Pendo Center of Excellence: How to build your Pendo team to reach your goals

Hi everyone! Have yet to introduce myself on the Community – I'm Will – a CSM here at Pendo.

I wanted to hop in here to share my thoughts on one topic that I'm passionate about: helping customers get the most out of their partnership with Pendo – a large part of which is having the right people and processes in place to make success seamless.

Don't get me wrong – Pendo's product is great. In fact, that's often the challenge that is faced by many Pendo customers: Pendo is so easy to use, and solves so many different problems, that there's often not much of a barrier to seeing results with Pendo. Non-technical users have the ability to tag a Feature or build a Guide whenever inspiration strikes, and see results almost immediately because of retroactive analytics. 

The problem is that this reactive approach to Pendo can lead to downstream headaches: duplicate Feature tags, too many Guides getting in front of customers, and data that means different things to different users depending on how they're used to classifying events. 

This reactive approach to using Pendo also hinders the ability to truly drive Product-Led-Growth through cross-departmental collaboration to accomplish big goals like: improving client satisfaction, improving customer retention, driving expansion revenue through cross-sells/up-sells, and more. 

We all know the old saying, "measure twice, cut once". This is the spirit of the Pendo Center of Excellence: how can we build cross-functional alignment to tackle the biggest goals possible, and have the right systems in place to easily adapt how we're using Pendo based on the ever-changing business landscape?

A successful Center of Excellence will have two main components: the right people, as well as the right governance processes to ensure ease-of-use, without creating downstream headaches. A Center of Excellence will look different at every single business depending on how they are staffed and what their company priorities are, but let's walk through an example of how to build a Center of Excellence.

Let's start with the right people:

Next, let's talk about governance. There are a few main parts I think of:

1. Having a defined Naming Convention – both for Guides and Analytics (Pages, Features, and Product Areas). 
2. Building a Guides SWAT team – this team is responsible for approval of Guides and pushing them live. They are also responsible for Ordering and Throttling of Guides. 
3. Building out a Theme and a Guides playbook to enable non-admin users to easily build on-brand product experiences.
4. Well-defined Roles and Permissions to reinforce your organization's structure around Pendo.
5. **Having all of these assets, plus self-service Pendo Education content (I am a huge fan of the Pendo Academy) stored in an internal repository (like Confluence) to easily orient new users to Pendo.

I am likely leaving out plenty of important pieces here, and would love to hear from the rest of the Pendo Community. How do you all enable your co-workers and your company to get the most out of Pendo?

If you're interested in learning more, check out our help article on the topic: Building a Pendo Center of Excellence.