right. Right >>now it's like the ones that are enterprise grade happens to be the ones we also are using. Right. So that's, that is the super interesting, um, sort of wave that companies like Smartsheet carrying these tools fundamentally appeal and they have lots of evidence that are appealing virally. >>Well, I mean the fact that you can collaborate with people outside your company on your license for free and I think Mark said 50% of their users are people that are outside of the organization of the licensee. That's a pretty, pretty, I don't want to say Trojan, uh, strategy, but certainly certainly feels like, you know, a great way to permeate, which I think back like at last, Ian with the way they got started with, you know, a $10 10 seat license and, and again, AWS and some of these early kind of backdoor ways in to deliver real value that people were willing to put the credit card down. Yeah. Right. >>But you know, I mean, so I guess the challenge for Smartsheet and others are as he became a more enterprise grade platform, how do you keep that user appeal? Right. Cause that could obviously be one scenario which has more features, more complication actually more difficult to use, more complex. These guys are very conscious of it. Others in that sort of environment are very conscious of it. Um, but yeah, I mean the whole can do thing which um, Anna talked about this morning in the keynote. It's interesting. It's like a really interesting sort of democratized way of talking about power users that we kind of used to talk about the sort of folks that have that technical ability. And they're the ones that drive some kind of work initiative. Um, you know, platforms like Smartsheet and others are giving more people the ability to be that power user. And that's, that's kind of cool. >>Awesome. Great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. You're watching the cube.

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight coasting alongside Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Mark Mater. He is the CEO of smartsheet. Thank you so much for coming, Warren. Thank you. So great job up there on the keynote way. No, this is the third annual conference of 4000 people from 39 different countries. The theme is achieved more, and the theme is actually tied to a very special announcement you made today about the about the achieve as one alliance. What can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? Yeah. The chief is >>one alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that Aaron flight right now and marrying those with the people in the technology. And we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people. Aye, aye. And ml worker replacement say whoa, whoa, whoa. These are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for and I think there's a lot of education that needs to take place. So we plan on doing is doing research through this alliance and then publishing that work is I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence and take that step. It's a >>different way to treat people. We're in this weird spot where you know, the super low unemployment. And yet in that you know so many things. Air service is and a lot of your assets walk out the door every single night. You hope they come back the next day. So you're trying to give them meaning. You're trying to do more than just kind of the core function of the business. You had a great hackathon yesterday for good. So it's a really challenging, people challenging time for employers to keep the workforce engaged. And you're really trying to help them kind of move some of the roadblocks and may be easier for them to keep those folks and gay >>it is Jeff and what we're seeing is and you see the studies come out where there's never been a higher percentage of people who feel disconnected from their work, and I don't think that's just giving them good tooling. They actually want to know who is being benefited. Ultimately, what's the endpoint benefit? And if they can somehow feel connected to something purposeful, that is a mechanism for feeling connected to work. So we want our team. We want our customers showing up to their offices, everyday organizations feeling motivated. And I think absent that human dimension absent knowing who you're helping, I think makes it feel a bit hollow. That's one of these about engaging Brings this together. You see it firsthand, very invigorating. >>Talk a little bit about the customers that you had upon the main stage, telling their smartsheet stories and one of the ones that you find most inspiring and and most sort of life affirming to you as the CEO of this company. >>Well, the thing that that never gets old for me, Rebecca, is when somebody felt something one day was completely unattainable. And then they have that unlocked moment like Holy smokes. I pulled it off, and what's even more exciting when they pull that off with very few resource is they didn't have to go to I t. At every turn. They didn't have to mobilize on a big budget ass. They just got it done. So one of the real memorable moments from me this year was when I visited Syngenta out in North Carolina and I spoke with a head of health and safety and she said we mobilized on Smarty. We enabled all of our team members to submit issues safety concerns they had. How do you simplify the process of taking a picture of a potential issue getting into a queue getting it responded to? They saw a 500% increase in the number of people who are saying, I think that you could use improvement. I think that could use improvement. And it's 65% faster resolution time. So she is convinced that people's lives are being materially impacted to the positive. Because of this, I mean, how can she not feel empowered that it's a pretty big? That's a pretty amazing feeling, so that's one that really stands out to me >>in terms of the other customer stories. One of the things that also struck me was just how adrenaline pumping the main stage show talk a little bit about what it means to put up the customers who have these very compelling, visually interesting stories, from outdoor clothier Sze to travel destinations, and also what it means for smartsheet employees to be in the audience hearing these stories about what they're doing to help their customers. I >>think I think we all want to wake up every day feeling like whatever we do