MarTech Edge Interview with Hardik Chheda, Chief Product Officer, Tellius

Please share your journey in product management, especially with Tellius.

My journey in product management has been diverse, starting as a BI Analyst at Coca-Cola, then transitioning to a BI Architect role at KLA-Tencor. There, I developed critical expertise in data analytics and business intelligence solutions. I further broadened my knowledge as a Sales Engineer at Oracle, gaining deep insight into the market landscape and customer needs.

At GoodData, my career took a decisive turn toward product marketing and management, focusing on strategic areas such as market analysis, product roadmaps, and competitive positioning. This focus continued at Birst, where I took an active role in managing product lifecycles, defining go-to-market strategies, and shaping innovative solutions that delivered customer value.

Today, as Chief Product Officer at Tellius, I leverage my technical background, market insights, and customer feedback to drive our overall product strategy. The diversity of my career path helps me create products that not only meet but exceed customers’ expectations. Effective collaboration lies at the heart of my approach. By working in synergy with cross-functional teams, we ensure our products are finely tuned to meet evolving market demands and cater to the unique needs of our customers.

Tellius was recently named a Visionary for the second year in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for analytics and BI platforms. Which factors proved instrumental in this success?

At Tellius, we’re thrilled to be recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for analytics and BI platforms for the second consecutive year.

We build innovative features not just based on what’s trending but, more importantly, on how we can help our customers address their challenges and needs. But what makes us truly visionary is our strong customer attraction. We listen, we understand their pain points, and we create. We’re delighted that customers not only love our platform but are continually discovering new ways to imagine using it. We are committed to continually aligning our innovative mission with our customers’ needs, turning their pain points into our next big feature.

Since our inception, we have been seamlessly weaving AI augmentation into every aspect of our platform. This could range from subtle aspects like detecting data types to more visible ones like natural language-based data exploration, auto-visualization, predictive modeling, and storytelling. We believe that AI is not just an add-on but an integral part of the analytics process that empowers any user to generate insights at every stage.

The platform provides a greater degree of agility in analytics than anything on the market today. It enables a rapid analytics iteration designed to foster collaboration between creators and consumers. Our aim is to help users move from data to insights as quickly as possible.

What are your plans to reach a broader audience and capture newer markets in your vertical?

Our central mission is to democratize analytics with AI-powered decision intelligence, focusing on equipping companies with the tools they need to become data-driven. To make our technology more accessible, we are adopting a freemium model, which draws from a product-led growth (PLG) strategy allowing users to engage with our platform firsthand, fully experiencing its potential without any upfront investment. This model’s unique approach gives users the freedom to understand our platform’s capabilities, grasp its intuitive design, and then select a pricing model that aligns best with their evolving needs.

To reach out to newer markets and broaden our audience, our commitment to innovation remains unwavering. We continuously work to enhance our analytics workflow and are resolute in expanding data access to a wider range of personas within an organization. With our autoML feature, which is already fortified with a spectrum of industry-specific models, we are relentlessly expanding the options available to our customers. At Tellius, we’re committed to turning visions into reality, adapting to evolving market needs, and consistently delivering value to our customers.

Collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams is essential for growth. How do you ensure that they are operating at optimum levels?

At Tellius, collaboration forms the core of our ethos. Regular stand-up meetings punctuate our week, with product updates flowing seamlessly to our marketing, sales, and customer success teams. This fosters an environment where each department remains in sync with our latest advancements, enabling them to work effectively. Additionally, the product and marketing teams provide weekly enablement content to our sales force, driving a culture of knowledge-sharing and mutual growth.

We have established a consistent feedback loop between our customer success team, sales, and product. This allows everyone to stay updated on key customer requests and issues, fostering a unified approach across all stakeholders. Additionally, our product team remains in constant touch with our key accounts, reinforcing our commitment to account health and customer satisfaction. At Tellius, collaboration isn’t just a part of our workflow; it’s the heartbeat that propels us forward, ensuring we remain attuned and responsive to our customers’ needs.

How does Tellius modernize customers’ data analytics stack while providing a better way to reveal insights?

We’re helping to usher in a new era of analytics in decision intelligence, moving away from the traditional business intelligence approach towards a user-friendly, AI-augmented platform. Our aim is to reimagine analytics as a Google-like experience—easy, quick, and intuitive. By intertwining self-service analytics capabilities with AI, we’ve built a platform that empowers everyone within an organization to tap into the power of data-driven insights.

Our secret sauce? A blend of features that streamline the analytics experience. Natural language search, auto-recommended visualizations, automated insights, and no/low-code data preparation tools allow users to generate insights within minutes. Add to this the power of our dual-analytics engine, which ensures rapid, accurate queries and insights. At its core, Tellius is not merely modernizing data analytics; it’s revolutionizing the entire path to insights, making it more accessible, actionable, and fundamentally beneficial for users.

