4 Ways Kong is scaling analytics with Hex

As the leader of product analytics at Kong, my goal is to equip our organization with timely, data-driven insights while keeping our workflows efficient and collaborative. For a lean team like ours, balancing these priorities is challenging but critical. With Hex, my team and I have been able to uncover impactful trends, automate complex analytics processes, and strategically guide product teams with data that’s not just timely but highly relevant.

Here’s how Hex has helped us stay on top of our “health of the business” metrics, derive insights to guide product strategies, and set measurable goals.

1. Automating business reviews for real-time insights

At Kong, weekly business reviews are essential for aligning on KPIs and quickly responding to changes in the business. We’ve built an automated business review pipeline in Hex that integrates real-time data feeds, so that we can monitor key metrics without needing to do manual updates or ad hoc reports.

Hex’s tab management feature lets us organize insights into dedicated views for each product lifecycle stage — acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention — enabling a granular view of user behavior and KPIs at each stage without overcrowding the dashboard.

Our Business Summary tab provides a consolidated view of financial KPIs like revenue, ASP (average selling price), and customer counts segmented by cohort and target groups. Through interactive visualizations like line charts for revenue trends and bar charts for ASP variance by customer segment, stakeholders gain instant visibility into financial performance and growth drivers.

These insights have been pivotal for proactive decision-making. For example, tracking ASP across segments allowed us to identify a trend of higher spending within a specific customer tier. This insight led us to prioritize product enhancements and support for that segment which boosted retention rates and contributed positively to ARR (annual recurring revenue).

2. Collaborating with product managers in the same place

Hex’s intuitive, SQL-friendly environment has been instrumental in fostering a collaborative analytics culture at Kong. My stakeholders are skilled in SQL, so giving them edit access has empowered them to build on my queries, add their own analysis, and explore data more deeply.

They’ve been able to test hypotheses around customer activation by running queries on plugin adoption rates and first-week engagement trends — allowing them to validate their ideas without needing to wait for my input.

This level of self-service analytics has made our process more agile and has led to several actionable insights. Recently, a PM identified that organizations with three or more plugins activated within the first two weeks exhibited significantly higher retention rates. This informed a new onboarding initiative focused on guiding users toward plugin setup early on, which is showing positive impacts on user retention.

3. Automating a/b testing analysis for faster experimentation

A/B testing is central to understanding what drives engagement, activation, and conversion at Kong. By automating A/B testing analysis in Hex, we can track each test’s metrics, compare cohorts, and measure statistical significance without getting bogged down in manual data analysis.

Hex’s bar charts for engagement metrics and funnel visualizations for activation flow let stakeholders track real-time experiment outcomes, eliminating the need for manual tracking and documentation. This automation has led to quicker iterations based on real-time user feedback.

4. Plug-and-play model for North Star metrics: Defining success, setting goals

Currently in development, this plug-and-play model for North Star metrics will let us define, measure, and track our product’s most critical success indicators. For our product managers, this model will go beyond merely reporting metrics. It will give them tools to set target adoption rates or engagement thresholds and assess progress against these targets.

By incorporating goal-tracking visualizations (e.g., progress bars for goal completion and trend lines for target vs. actual performance), PMs will have real-time insights that align with strategic objectives. This makes Hex a powerful performance-tracking system that PMs can use to make timely adjustments based on data.

Impact and looking ahead

Hex has transformed how we manage, analyze, and act on data at Kong. Beyond a BI tool, it’s an enabler of data-driven excellence and a strategic partner on our growth journey.

Despite my 15 years of experience with various BI tools, Hex stands out as one of the most accessible platforms I’ve used and has a hands-on support team that understands our challenges in real-time, enabling precise answers and faster resolutions to any issues. I look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible with Hex and sharing our progress with the broader community.