matters right, whether that's individually or with your family or with your business. And when you see someone like an Arc Terex or a Spartan race, or a Vulcan, which is helping do census on elephants, elephants and preserving that species coupled right alongside it with Cisco that is protecting our networks, which are more complex than ever before on your participating in that site. Okay, that can again back to that connectedness, right? Andi, I think I think diversity and who we serve also keeps it interesting. You never know who you're going to serve next. One day at Cisco the next day, it's agriculture. The next day it's saving elephants. That diversity keeps things fresh. >>One of the things that struck me in the keynote is there was a story of this guy. I guess it's gonna fly around the world in London plane in five days or eight days, but on the one of the test flights are a significant change. Was trying to fly to why there was equipment failure and he had to divert. And, you know, when you see the screen grabs and people working and smart, she looks super detailed. It's like a project plan, and there's resource is that died research, legalization. But in this case, they had to be able to flip on a dime. They had to be completely at around. I think she said, that eight teams around the world, I presume, where the stops are. That's a really interesting dichotomy of the tool that you guys were delivering to, to have the detail to be. Numbers focus. Okay, I focused, but at the same time be really right. In the real world, stuff doesn't always go as planned, >>be Rio and do it instantly. So if we have an issue with the plane, we're not gonna host a summit to talk about with how to get back on track way got to do it now. So the thing that's that's also need that example is you're talking about 8 to 10 people across multiple continents who have to work Right now. There is no mobilization. There is note, as they said, Summit and I think being able to do meaningful things quickly. That is a fairly rare combination, right? Very often meaningful stuff is heavy, Complex taste time. Eso again. I'm this constant pursuit of faster, more meaningful, more depth, more value >>in this kind of cross silo collaboration to I mean, that's the theme that comes up over and over again. Is that you need contributions from loss of people and lots of know, formally silo departments is maybe what they're gonna be called in the future to get to resolution so that you can move forward >>on. I think the thing that we spoke to in one of the product announcements was We're so inundated with information and Mark, I need a faster I need a faster yet again. It's a holy Rebecca. I can't actually process it. Also, one of the things we're trying to do is how do you also improve the context within within which people see things, right? So if you ask me a question and I don't have toe tab out to another application. I can actually see your question in the context of that work. And that's when I think one of the real big breakthroughs were releasing this This engaged. >>I mean, when you think about the the current status of work and you really and you really see it from where you sit, I mean, is it almost shockingly abysmal about how bad things can get at companies in terms of how many silos there are, how the number of communication breakdowns, the way the communication breaks down? Because, as you said, you could just be working >>on a different version. Great question, Rebecca. And the reason I would say it's not shockingly business because we've been doing this for years. It's like it's the norm >>Bates, >>the cost of doing business. So what our job is to how do we get people to get that spark to elevate a basic? Oh, my goodness, there is a better way, and it takes a lot to change people's behavior. You can't just say, Well, there's a better way. They have to experience it, right? So we're in that in that pursuit of how do you get more people to clear that hurdle the first time. Because the norm is it's hard. The Norma's is distributed enormous. I don't know what. So that's what we're trying to unlock for folks. >>And you said in the Kino, once they get that spark, and then achievement becomes the new norm that that has its own momentum to >>Yes, it's the you know Jeff does something amazing and I'm I I want in. Jeff doesn't have a monopoly on that on that. That's the viral effect. And it's not so much a vendor saying, Hey, Jeff did something now you should be motivated. You should feel that way, Rebecca And that's what we see at this conference. This is 4000 people who weren't told to go to the conference. These air 4000 people who want in, and that is a really special part >>of the conference for us. Shift gears a little bit on a on artificial intelligence machine, learning. We hear about it all the time, and I think everyone now has kind of figured out that it's not going to be a company delivering an ML. It's really applied a i N M l within an application When you guys look at the opportunities, especially with the data flow that you have and you know your sass application, where do you see some of the the short term winds and opportunities using A. I even better, you know, eliminate some of this redundant, painful work. >>I think part of it starts with educating people on the potential benefits of it. And then I'm an experiential learner. I think many people are so instead of talking about the theory, demonstrate how it could help. So we've already started doing saying things like recommending to people certain things based on actions they take. It's also very important. As a vendor, we have made a commitment to be very clear that for more advanced types of a I people need to opt in. So again, part of this what's happening to my data? Who's working it well, that's part of our platform. And when I look at the future, it's the first step I think is really how do you drive? Convenience improvement recommendation? How do you let someone take better advantage of the systems they're already using? And what people don't have to appreciate today is by exhibiting this behavior. But in taking information, structuring and reporting out, the system will observe a pattern. And ultimately, should they choose to opt in, the system will get to a point where we'll be able to make recommendations, recommendations and derive insights. Um, but again, a