While leading Shotgun's product design, my team and I regularly conducted 6-8 customer and potential customer interviews each week. It was imperative for me to ensure that my team had a deep understanding of customer needs and stayed informed about customers' perceptions of Shotgun and our competitors. During our research, we began to notice feedback from key customers who were either utilizing expensive tools like PowerBI or Tableau for managing analytics in their film/VFX projects, or were improvising their own analytics tools using a combination of Excel, PowerPoint, and other office tools.

Upon discovering these insights, I initiated discussions with our VP of Product and VP of Engineering to address the feedback from customers. Consequently, we swiftly assembled a small team to delve deeper into the challenges and explore the possibility of offering an add-on analytics service for Shotgun that was tailored for the industry and seamlessly integrated into the core platform.

Drawing upon our research and insights gained from working closely with key customers, we crafted a vision for the analytics platform: to provide a robust tool for visualizing production data through Shotgun Production Insights, a new suite of analytics and reporting tools empowering studios to visualize essential production metrics, monitor project progress, and make crucial business decisions proactively.

Our initial focus was on burndown charts, particularly in the realm of game development. To ensure accuracy in our visualizations, we developed a spreadsheet with idealized values to test the system's integrity at its most basic level. We identified hierarchy as a major challenge, understanding the significance of viewing both task breakdowns within a sprint and forecasting progress across the entire project.

In our pursuit to refine the analytics platform, we researched various report types and defined key metrics. Leveraging Shotgun's extensive database of tracked metrics and insights from industry publications on production data, VFX pipelines, and workflow efficiency, we acknowledged the pivotal role of individuals in the production process. The flexibility to scale production teams based on workload fluctuations emerged as a crucial factor in maintaining operational efficiency.

After expanding our scope and securing team approval, we explored integration possibilities to create a cohesive system rather than an overly customizable dashboard. By carefully selecting which metrics to analyze and how to present them, we aimed to establish industry standards and enhance user experience within the Shotgun ecosystem. Our goal was to facilitate early bottleneck detection, enable detailed analysis, and prompt necessary corrective actions within Shotgun.

Recognizing the varied user motivations for accessing the app, whether out of curiosity or specific information needs, we prioritized highlighting areas requiring immediate attention. This approach ensured that users could swiftly identify and address critical issues within their projects.

Subsequently, based on our research findings, we initiated a sprint to rapidly develop a minimum viable product (MVP). Emphasizing data visualization accuracy, we began with sketching before diving into design tools. Through an iterative process, we rolled out a beta version to key customers, followed by a 1.0 MVP release, and continued to enhance features based on user research-driven development.