Kong

The challenge: Needing to deliver on top-line business metrics, do ad hoc investigations, and run experimentation

Like many fast-growing companies, Kong relies on business health and product performance metrics to understand where to make bets and where to invest.

The data team needed to give leaders a clear picture of top-line business performance metrics, while simultaneously handling ad hoc data requests, running complex investigations, and making time for proactive analysis.

With a small team, Kong’s product analyst, Snehal Karanjkar, knew that choosing the right data tool would directly impact their efficiency and ability to scale.

“Balancing these priorities is challenging but critical,” said Snehal Karanjkar. “And our data team needs to make our services optimized, secure, and scalable without burning out.” The data team started to build data projects in Hex.

Solution: A data tool for exploratory business KPIs and complex business analytics

Data product 1: A data app with crystal-clear, business performance that leadership could explore

At Kong, weekly business reviews are essential for quickly responding to changes in the business and growing ARR. The data team built a Hex-powered data app that gives leaders instant visibility into financial performance and growth drivers—and, more importantly, the ability to explore anomalies in real-time.

The app covers critical KPIs in an acquisition-to-retention-to-actuals journey — that guides viewers with text boxes like, “How to interpret” to clarify what the data is showing.

Throughout the app, stakeholders can toggle various charts to show weekly, monthly, or quarterly which comes in handy for different review cycles. They can also parameterize certain charts with a sliding scale anywhere from one to 24 weeks.

Most critically, the app eliminates the need for ad hoc data pulls. Stakeholders can “zoom in” on spikes or declines in their data and explore the data more closely to understand what was behind a particular anomaly.

See a mock of Kong’s Business Summary app

Beyond interactivity the app integrates an automated business review pipeline with real-time data feeds, removing manual updates and one-off reports. This has already driven impactful decisions, such as identifying high-spending customer segments and making targeted product enhancements that improved retention and ARR.

Data product 2: A data app that lets PMs track their most critical North Star metrics

The data team built another custom data app in Hex that lets product managers define, measure, and track our product’s most critical success indicators, including feature adoption, user engagement, and retention—all within a consistent, goal-oriented framework.

Unlike traditional BI dashboards, this app doesn’t just report metrics; it enables action. PMs can set adoption goals or engagement thresholds, track progress, and compare target vs. actual performance with intuitive visualizations.

Before Hex, the data team was buried in one-off requests from PMs. Now, product teams can self-serve their data needs while staying aligned on strategic objectives.

“Hex has completely changed how we support PMs and other stakeholders,” said Snehal. “Instead of constantly fielding requests, we’ve empowered teams to get the answers they need on their own.”

Impact: Less firefighting, more strategic influence and resources

Before Hex, teams would get a dashboard, but couldn’t do the further exploration that would unblock them. Now, the data team’s work has helped leadership make faster, data-driven decisions while drastically reducing ad hoc reporting.

This transformation hasn’t gone unnoticed. Snehal’s data team is receiving requests to cover even more surface area for the company. “Leadership’s feedback was: ‘You guys are always on top of your business. We want you to launch this for the entire product.”

Because the data team is getting recognized for running such a tight ship, they’re getting even more headcount planning and tools approved. The data team is also able to drive up output with Hex — saving about four hours with every new dashboard and increasing 40% of their time on proactive analytics, up from ~10%.

“Despite my 15 years of experience with various BI tools, Hex stands out as one of the most accessible platforms I’ve used. My team was able to adopt it quickly and maximize our focus on insights.”

By making insights easier to uncover, Hex has helped Kong’s data team increase influence,  work smarter and have a bigger impact across the company.