lot of this is fairly theoretical. We're in the early innings of this, Jeff. People are just starting to figure out I can automate something. So, you know, I think there's a much like people said 10 years ago. You know, the future is now. The future is kind of showing up today, and then the next phase is still a couple of years out, but it's a very exciting. It's a very exciting prospect. >>So those recommendations then, can become best practices because I'd like to get it back to this. This achieve as one alliance and sort of how you're going to take that research and educate the market and then use it to implement these new technologies. And best practices of this is how we can get more done and achieve more together. You and >>I think by showing examples of how a I n. M. L can contribute to someone's performance as opposed to you. Did these 10 things the machine is taking over those 10 things? What's my role in it? That's not a very exciting conversation to have. So I think, by demonstrating how somebody's game can innocence slow down. So if that machine can help me further inspect more deeply, assess have that next moment of insight that's contributing, not taking away. And again we need to show examples as an industry that happening until we show it. It's sort of all for not so. I'm really excited about about helping our customers through that journey. >>Yeah, there's so much opportunity, and the the other one that comes up in other times is unplanned downtime, Right? So a lot of talk always about unplanned, unplanned downtime machines, right? It's completely disruptive. You don't want it scheduled maintenance, but no one really talks about unplanned downtime of people not necessarily in the way being sick but being distracted by often mundane, often road often anticipated task. I won't even call it work that suddenly get dumped into your lap that you have to take care of, and those really think huge opportunities to add some automation and get those things kind of off the plate. >>You think about the breakthrough ideas you've had in your lives? Does it happen when you're like feverishly working ways? No. It's usually when there's a moment of just peace before you're able to process. That's when the breakthrough happens. So one of the things we talked about today was how, also his leaders. We need to empower our teams to not just drive for more yielding throughput. Take that extra benefit in. Actually, look at the board, process the board and think about what we're going to do next. And I think again, you need to exhibit. You need to give people the permission to work that way because we're all feeling this this pressure to innovate. You got to give people time to do it >>and do more with less to do you think it's realistic? Do you think leaders are going to be able to do that? And >>I think the leaders of successful companies will do that >>and role model. That, too, because they can also be worried about their own throughput. As you said, >>right, Right? Yeah. I mean, as Gabby, have you reset at the end of her talk. You have to exhibit the behavior. You want others to practice. So I think that was a wise, wise statement. >>Well, I really loved the outdoor clothing company who, you know, specifically said, We want our people out doing the things that our customers are doing, experiencing what they're experiencing and really bacon that into the culture, not just saying it, but get outside and go run around on and do what we want our customers to do and what our customers do do a very different approach. >>It is, It is. I think, again, back to back toe us, understanding what our customers are doing. This is equivalent to our Super Bowl every year, right, we get 4000 these people coming in here and there is no substitute for that in the flesh interaction. And that's again one of the reasons why it's everyone's such a positive, engaged mood right now, >>so they're not only interacting with a smartsheet folks, but they're interacting with each other at learning how each company uses smart cheat. >>I mean, when you think that 1/2 of all collaboration that takes place on our platform is cross company, it's not a surprise that people interact with another. It is it is happening. We have companies who interact with hundreds of brands outside of their own. So we service that cross connect for companies, and that's the modern company. I don't know of a company that is completely insular. So if you can help promote that safely, that za real advantage for company >>wrapping up, what do you think you're going to be? The themes for next year's conference? What is what are sort of what's on your plate? What are you thinking about? What are the big challenges that you're gnawing on right now? >>Yeah, I think the I think the continue shift from efficiency to effectiveness people. I think most people are still measured on the output goal. How many units did I do? And while that may serve you well in the quarter in the next quarter, it does not prepare you for years two and three. So you have to be very committed to the investments today that may not pay off in that 6 to 12 month window. You have to, and I think stories will come out as people are learning new ways. Toe work of examples of Here's what we did in 2019 which ended up being a home run in 2021. So it's back to effectiveness, effectiveness versus efficiency. That is gonna be, I think, one of the themes we speak to next year. >>Thanks, Mark. A pleasure having you on the show. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick. Stay tuned of more of the cubes. Live coverage of smartsheet engage.

