Steep: helping teams understand the business

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk with Johan Baltzar, co-founder of Steep (with Nino Höglund), about building a tool that helps a whole team understand how the business is doing.

Johan brings a strong analytics background to the problem: Product Analytics Manager at Spotify, Head of Product Analytics at Zettle, and Head of Analytics at Kry. Steep grew out of frustrations he kept hitting across those organizations.

The core idea is democratizing analytics. Steep turns data into visualizations so people who do not know the analysis tools can explore data on their own, without needing a specialist for every question. A few details from how the team built it:

• Mobile-first from early on, with desktop scaling recognized as a need.
• DBT for data management, with defining metrics treated as the foundational step.
• Qualitative research through user interviews, with audio clips kept in Notion.
• The team uses its own tool to analyze itself.

Johan also talks about testing visions with users. He points to lessons from Spotify, where most prototype interfaces turned out not to work, as the reason to put ideas in front of real people early rather than betting on a vision untested.

The takeaway is that getting more of an organization close to its own data, and validating product direction with users along the way, beats keeping analysis locked with the specialists.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the full conversation with Johan Baltzar.