Best Of

Last week, I attended my first Domopalooza and I wanted to take a moment to share my reflections. I'd be curious to hear what everyone else took away, so I hope to hear from some of you. My biggest takeaway was how impressed I was by the product managers I got to meet and see present. They seem genuinely engaged with the user community and announced/demoed a host of features that will make my life better in Domo (as they eventually trickle out into GA). More than once, I saw screenshots of posts from this very forum as part of their presentations, showing the demand for the features they built. Also, more than once, and for different features, I heard the claim that a new feature was the "most requested" by the community. That makes me think we could use a better system for merging similar requests and creating a more reliable metric for ranking the "most requested" features.

My second big takeaway was that the Domo community is, in fact, a community. I felt warmly welcomed by everyone, especially those that, like me, spend too much time on this forum. It made me realize I would benefit from putting more of myself into this community. Those two things—that Domo leaders take to heart the posts on this forum and my renewed appreciation for the members of this community—motivated this post (and maybe some more posts in the near future).

Which brings me to my third takeaway from Domapalooza: bookends to the conference that made me think that Domo leaders misunderstand why people use Domo. The opening bookend was a series of breathless demonstrations of the powerful capabilities of…Claude. The demos were (it was proudly declared) prepared at 1:30 am that morning. I'm curious what was pushed off the agenda by that early-morning brainstorm. One can imagine someone had thought about something for more than a few sleepless hours that they were ready to present to the thousands of attendees at their freshest and most excited.

What was the point of the Claude demos? Was the point that Domo's core features are so clumsy that you need to use a different company's robot-god-brain to extract any meaningful value from them? Was the point that none of Domo's own new features were exciting enough to compete with Anthropic, so let's play with the exciting stuff before we have to slog through all the boring Domo stuff the next couple days? They opened with Claude in an apparent vote of no-confidence of Domo.

The closing bookend for me, if not the literal one, was when Domo's CEO reacted with exaggerated dismay to Domo being called a "dashboard company". What's wrong with being a dashboard company? What does a well-made Domo dashboard represent? Useful data has been connected, transformed, and analyzed, and is being put in front of the people that need to see it.

Which brings me back to why (I believe) people use Domo. That process from connecting raw data to presenting it clearly has never been as easy as it is in Domo. That is Domo's competitive advantage. Anything that adds to that ease of use will build on Domo's advantage, and anything that distracts from it is a missed opportunity. The vision laid out in the general sessions started and ended with Claude and some dubious promises of using AI in Domo. Happily in contrast to that vision, when I look at the product announcements from Domo, I think most if not all are building on Domo's ease of use; you don't need to use Claude to benefit from Worksheets or the myriad enhancements in MagicETL. That mismatch between what Domo is saying they're doing and what they're actually doing gives me hope.

What I do see missing is any investment in cards. What was the last new card type we got in Domo? I think it was packed bubbles back in October 2023 almost three years ago? (I'm not counting the minor updates to donuts and gauges in January 2024). Worksheets and the new App Components serve a similar function as cards, so those are welcome and helpful additions, but they don't play across the entire Domo ecosystem the way that cards do.

So I'll close with my case for cards. The card is the atomic unit of analysis in Domo. They determine what can be built with the rest of Domo with the least friction. Wouldn't it be nice to expand the periodic table a bit? I'm not talking about features that can only be used in AppStudio or that you need Claude to help you create in a ProCode app, but cards that my least technical users can make from anywhere in Domo and have a better handle on their data than they did before.

I have some ideas for the types of cards that I'd love to see, and my intention is to post some ideas in the coming weeks making a more specific case for those cards. I hope you upvote some of those ideas and contribute some of your own. I also hope some resources are left at Domo after they pay for all their Anthropic subscriptions to continue to develop the part of Domo that makes Domo what is is: a dashboard company.