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering Smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host along with my co host, Jeff Rick. We're joined by Jean Farrell. He is the CPO of smartsheet. Thanks for coming on the show. >>Thanks for being here. >>Great to be here here last year and even bigger and better. You moved out of the hotel and convention center. That gets something. Did >>we did, We were. We have almost 4000 strong this year and we're super excited. We've been looking forward to this for a while. So >>So this is the third, the third annual conference yet. Just tell us a little bit. Let's 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 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 5 700 people there, and it was a great start andan. Last year we doubled in size and we actually outgrew the facility in Bellevue on. So when we planned for this year, we said, You know, let's go Big way felt this momentum building. We had such great feedback from customers what they learned and what they came away and could do after coming to engage 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 half years ago. I spent five years that Amazon Web service is, and I was fortunate enough to be there when they did their first reinvent in Las Vegas, and it was roughly 5000 people, and I had a very interesting deja vu moment walking into the main auditorium here yesterday, Andi, it just brought back all the memories of Oh my gosh, this is like the size of remain so in three years we should be. Roughly 25,000 will be >>in Vegas >>today, up on the main stage. A lot of great new product announcements I want it, I want you to sort of break it down for our viewers. He started talking about how you really served three core customers and these new product announcements are really targeted. Each of these >>Yeah, we kind of broke it out. And what we find >>your way, sir? Customers of all sizes. So from startups, toe, medium sized businesses to large enterprise and within almost every one of those customers, we really see three distinct user groups really work force, which is at the core kind of where we started the I T teams, which many times there to support the workforce but also drive a lot of their own work clothes. 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 on DSO 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 gonna enable ah, 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 go send a chat and then the response is disconnected. So it just wasn't as efficient. That could be. So we took that signal and work very closely with customers to design the new experience. So really excited about those those capabilities. We launched new forms, capabilities and multi select dropped down a lot of things that our customers are really excited around. From the workforce perspective on the I t front, we've introduced a ton of new things all year. The two big announcements today were around our accelerator for GDP are which it actually affects almost anybody that does business with an EU citizen. So a lot of folks don't really connect the dots ago. I'm in. You know, I'm in Redmond, Oregon. Why do I need to comply with GDP? Are well, if you sell the anybody in the you need to figure that out, um, and and then, um beyond GDP are. We talked about our federal offering on our new govcloud, which is really key for government agencies but also all the contractors to support government agencies. And so a lot of our customers are very interested in that. And then the final piece was really business leaders. Andi talked there about new enhancements to control center. Do it really let it scale and move across the organization roll ups, ability to do multi tier on then. Importantly, we talked about the new content collaboration capability, which is which is a really big it integrates are our slope technology. So marketing and other types of, uh, disciplines can use content collaboration in their work. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention 10,000 feet. >>So lots to talk about a lot. But you clearly, this is the customers, right? Because I think it was at the pasting. Widgets between Dashboard was a standing ovation. It's amazing the power of copy and paste when you can pull that work, you know, it's it's what the people want. It's funny you say that I am constantly >>amazed with that. The things that when you saw 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 Drop Down is a great example where they had to do all sorts of gyrations in how they configure 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 can't >>let you go. >>Wow, Is that all it took? I would sooner. It is a lot of times right, the simple things that have the huge, a huge improvement in kind of getting away from this repetitive work, which is under the theme we keep hearing over and over and over again. >>No, that's absolute. That's absolutely true. And it is really little things can have a big impact or Or or the analogy I sometimes will use is if you're creating a puzzle or if you have kids and you've ever built, you know, the X wing fighter set. If you're missing a few pieces, it's just not the same, right It just right. You can't kind of complete the work and so sometimes just completing that play for customers, giving them that that last piece they need to really go in power. Their workflow is is really cute. >>And I also think because we're living at a time where we have way demand so much from technology in our personal lives, and it delivers most for most. For the most part, our lives are pretty seamless and the way we can order things from anywhere. And so when we have, 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 stage 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 for >>way actually, have >>we actually have a bunch of different mechanisms? We used to listen a customer, and I actually call it customer signal because it comes from a lot of different places. Way have kind of foundation. Aly we have a process actually called enhancement request. So many of our customers can go in our community and actually submit a form and say I really want you to build this Andi, 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 we get feedback on on kind of a freefall flowing forum where they give us feedback. We have user groups that this year will due north of 40 user groups around the world, where we bring collections of customers together, many time hosted at different customer locations, and customs 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 themselves problems on and importantly, we have AH product advisory Council and a customer advisory board. And these air both specific groups of customer smaller groups that we've recruited and we actually use them tow, 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. Both of those enroll customers in interacting with things were building before they're launched. And that gives us a chance to get real time feedback into what they like. What? They don't know what we need to improve. And sometimes the product will stay in 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 if you're on, if you're not satisfied, customer need or solving a problem, >>they're not gonna buy. What's the point? You're >>surely gonna get a lot of customers signal here at >>engaged over the next couple of Absolutely. And they're absolutely not shy. Every time I'm running some, it's like, Oh, we love this. And here's the 10 things I want that exactly. >>Thank you so much for coming on the Cubans. Pleasure having you >>my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thanks for being here. It engaged. Thanks >>for having us. Great. >>I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick, You are watching the cube. Stay tuned

