May 2020 Summaries

Census is a product that syncs customer data from a data warehouse to business tools, designed for business ops teams who want to leverage data without relying on engineering. Census has raised over $4.3 million in seed funding and is now publicly available, launching with support for major cloud data warehouses and a dozen app integrations. The company aims to combat data sprawl by providing a simple interface to control data mapping and syncing, allowing users to transform their data using SQL or tools like dbt. Census connects directly to data warehouses and syncs data into apps like Salesforce, Marketo, and Google Sheets, helping customer success, sales, and marketing teams be more effective. The product is designed to help data and ops become more agile by building a central customer data hub that enables orchestration at scale.

We are a small software development team that has adapted to working from home during the lockdown, with one major challenge being finding virtual alternatives to our physical space-dependent processes. Our team uses a giant whiteboard as a central tool for managing our work and company information, which is divided into multiple sections such as prioritized tasks, blocked and done tasks, and recent customer pipeline. The board's physical constraints force us to stay focused on priorities and maintain organization, with the added benefit of being able to see all work items in one place. However, when we added our first remote engineer, we struggled to digitize the board and found that project management software like Linear couldn't replicate its spatial affordances. We've since created a custom digital solution called Deck Chairs using Vue, Netlify, and Linear's GraphQL API, which replicates some of the sections from our physical whiteboard. Our goal is to continue improving this digital tool and explore other solutions like Miro and Figma to make remote work easier for our team.