Moment Gets a Clear Picture of its Data with Panoply

The Company

Moment is a company comprised of photographers, filmmakers, designers, and engineers. The firm’s philosophy is that the world is a better place when you get lost and follow the camera.

Starting with just a Kickstarter campaign and a mission to make better lenses for smartphones, Moment has now scaled beyond the company’s wildest dreams. From making lenses to now building apps, trip guides, gear, Moment was ready to make some serious changes to match their growth. Recently, company leaders set their sights on data as the next business area to harness for maximum potential.

The Challenge

For the last few years, Moment used RJMetrics as the company’s ETL, data pipeline solution, and business intelligence tool. However, analysts felt constrained and frustrated by the tool’s lack of flexibility and found themselves continually in a tech support queue for weeks at a time.

Another major issue with the startup’s legacy data infrastructure was a lack of control over the data modeling layer. With Moment expanding at an accelerated rate, more data was being collected every day. With the company’s RJMetrics solution, Moment was not able to fully capitalize on the rich customer data they were collecting. The company’s data leaders knew a new data management plan was necessary. The company needed something that would accommodate a business intelligence tool.

The Solution

Moment’s technical leaders focused on finding a solution that would separate the data pipeline from the business intelligence tool. They also required a platform that could be implemented quickly and with few resources.

Ultimately, Moment’s leaders chose Panoply and Looker. Panoply offered the integrations required by Moment as well as a fast and painless integration period.

Panoply had significantly more built-in connectors than RJMetrics, so integrating with more of our data sources was an easy win to give us a more complete picture with our data.

The combination of Panoply and Looker allowed the company to zero in on their data with a clear, end-to-end view. The new data stack also enables the entire organization to access and understand company insights.

A key benefit of the Panoply and Looker solution is that data can be accessed and leveraged without an onsite data scientist. This data democratization has created much more of a data-driven approach across the business. Now everyone at Moment can be a part of the daily decision making in the business.

The Results

Before implementing Panoply and Looker, the company’s data collection system was clunky and support for data customizations was slow. Today, everyone at Moment is using data to make strategic decisions that positively impact customers.

The leaders at Moment are able to enjoy conversations with everyone in the office about what they learned in relation to data. This not only helps employees understand the company and its customers better, but Moment’s stakeholders are able to make better decisions with a wider array of insights. Furthermore, due to the integrations available through Panoply, Moment has seen mass improvements in efficiency in the company.

On a weekly cadence, we have each person at Moment answer the question, 'What did you learn this week?' It's our forcing function to keep each team at Moment tied into what's happening across the company.

Before Moment implemented Panoply Looker, the company's leaders were making decisions blindly, without fast access to important data. Today, Moment has an almost-photographic view of important data and those insights are winning with customers.