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick and Jeff and I have been live at Smartsheet Engage all day Jeff, we're in not Vegas. >> Not Vegas. >> Bellevue, Washington, this has been a really electric event. They keynote kicked off this morning standing room only, they have doubled in only their second year they have about 2,000 attendees, 1,100 customer companies represented here, they had customers from 20 countries, they more than 50% female attendees for the second year in a row, but we've heard such great groundswell stories all day. >> Yeah, it's been a good day, Lisa. You know, there's a little bit of confusion in this space, I think there's a lot of tools around workplace productivity, we got to hear from a couple analysts and how they're reshaping the way that they define those tools and that's okay, and I get it, but there was no question about the three customers we had on and the passion that those three customers had, kind of old school shadow IT implementations, they brought the tool in from their prior work, plugged it in and are having tremendous success, even the last one, to the chagrin of the parent company that builds software to do the same thing, so there's really no substitute for that type of passion and you know, we've seen these kind of communities grow before, I remember early days at the ServiceNow, it kind of reminds me of that you know, a lot of passion, applause, applause at the new features which is is always an interesting one, so a really, really good day. >> And well, you talked about those three customers that we had on today, we had GE Renewable Energy which was our last guest, a woman from Sodexo, Sodexo is a massive, massive company and then we had a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal. These are three massive companies and the interesting theme from each of them is that these were groundswell opportunities for Smartsheet to really go viral within these organizations and make massive business impact and it's interesting that it really, even from a sales perspective, when we talked to the V.P. of Strategic Accounts, this is not a top down sale, this is bottoms up. Even PayPal found it on their own and learned how to use Smartsheet from YouTube videos. >> I love that. >> That was fantastic. >> So I love, you know, everyone talks about the new way to work but what about the new workers, right? And both of those examples are really good. The PayPal one as great, office of the CIO and yet to figure it out they just watched YouTube videos which is how people learn things today, and they implemented it from that experience. They didn't call Smartsheet, they just put it in and it worked and then we just had GE on and his comment that he wanted something lightweight for his workers. Lightweight. Three click rule, he said he had a three click rule after we turned the cameras off and if he can't get it down to three clicks you got to go back to work and make the process a little bit simpler, so you know, these are real examples of real big companies implementing kind of at the departmental level where this is getting traction, and executing to drive differentiation. And that's pretty exciting regardless if you get confused about the messaging or this or that, those are real life examples. >> And there's nothing that's more validating, right? Than the voice of a customer who has used it and especially the voice of a customer who is not a developer, doesn't know what an API is or need to in their daily jobs. This is technology that was built from the ground up, back 12 years ago on the construct of a spreadsheet which so many people understand and they've really parlayed that you're comfortable here with these tools, there's going to be like, you were talking a lot about today very smart that you brought up, I've got so many apps open and I think Forrester said between 13 and 30 apps people have open every day, so you can't really compete for that mind share so in terms of differentiation we've heard from Smartsheet themselves that they collaborate with companies that you'd think would be their competition. >> Right. >> But they understand that how this is starting from this groundswell, they have to be able to collaborate, to integrate, to connect with Slack, Microsoft teams, Office365, CRM systems from Microsoft, Salesforce, because that's how the worker needs to see their information, and they're also giving users the ability to configure, I want to see this, my team might want to see something completely different, and we can do that while sharing the same information. >> Right, right. I think the thing that struck me as really the big competitive differentiator in this kind of, work-group management is the going outside your four walls. If you use Salesforce, if you use even G-Suite, every time I send you an email it says, Lisa's not in your G-Suite are you sure? Are you sure? Like, red flag, I'm doing something wrong, the fact that the Smartsheet licensing structure is set up that if I set up a project I can share it to people outside of my organization. They can participate in that project. A, it just makes a lot of sense 'cause more and more projects right? You've got contractors, you've got partners, you've got all these things. It's not just an isolated instance anymore but then, more importantly, for Smartsheet, it just gives exposure to the tool to a new group of people. So, I think that's a really key part of the story here, that again maybe count as under the covers in terms as some of the messaging, but a real key differentiator, we've seen this type of viral growth before. I used to work for an Atlassian Service Provider and Atlassian had a great, kind of, seed strategy. $10 for 10 licenses and the $10 goes for schools