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Case Study: Appcues cuts data quality issues 77% with Metaplane

Appcues Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
Appcues
Industry
SaaS
Challenge
A sole data engineer was flying blind, learning about broken data only when colleagues flagged it, sometimes several times a week.
Headline result
A one-person data team at Appcues reduced data quality issues by 77% with Metaplane and cut stakeholder-reported problems roughly 10x

Key results

77%
Fewer data quality issues
after adopting Metaplane
10x
Fewer stakeholder-reported data issues
reduction in 'WTF messages'
20-40 hrs/mo
Less time investigating data issues
team-wide

The challenge

Appcues depends on data across product, operations, sales, marketing, and customer success, but a single Business Intelligence Architect worked exclusively on data. Before Metaplane, data quality issues were flagged by stakeholders, sometimes several times in one week, and he would not know about a problem until someone pinged him. Getting changes right the first time and manually fixing breakages wasted time and caused burnout.

The solution

Appcues adopted Snowflake, dbt, and Metaplane together. Metaplane was configured to automatically add tests and monitor data quality across hundreds of tables in Snowflake and dbt, with Slack alerts and machine-learning models tunable in a click, integrating with Looker for root-cause analysis and downstream impact.

The important thing is that when things break, I know immediately—and I can usually fix them before any of my stakeholders find out.

AM
Andrew Mackenzie
Business Intelligence Architect, Appcues

The results, in context

After adopting Metaplane, Appcues experienced 77% fewer data quality issues and roughly a 10x reduction in stakeholder 'WTF' messages about broken data. The team became more productive, spending on average 20 to 40 fewer hours per month investigating data issues.

Products used

Metaplane Metaplane