How Rebank invests in product intelligence to build better products

Rebank is the financial operating system for startups, aggregating bank accounts and payments into a single view for founders. As the team started to grow, engineering tasks like analytics started to get more complicated. 

Simon White, co-founder and CTO, is in charge of everything product and engineering. Simon recently led an implementation of Avo to solve the problems nearly every engineering and product teams face as they begin to scale: lack of clarity and an ever-increasing web of stakeholders.

“When you’re a small team of talented engineers, managing engineering is simple. Where the complexity comes in is with increasing numbers of stakeholders and communication paths. Spreadsheets start to fall apart when things like responsibility, implementation, and naming conventions come into place. Our analytics were bordering on useless because the data was so inconsistent.”

Avo as part of a modern tech stack

Rebank is built with Go and React, and hosted on AWS. For analytics, Rebank relies on Segment and Mixpanel. In order to customize for security, Rebank leverages Avo custom destinations to send in their schema data into Segment in lieu of the codelss Avo x Segment connector.

“We recently adopted Segment because our tool set has started to expand. Avo sits upstream, and allows for a high-quality data foundation for the rest of our stack. One of the problems you always have with analytics is managing a single source of truth when you start using multiple tools. Being able to have that in Avo has been very valuable.”

Measuring success with engineering time saved and analytics capabilities

To determine success, White has looked at time savings and the insights provided by their analytics. He notes that his team has saved a considerable amount of time on reducing the back-and-forth questioning of analytics performance.

“Obviously analytics is incredibly important to measure the impact of a new feature. You can’t gauge the success or failure of a feature without consistent and usable data. That’s evolved for us a lot over time--we’re better now than we were 18 months ago. We follow ShapeUp and use the scoping process to build out our analytics. Analytics is now a first class citizen in terms of product development.”

Product intelligence is worth the investment

With the many competing needs of a startup, it can be a challenge to prioritize what to work on and how much effort should be allocated. The best tools need to have recognizable ROI, quickly. Fortunately, White has consistently prioritized analytics health and was able to implement Avo in under 2 days.

“Avo is absolutely worth the time investment. It’s been transformational for us: not only how easy it’s made analytics, but the way we’ve been able to promote analytics to a first-class citizen in the organization. There is a cost in getting set up, but we went from nothing to reviewed and fully implemented in 36 hours. The ROI of instrumenting Avo has been great.”

This paves the way for clean, clear analytics from the beginning. A better understanding of your customers, your product, and how to move forward is driving Rebank to create truly exceptional customer experiences.