in Africa. Brilliant. Who doesn't want to pay 10 bucks to help such a worthy cause, and then to seed it in. And then people that had success with the tool, it goes with them. You know, we heard that here the last gentleman from GE used it at a prior company, brought it over, wanted a lightweight tool not a big ERP tool implemented, and now he's running, he said $100 million in assets more effectively than he could before. >> Exactly, but will you talk about in terms of that big differentiator, their ability to, if I'm a Smartsheet user and you're not, I can share something with you and we can collaborate. They've got, I think I read over the weekend, 650,000 active individual users, but they have about 3,000,000 people that are collaborators. And I think it was Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning, that shared with us. That's 40% of their business. They have a massive pipeline by just enabling this collaboration and the ability for a user who's paying license to share with a colleague that isn't. >> Right. And then this is always the small conferences, 2,000 people, still new, people are super passionate, it's not a big vendor show, it's not a big expo hall show, but people are super engaged and sharing information and you get that in kind of the early days of these conferences, which is a really neat thing to see and there's no substitute for passionate customers, at the end of the day that's all they can really hope for, and that's the validation you need to move forward. >> Absolutely and they had, I think, almost 50 customer speakers today and I know how incredibly difficult it is for a marketing team to find 10 customers. >> Yeah, you know that right? >> Right. To speak. >> To speak. >> Let alone what multiplier you need to have to get 50, four x? Maybe not here. It seems like these people that are users, PayPal, and Cisco, and Sodexo, and GE Renewable Energy, have found this on their own and are really kind of creating this virality that is, it was very infectious, contagious. >> Yeah. >> By the day. >> Which is amazing to me because there's, again, there's so many applications out there, and they don't all do the same thing and they all have pros and cons. But, to be able to find it to be able to deliver success and again another important piece at any rate in with those existing systems that already are in play. Mark was very clear, we're not expecting you to throw out the apps that you have, you may or may not be able to display some with Smartsheet, but we really want to work with them, right. We want to play together, not necessarily play separate. And again, you have to do that to be successful in 2018. >> And they're listening to their customers. They have to do that to be successful, that's driven by the customers, it's clear that, there's a push pull effect and it's going to vary based on the enterprise and their overall objectives, but their collaboration with customers to develop and prioritize all of the enhancements that people have been asking for for the last year since the first Engage was really, you felt that, you heard it. There was a lot of applause during the product announcement session this morning. They are listening, they're taking that feedback in and ultimately, what their VP of customer success talked about is they're driving change management and that is extremely difficult, culturally, to be able to do. >> It's people, right? I mean, they said it right out the top. Empower everyone to improve how they work, connect, innovate, and execute. I've said it time and time again, we do a lot of shows, I think that's a pretty straightforward path to give more people more data, the tools to manipulate the data and get the answers, and then most importantly, the authority and power to execute those decisions, especially when you're close to the customer. That's where good things happen. That's where the organization moves forward and you can't be centralized command and control everything 'cause it's moving way too fast. >> Right, right. >> Way too fast. >> Well, Jeff, I had a blast hosting with you all day today. Learned a lot, my perspective is really opened up about Smartsheet and what it is and how it can really drive a lot of transformation and accelerate digital transformation. >> I can't help but again go back to the line from Google Cloud, right? People want to move to judgment, less drudgery more judgment. That's what they're enabling here at Smartsheet and we're excited to be here and cover it and can't wait until next year. >> Awesome, thanks Jeff. Again, Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick. Thanks for watching our coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018, from Bellevue Washington, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've had a great day talking with Smartsheet executives, analysts, users, and we're excited to welcome to theCube for the first time, Gurmeet Mangat, the site manager Wind Power Generation at GE Renewable Energy. Gurmeet, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, thank you Jeff. I'm really happy to be here. >> So you're a user of Smartsheet, but you're also a renegade. So before we get into your renegade status, tell us a little bit about GE Renewable Energy and your role. You got a big role as site manager. What, 75 turbines across multiple locations? So let's talk about GE Renewable Energy and your role as site manager. >> Sure, no problem. So GE Renewable Energy. One of our missions statements is to unleash limitless energy. How we do that, we harness the power of the sun, the water, and the wind. So try to produce clean efficient energy to power countries, homes, businesses, whatever needs that powered energy. As a manager I manage, like you said three wind farms, three different customers. A very complex role to have. I'm coming right from not just operations, human resources, financials. So everything's required of someone like me to manage that business end to end. It's a challenge, at the same time I seek opportunity in a lot of what's going on and leveraging Smartsheet as one of the tools. It's something I've been using over the past year to optimize the business and run those turbines. >> So it's so funny because I would say GE turbine farms and GE engines are the most quoted, often referenced IOT devices in this next gen conversation about IOT and data and how