Joint Mammoth Growth and Calendly team saves over $400,000 and builds solid analytics and tooling foundations that enable Calendly to scale effectively

Over 10M users across 50,000 companies rely on Calendly for efficient scheduling in multiple calendar systems. With Calendly, sales teams can close more deals, recruiters can hire more candidates, and businesses can grow more quickly. 

Calendly has been mostly self-serve since it was founded in 2013. The company boasts  product-led growth and user acquisition stats most companies could only dream of, with 70% of new users coming from viral sources. 

Getting to this scale required quick decisions, often made in silos. Along the way, Calendly teams purchased numerous third-party tools and created many different types of analytics events to solve specific needs. 

However, for every company there will always come a time when a lack of analytics centralization becomes an inhibitor of growth rather than an enabler. Too many analytics events can easily confuse new team members who need the source of truth. And if every team maintains their own definitions of metrics, that can make cross-functional collaboration extremely frustrating and difficult. For all these reasons, Calendly knew it was time for a change. Plus, since they were looking for ways to better serve their enterprise and mid-market customers, it became even more essential for them to take control of their customer data.

It was Mammoth Growth’s goal to understand Calendly’s tool usage and data flows, and recommend steps to simplify their processes. 

Reviewing Analytics Data

Mammoth’s Growth Team as a Service (GTaaS) worked collaboratively with members of Calendly’s product, tech, and marketing teams to help them achieve their analytics goals.

Removing redundant data flows

Our first task was to review how analytics data was flowing across the organization and to third-party tools. In this way, we identified $400,000 in third-party tool spending inefficiencies. While these were quality tools, accidental duplication or errors in their setup meant that some data flows were redundant or inefficient, leading to unnecessary overage fees.

Action: 

A significant part of Calendly’s third-party tool stack was billed according to data consumption. Therefore, it was important to examine all analytics data flows, from source to final destination, in our quest to eliminate redundancies. We worked with the users of each tool to identify these inefficiencies and remove them.

Impact:

By pinpointing and removing the redundant data flowing to tools, we saved Calendly over $400,000 annually in data overage fees.

Simplifying tracking events

Our second task focused on centralizing tracking events so there was a single set for all business users.  We were able to reduce the number of high-priority tracking events by 90% while increasing the volume of high-value analytics tasks that could be completed.

Action: 

As Calendly’s growth accelerated, team members often created different analytics events for a specific use case or experiment. For example, the user action of sharing a Calendly booking link had 35 events for the 35 different ways of carrying out the action. Under this system, if analysts wanted to understand how many times a booking link had been shared, they would need to aggregate 35 different events.

Mammoth Growth worked closely with Calendly’s product teams to rationalize and simplify analytics events. Ultimately, the project saw a reduction in analytics events by 90% across core Priority 0 and Priority 1 tracking use cases. 

Impact:

• Unlocking new analytics capabilities that were previously impossible
• Enabling faster analytics (for example, querying a single Booking Page Shared event instead of having 35 different events for different share types) 
• Formulating more reliable decisions based on more consistent metrics, analysts are now pulling from a single source of truth
• Expedited onboarding for new analysts, because now Calendly has fewer events to manage, plus centralized definitions of what to use in each scenario

Implementing a data governance process

Our third and final task involved defining and implementing an automated data governance process to ensure that these new positive changes were long-lasting.

Action: 

Our drive to rationalize the event schema and remove redundant data flows was fruitful, and the team at Mammoth Growth wanted that success to continue. To reinforce the new system, we built a wide-ranging, semi-automated data governance process - consisting of data quality alerts, billing alerts, access rights, and approval processes.

By implementing automated controls to ensure the quality of events, including unit testing against schema at run time and violation blocking, Calendly was able to ensure 100% of data quality violations were captured or blocked before they were released.

Impact:

• Improved confidence to surface analytics data to Calendly’s end users, a powerful new enterprise-level feature 
• Automated feedback loops on data quality during development that allow for faster, upfront bug resolution prior to the actual QA process
• Scalable data governance infrastructure that’s flexible enough to support Calendly’s ongoing growth 

Conclusion

Understanding data flows and data governance are two of the basic building blocks of any digital transformation project. There are significant organizational benefits to knowing more about the quality of your data and how it’s treated throughout your organization. In Calendly’s case, working with Mammoth Growth’s GTaaS unit helped the company avoid more than $400,000 in annual third-party tool fees. 

Furthermore, Calendly streamlined and simplified their analytics events, unlocking new capabilities and empowering faster and more reliable decision-making. Together, we established an automated data governance process that was built to last. The results: Calendly’s product, tech, and marketing teams now have more confidence in their analytics data, which means more predictable growth for their entire organization.

Next, read how we helped Calendly measure campaign impact in days instead of months with a new attribution solution.