How does Tellius help industries like Financial, Pharma, Ecommerce, etc., gain AI-powered insights?

At Tellius, we bring the power of AI to diverse enterprises, spanning sectors such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, ecommerce, CPG, and financial services. Our goal is to transform their data into actionable insights. Within the pharma and life sciences arenas, our AI-augmented analytical frameworks simplify complex data analysis, fostering more informed, data-driven decision-making in areas like market access and commercial effectiveness.

Similarly, in the CPG and ecommerce sectors, Tellius has been a game-changer. We’ve enhanced shopper insights and pricing strategies and even facilitated swift, ad hoc analysis for over a thousand users. In essence, Tellius harnesses AI to deliver practical solutions and shape the future of data-driven decision-making across industries. With Tellius, every business has the means to extract maximum value from their data.

Are there any new launches or newer versions of the current solutions that will augment the growth of Tellius?

With the introduction of GPT-powered Copilot, the evolution of augmented analytics takes a significant leap. Copilot strikes the perfect balance between the power of AI and the strengths of human intelligence by offering features like automated code generation, business-friendly metadata creation, and insightful bite-sized narratives that fortify your decisions.

In our recent upgrades, we’ve integrated a metadata view, a strategic addition aimed at establishing a context and promoting collaboration among users. In addition, we’ve rolled out multi-business view Vizpads, empowering users with a holistic view of insights across varied datasets. These innovative features are continually pushing the boundaries of our platform, ensuring it resonates with the evolving needs of data experts, analysts, and business users. Tellius breaks down the barrier between various personas and data, enabling them to find their own answers and unleashing a level of automation that traditional tools have struggled to match.

With innovation at the core of our business, one of our upcoming features allows users to gain insight into our product roadmap, offer suggestions, and actively participate by voting on potential features. This bridges the gap between the product team and the users, emphasizing the collaborative spirit we champion at Tellius.

How is Tellius’ AI-driven decision intelligence platform unique in the market?

Tellius stands out in the market by embracing three foundational pillars: next-generation self-service analytics, AI augmentation, and superior analytics agility. Our self-service analytical capabilities democratize data access, transforming every member of an organization into a data-driven decision-maker. With a simple, intuitive, and “Google-like” search interface, users can find the data they need without being data experts. Automated insights extract meaningful patterns from the data, bringing insights to light with a click. Our dual-analytics engine ensures quick, responsive queries even for the most demanding workloads.

Additionally, AI powers everything from our simplest functions to our most complex analyses. The seamless integration of AI not only amplifies the capabilities of data analysts but also democratizes ad-hoc data analysis. Tellius’ unparalleled automated insights offer key driver, cohort, and segment analyses right into the platform. Furthermore, our platform enhances organizations’ analytics agility by streamlining workflows and fostering cross-departmental collaboration. Thus, Tellius redefines not just how organizations interact with data but also how they can leverage it to drive actionable, impactful decisions.

Which trends are you focusing on that will drive growth in marketing and sales?

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT has marked a pivotal moment in our industry. These advanced AI models will significantly alter the landscape of analytics, and we are strategically positioning ourselves to harness their potential, focusing on these trends to drive growth.

To this end, we’ve developed ‘Copilot,’ an exciting addition to our AI-powered platform. Copilot embodies our vision of automating the journey from raw data to actionable insights, an approach that resonates powerfully with the market’s needs.

Copilot accelerates data preparation while removing the tedious, time-consuming process of adding metadata to datasets. It goes a step beyond simply auto-generating the code by also providing optimization, inline comments, and explanatory notes to make data preparation more efficient and less error-prone. Tellius Copilot extracts key findings, interesting patterns, and trends from your analysis, presenting them as simple, digestible information.

This confident approach to innovation, combined with the adoption of powerful LLM technology, isn’t just aligning us with industry trends—it’s propelling us forward as trendsetters in the realm of AI and data analytics.

What do you think the future holds for AI-driven decision intelligence and automation platforms?

The future of decision intelligence and augmented analytics is promising and dynamic. The convergence of data science and business intelligence is reshaping industry standards, and we at Tellius find this exciting as a forerunner in the automated analysis space. What we are seeing now is a powerful shift towards not just visualizing data but also enabling the automated generation of insights.

We’re at a pivotal moment in our industry’s evolution, particularly with the emergence of LLMs. Traditional players struggle to keep pace with rapid innovation, leading to ill-considered bolt-on services and even retractions. Implementing LLMs demands careful planning, given the risks—such as the ‘hallucination’ rate of up to 20% in popular models like GPT. However, we at Tellius are tackling these challenges head-on. We’ve incorporated the ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle, creating a safeguard against inaccuracies in LLMs. This exciting journey forward brings us to the frontier of industry innovation, and we’re eager to help shape its future.