much data they throw off of any other kind of product out there, and you're sitting right in the middle of it actually managing the real machines and managing the real data. >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean the, the machines themselves are highly automated. They're spinning out a lot of data and we've got great systems in place to manage that information. Make it transferrable, viewable to a lot of the people that need it. The opportunity is not necessarily in the equipment that GE manufactures but the back-end business that drives that manufacturing, that drives those services. That's where, again we leveraged Smartsheet over the last year to close a lot of data quality issues. We're ruling out and canceling a lot of the human error of the process steps that we're seeing in a lot of businesses today. We're really taking the initiative of managing our data, bringing us, making us actually competitive in the fourth industrial revolution. I mean I've had a strong believe that if you're not managing your data correctly today, you'll market yourself out of the business, you won't stay ahead of the game. So I think, like I was saying before the biggest opportunity right now is the back-end of the business. Smart GE does a great job at manufacturing and producing high quality products. I think there's huge opportunity in saving the back end and optimizing the process that runs that. >> When you say the back end, there's always a lot of conversation about you know going from reactive to predictive to prescriptive. Analytics, again everybody likes to talk about keeping the turbine up. Are you talking about those types of processes or is it more, you know how that energy is fed into the grid and more kind of the connection to the broader ecosystem, when you say back end? >> Let's talk about the proactive and reactive situation, 'cause that's really what we're trying to drive. >> Okay. >> There can be particular cases where a turbine could fail in the middle of winter, a high-wind season and the visibility's not great. So what we've done is we've taken Smartsheet. We've given our technicians a mobile application tool to collect data as they visit turbines. We're taking information within Smartsheet, we aggregate it, we quantify it, and now we're able to predict turbine behavior based on this information. A little bit faster than some of the tools that GE provides today. A perfect example is about a month ago we determined that a turbine needed a quarter of a million dollar repair before any GE tool told us that. That was simply because of giving our technicians a tool, which is a Smartsheet webform and telling us what happens everyday you visit that turbine. That goes into the background. We take the information, aggregate it into a dashboard viewings. That gives us a great visual control and visual aid of our business. >> That visibility-- >> I was going to say, is he collecting different data, or are you processing it in a different way with the tooling that you set up with Smartsheet that gives you that visibility? >> They are, so we are collecting different data. So GE gives us a lot of data on our turbine health efficiency, how it's operating. It might quantify the number of faults per megawatt hour and per (mumbles) it for us for example. But what we're creating with Smartsheet is we're creating our own organic KPIs I'll call them, some metrics that we are creating ourselves to try to drive different behavior. So when the techs go in, we talk about parts consumptions, for example. So if this part's been consumed 20 times over the last month, you've got to ask why. You know, why do you keep visiting this turbine to do that. So that visibility drives a different discussion now, so now we can engage with engineers with different type, different information. They might be able to say, "Okay, "you know what, you guys got some good data here. "We think you're right. "We should execute this repair." >> So, that example that you gave and give me the number again that working with Smartsheets your team was able to find a, what did you say, a $250 million? >> $250,000 repair. >> Thousand dollar repair. >> That's the cost of the repair, but it's a proactive repair versus reactive so now we're not facing a long wait time, finding a crane, bringing a crane on site, getting the paperwork in place to get the job done 'cause it's not an easy repair. >> But there's a very impressive snowball effect of the benefits back to the business. You've found it faster. You were able to get, you know the parts needed faster, repair it faster. Clearly that goes all the way back up the chain from a revenue perspective. >> Absolutely. >> But you, when I alluded to you earlier, this renegade status, you brought Smartsheet in from your previous job and you've said, "This has enabled us "to find something faster than "our brand of technology's product would have been "able to do." Talk to us about this conviction that you brought in and is it kind of becoming viral within GE Renewable Energy yet? >> Good question. It's becoming viral, a lot of people are listening now. So we've talked to GE digital VPs. I've talked to the ERP providers in Europe, what they're doing with GE. So we've essentially, I call it a success story. They're not going to adopt Smartsheet. They want to build their own enterprise solution but, the reason why I call it a success story is because I've changed the way that they are thinking today. >> That's huge. Cultural change? >> I've presented a solution to them. I've essentially told them, you need to give us something that works for us faster. If you do this, it gives managers capacity to improve your business, really develop people that are working underneath you, engage them, empower them, and move the business forward not on a typical five year plan that most businesses have in place. But it's a step change. >> Right, right. >> It takes you year over year and you're stepping every year to something new, and I think in today's day and age with how fast things are moving, you need that. >> And I'm curious to unpack a little bit on this example where you said you know, it's this failing part that was giving you a leading indicator that there was a bigger problem. So that was just kind of a different way to look at the solution, right? You're identifying kind of a stupid consumption pattern on a