The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Auto Tracking in Product Analytics with Ken Fine of Heap

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Ken Fine of Heap.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, fascinating show with Ken from Heap. Kostas, I think my big takeaway was his answer to my burning question around AutoTrack. And the story around the Heap founders' commitment

over a long period of years to actually make that a viable solution with all the engineering problems involved was a fascinating story, right? I mean, you have security concerns because you're auto-capturing all of this data. You have severe gross margin problems because of the amount of data that you're actually collecting, right? And you have to put that somewhere. And so compression issues, and I mean, pretty wild. And then you actually have to make it usable for someone. And you're talking about, you know, truly a firehose of data. They've done it really well. And that was just a great story. Of course the engineering parts are interesting but the commitment to a vision

by the founders, especially the technical ones, was really a great story. I mean, definitely a must listen to. Yeah, 100%. It was a very extremely fascinating conversation that we had at many different levels. I agree about

AutotTrack. And you know, like AutoTrack is like one of these very interesting problems because it's extremely easy to implement. I mean, at the end, like all you need to do is like just capture every change on the DOM tree. But it's extremely hard to make it work at the end for the user. Yeah. Like it's there's like a huge distance between like the basic engineering work and what needs to be done on top of that in order to like make this feature like something that actually works for everyone. So that's one thing.

The other thing that I keep like from the... there are like two other things that like I keep like from the conversation with him. One is the part where we were discussing about this whole process of going to a market states in the past couple of years where like we had like this boom of like all these tools coming out there and how now we'll be getting into like in an environment where we will see more integrated solutions instead of like all the different like every possible feature being the product on its own and he gave us like some very interesting insights there and the other thing is what he he talked about like the different types of people that are needed at different stages of

the building of a company right and i think that resonates a lot also like with the founders of hip right and that part was like with the founders of HIP, right? And that part was like extremely interesting. I'm not going to share more because I think I'd like to listen to him, what he has to say. But that part was like very insightful for me. Yeah, I agree. Also, a great tidbit for anyone interested

in what it would be like to be a product manager slash engineer for submarine technology. That was a really crazy story. So definitely take a listen. Subscribe if you haven't. Lots of great episodes coming up. And we'll notify you in your favorite podcast app. Tell a friend and we will catch you on the next one.