Combining Intuitiveness and Power

On June 11 2024, we are launching our biggest platform upgrade ever, becoming available to customers and prospects on a rolling basis over the coming months-to-year. This article will dive into the thinking underpinning this update, and give a brief overview of the suite of improvements.

Why we have made this investment

Planhat is built to combine seeming opposites; enterprise software that is both powerful and intuitive.

In the first decade of our platform journey, priority has certainly been with the former.

Planhat is a place where you house everything from company and contact data, to revenue management, to daily tasks and emails and events, to project management, to tickets and chats, to product analytics. Data can be viewed in the moment, or over time. To exemplify, we have customers who input all of their physical machines deployed at customers, and feed telemetric data back to Planhat, merge it with revenue and subscriptions, in order to understand activation and utilisation rates, and put customers into automated workflows to risk-mitigate drop-offs and upsell licenses.

Increasingly, Planhat is also a home for rich enablement content - how to run expansion strategy, or your EBR presentations - powered by data, and automatically distributed to the point where it’s needed. Our customers track their objectives in Planhat, to ensure they can focus on outcomes and measure performance of objectives against real data.

It’s a virtuous cycle of data and workflows, and learning, and growth.

But given the complexity of the real world, Planhat has to be complex to be powerful - and so our latest, and biggest-ever, platform upgrade is all about bringing simplicity to that complexity.

All of this data means nothing if it’s not intuitively accessible and comprehensible to endusers. And with all of this data, the opportunity to intelligently guide and assist endusers at every step of the way is immense.

That is what this platform upgrade means: a suite of new features, with a new flexible and customisable interface at the centre, designed to help organisations and endusers make their days simpler and more effective - combining the seeming opposites.

What this platform upgrade comes with

The upgrade can be grouped into five buckets:

1. Workspaces > personalising your interface

2. New Portals > a(nother) paradigm shift in customer collaboration

3. New design > more modern, more functional (and with dark mode!)

4. AI > the first set of Planhat-native agents, put where users need them most

5. The long tail > everything from Documents to new Search to Live Data updates

You can learn much more about these individual features over our coming Customer Webinars series, so below is a short summary of each.

1/ Workspaces

Workspaces means each organisation, or team, can customise their interface. It seems to us that most users spend 80% of their time on up to five core views, and this seems to cluster around the role you fill.

However, often those 5 views are not “similar” from a data or workflow perspective: it can be a renewal rate chart to track your quarterly performance, next to a list of your customers, next to a KPI dashboard built by your manager, next to your calendar of tasks and projects, next to expansion opportunities you work on, and a document you collaborate on with a colleague on improving your Mid-market service model.

Workspaces allow you, and your teams, to put these views next to each other and have everything you need only one click away.

2/ New Portals

In 2019 we released our v1 of Portals, and they changed the way our customers work with their customers. Now is a time for an equally big step forward.

Our new Portals come with:

1. Ability for your customers to input data that updates data in Planhat

2. Ability to auto-generate Portals based on templated versions you create in Planhat

3. Improved branding and design of Portals, to be more in line with your own

4. Ability to create Portals on custom URLs to enhance the personalised experience

Moreover, they come with all of the other benefits our new platform has: a new overall design, ability to customise the Portal content structure and granular access control, new Documents, live updates, improved notifications, and more.

3/ New design

We're incredibly proud of the updated look.

We wanted to create something that simultaneously is:

1. Functional and focused (after all, we are Swedish)

2. Collaborative and humane (after all, we are a place where people spend their everyday)

3. Sophisticated and powerful (after all, behind each dot hides millions of data points)

At this intersection is not only our new platform design, but also our entire new visual brand identity, and behind it: our company's entire ethos.

4/ Planhat-native agents

Planhat is a natural place for agents, powered by language models and other technologies, to start to develop. It’s a place where you work, so agents can make you more productive. It’s also a place where you house all your data, so agents can help you spot patterns and take action.

In this release, we’ve built out a backend architecture and brought to life a first set of AI-based agents, focused on productivity. Helping users write emails, summarise extensive notes, bring out takeaways from important conversations, and summarise action points after meetings. All helping you move your day forward, a little bit faster (these features are already available to most customers).

5/ The long tail

As you start exploring the platform, you’ll find a ton of other new features, but some are big enough to be called out in a best-of-the-rest.

New Documents, that means we take our first steps into what we think of as distributed enablement. Documents are now alive, and not stashed in a separate repo like Notion or Drive. They have live charts, live data tables, references to objects, and over time AI agents with all your customer data as context. Moreover, Documents are distributed to where they need to be - a “How to run a Kickoff Call” document is auto-attached to every kickoff call task in your system; a “Creating Value with Us” document is shared both in a Sales Collateral Workspace and with customers in their Portals.

An upgraded Search that both goes across almost all objects and tools in Planhat and is instant, inspired by the architecture of other leading search applications.

Live Data Updates means real-time collaboration with all team members and customers - see instantly whenever anyone (a user, a customer, an integration, an automation) updates a data point, or adds a comment, or mentions you anywhere. Read a technical deep-dive here.

A new Data Explorer, purpose-built for fast data exploration for non-technical users. Means customer insights are few clicks away, and you can save down insights you like - others are ephemeral, to maintain system hygiene.

We have new custom notifications, a new Dashboard layout for faster report-building, improved management of outgoing emails, dynamic date filtering of dashboards, and much more. We’ve rebuilt our frontend code architecture, so Planhat is now orders of magnitude faster and more responsive. All of this, built on the same data, integrations, permissions, workflows, and automations that Planhat already stands on today.

We’re beyond excited to bring what we’ve been working on to the world - as always, it will be taken and deployed in ways we couldn’t even imagine.

Finally, this has been a transformative and deeply valuable experience to our entire product and engineering organisation. Back in 2023 when we decided to create a new code repo and re-build the entire interface from scratch, it was a big - and sometimes overwhelming - bet. We’ve learned so much over the past months, and we can’t wait to bring this experience into our next projects, where from now on we’ll never be able to aim any lower than what we did here.