spare part that shouldn't happen as opposed to the core data that's coming off that machine and that's what gave you kind of the unique insights. Does that come from you? Does that come techs who are in the field and have kind of a sense of, "Maybe we should be looking at this, "maybe we should be looking at that." How do you start to empower people or where do some of these different kind of points of view that then can be backed up with data in the Smartsheet process come from? >> So, it's all techs. (clears throat) Coming into the job last year, I asked one of the techs, I said, "Why are you going to this turbine?" And the question why is such a powerful question to ask. They said, "We're going to fix this." So what happened last time? They had no idea. So I said, "There's no "information to support your visit today? "And you don't understand why you're going today." They said, "As a result of something that was not "done correctly before." So we fixed that part first. We started giving them the information upfront. We gave them a tool to collect the data. So now they are empowered to provide very direct feedback to myself as a manager and even to an engineering team, like in New York for example. Something technicians never felt empowered to do before. They are the driving factors for those data collection, the decision making. I definitely appreciate that by giving them feedback on a daily basis, that what you guys are doing is changing the way that we manage the business. It's a very driven culture change by the front line. It's not something that I'm pushing down. I'm asking them to help me push it upwards to the senior level. >> And they've got to love it. They've got to love thinking that they've actually got input as opposed to just being called to go out and fix things when it breaks. >> Exactly. They're driving their day. They can go to work in the morning. They can look at the whole personality of a turbine, what's outstanding, what was done last time and the conversations are very quick in the morning. It used to be a 7 o'clock startup. They're not driving out 'til eight, 8:30, nine o'clock by the time they get their stuff together. I mean we're averaging a seven am to about 7:30 departure now. >> So each person is saving 60 to 90 minutes everyday. >> Every day now departure. >> That's a big roll up. In fact, I was looking at some of the productivity stats that Smartsheet talks about on their website and they say an average per, individual user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours a year. An organization can save up to 60,000 hours a year. >> I believe that. That's believable. I mean there's, just a technical aspect of managing a turbine. If we even talk about you know issuing a purchase order. Managing contractor labor, invoices. The tool that we're using today is a complete end to end P & L management tool. So it takes invoicing from subcontractors, labor. We are inventory tracking, we are tracking any health and safety issues. Everything from end to end, so it's really done a great job for us. >> That's all built within your Smartsheet? >> Correct. >> Wow. >> And it's all mobile, so. I mean I'm not at my site this week, but on a daily basis I have visibility to my business. You're talking about 70, 80 plus machines, that's over you know about a hundred million dollars in assets that have to be managed effectively, efficiently, and correctly. >> You have visibility into everyday from wherever you are? >> Exactly, yes. >> That's a huge transformation. So we talked about you being a renegade and other groups within GE on divisions that are curious about this. I'm curious, have you heard anything today that they have announced that excites you, or maybe was any of this part of a feedback that you provided, as we've heard all day Jeff that they're very responsive to customer feedback in terms of product innovation. Anything you're going to go back to the office and be excited, like the next generation or what's coming available soon? Is it going to enable me to do X-Y-Z now? >> That's a good question. So GE is a very tough company to change. There will be a lot of takeaways from this trip and when I go head back. After the last conversation I had with GE digital and the team, they are going to hire a new resource and set budget aside to help close the gaps that we've identified. So I think after this visit and some of the things I've learned throughout the conference and when I head back I'll only be able to identify a few more gaps that they need to fill, and I'll push that up to them probably in the next week when I get back there and hopefully they can appreciate that candid feedback and take that and run with it. >> But you were able to fund your existing project just out of your own discretionary funds? >> Exactly. I mean that's one of the benefits of Smartsheet. It costs really nothing to create something, and my job is to manage wind farms, so I've taken initiative to create, I call it a mini-ERP system using Smartsheet with an associate of mine, and it's an organic creation. It didn't take us, I mean to run three wind farms, I started last April, it probably took us less than six months to create a working system. That's awesome feedback for Smartsheet, their tools are very user-friendly. It's lightweight, it takes away the fear of coding that Excel gives to some people. If you're a new user of any application you can kind of walk into it and run with it. That's one of the reasons why we took it from nothing to something in such a short period of time. >> Wow. >> That's a ground swell in action that has some significant results. But you'd better be careful. I'm imagining your success is going to go so viral, you're going to have way more than 75 turbines and three wind farms >> That's possible. >> to manage. (laughs) >> There's been a recent acquisition and there's other sites around me that my boss is, or my directors said, "Hey, what are you doing next week?" >> Oh! (laughs) >> "Let's go visit this site for a few minutes." Okay, I know what you're getting at. >> Kind of a good problem to have, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what you're doing as a renegade. It seems pretty contagious. >> Appreciate it, thank you for having me. >> Thanks. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be back to wrap up the show in just a minute. (digital music)