Braze Data Governance

A Hack Day Project

ROLE
Research and Prototyping

TEAM
PM, 2 Eng

Introduction

Hack Days have always been some of my favorite days at a company. They offer the chance to step away from my current work, collaborate with new people, and dive into different areas of the product—experiences I find incredibly valuable. During one Hack Day, a PM pitched a partial product brief focused on helping customers understand and govern their data consumption. Although I hadn’t worked with this team or in this product area before, I was excited to tackle a new challenge. Together with two engineers, I volunteered to join the project. By the end, we had created a complete product brief, detailed UX requirements, a prototype, and a functioning proof of concept (POC).

Overview

In the days leading up to Hack Day, the PM and I spent our spare time fully defining the product requirements, documenting competitive solutions, organizing quotes and insights from existing customer feedback and user sessions, and refining our focus on what we should build. Once we had a clear direction, I designed a solution and handed off a prototype to the engineers.

While the engineers began building the feature's framework, the PM and I conducted internal usability sessions to gather feedback from customer success, sales, and support teams on the concept and requirements. The insights we received validated our approach and motivated the team to keep pushing forward.

Ultimately, the team won an award for presenting a functioning POC, a high-fidelity design prototype, and a comprehensive product document with guidance for the product owner who later picked up the project in subsequent quarters.

About Custom Events

To understand the importance and nuance of this project, it's essential to first grasp how Custom Events work in Braze. Braze collects data for our customers via APIs and SDKs. For example, a customer may want to track user behaviors like adding products to a cart or completing a checkout. They would collect information (event properties) about these actions, such as the product’s ID, category, price, or the value of the cart when abandoned. Since data consumption has financial implications, customers are careful about how much data they collect and how they use it within Braze.

Once the data is collected in Braze, customers use it to target and personalize messages for their users. For instance, a customer may want to send a personalized email with a promo code to encourage a user to return to their cart and complete the checkout. As a result, customers care about both the volume of data coming into Braze and how often it’s used in Segments, Campaigns, and Canvases.

The Problem

Customers do not understand their data consumption and are unable to govern it.

Research

Below is a collection of research materials gathered before designing the final solution. Competitive and comparative research helped us understand industry standards and define the feature requirements. Examples of customer workarounds shed light on the severity of the problem and how it’s currently being addressed outside of Braze. We also evaluated Braze’s existing offerings, identifying areas for improvement and additional features that were necessary to fully address the issue.

Current State

How might we…

Once we understood the landscape, we started ideation into how we could:

1. Display all custom events to users for full visibility.

2. Help users identify unused events and duplicates.

3. Provide clear display names and descriptions for each event and its properties.

4. Allow users to manage events, including adding, deleting, blocking/allowing, renaming, and changing data types.

5. Show event usage over time to help users track data consumption.

6. Empower users to understand where and how events are being used in Braze Segments, Campaigns, and Canvases.

Ideation

Using Jamboard, I started sketching the various required steps and pages.

Designs

Data Governance Overview Page

Management of All Custom Events and Properties

Management of Individual Custom Event and Properties

Internal Testing

After completing the research and finalizing designs we were confident in, we conducted internal usability testing. We spoke with two Customer Success Managers, two Solutions Consulting Engineers, one PM (who was also a former Braze customer), and an Onboarding Manager.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and fortunately, we didn’t have to make many changes to the designs since the engineers were already well into development.

Outcome & Reflections

We presented a short deck showcasing the problem, user needs, and design ideas, followed by a demo of a working POC, and ended up winning an award! However, since this was a Hack Day project that wasn't part of any team’s roadmap, we knew the work wouldn’t be completed within the current quarter. So, we made sure to wrap up the work thoroughly and leave clear instructions for the team that owns this area of the product. Our 18-page document included all the research, user insights, user stories, technical and business concerns, internal testing results, as well as future ideas and outstanding internal and customer needs.

Looking back, I’m really proud of this project. I was able to expand my Braze knowledge, dive into a new product area, and create a promising design that gained internal approval. I think it shows how effective I can be in a short amount of time—within a couple of Hack Days—after three years at Braze.