Cost-saving stories from enterprise teams

Just because a process is entrenched doesn’t mean it’s the best, see how Qualtrics and Opportun leverage Coda to save money.

Joe Bauer

Product Marketing Manager at Coda

Cost-saving stories from enterprise teams

By Joe Bauer

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Product teams · 7 min read
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, office memos lived on paper. Execs communicated with secretaries, who typed up and transferred messages to someone else to deliver to other employees or to the post office, where the process continued for several steps. Now, of course, we can Slack or email a colleague or client halfway across the world in a matter of seconds. Just because a process is entrenched doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do things. When Coda co-founder Shishir Mehrotra was designing his dream software, he had a similarly comprehensive view of the ways in which Coda would change the way we worked. Coda was based on a document—one of the earliest things software changed. But Coda’s original docs have grown into an all-in-one workspace that can consolidate or replace all of your daily tools. Writing, data management, and project tracking can all live in a Coda doc, and a broad library of integrations means you can pull in work from hundreds of other tools. Just because it used to take five tools to run one process doesn’t mean it should. And the best part? Coda can revolutionize your workflow while it saves you money. Here’s how.

Qualtrics decluttered their data with Coda, saving time and money.

 Qualtrics deals in data for companies that have a lot of it—organizations like Coca Cola, Spotify, and Toyota. Wrangling all these other organizations’ data left Qualtrics with exponentially expanding documents and spreadsheets. As they pulled in more and more world-class clients, Qualtrics’ Product Managers knew they needed an intervention.
We were exhausted with the sheer number of documents being generated and how quickly those documents became obsolete.
Drew Holman
Senior Product Manager, Qualtrics
“We were exhausted with the sheer number of documents being generated and how quickly those documents became obsolete,” says Drew Holman, Senior Product Manager. And the issue was company-wide. Their infrastructure—of many platforms used slightly differently by each team—created confusing warrens of untrustworthy documents. “It was impossible to trust any document unless it was being shared live, and the effort just to know what was being worked on and how it was going was more work than it was worth,” Drew said.
  • The Product, Design, and Engineering team worked out of Google Docs, so they had to make sure several docs stored in different drives were updated correctly multiple times every day. Switching gears, tools, and accounts throughout every single day was frustrating the team and causing operational drag.
  • Over on the sales team, fragmented information stored in multiple tools meant the team struggled to get the big picture. They spent most of their time focused on active opportunities instead of generating new deals across their books.
  • The team putting on Qualtrics’ biggest event, X4, relied on individual people as their source of information storage. Failing to codify that knowledge meant newer team members were often left waiting for meetings to find the information they needed to do their jobs.
Drew and company were confident Coda could wrangle documents better than their fragmented system, and the streamlined organizing came with an exciting bonus: they got to hit “end subscription” on several expensive organizing tools. Qualtrics found several pros to using Coda right away. Namely, teams were both happier and more efficient (and quicker, more satisfied teams are an accounting team’s dream!). Since Coda centralized operations for every team, employees could now do their job without wasting time switching gears between docs, platforms, and accounts.
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Coda made Oportun’s savings worth reporting to the CFO.

 When Oportun acquired Digit, they knew there would be some workflow adjustments—after all, that was part of the point of acquiring a category leading savings app. They expected a learning curve with their new teammates. But the Oportun team didn’t expect to fall in love with Digit’s tool stack, especially (you guessed it) Coda. In the early days of the acquisition, leadership wanted the transition to be as seamless as possible. They let everyone use whatever tools they liked, as long as the work was getting done. The combined teams were still settling into their routines when an explosion in organic growth made Coda’s edge clear. The workflows built in Coda were objectively quicker and more coherent, even under the pressure of unexpected growth.
When the original Oportun teams saw how well Coda could keep up with increased demand, it led to organic, organization-wide adoption.
It means we're not having to manage all of these different apps, while the icing on the cake is when you can take the cost reductions to the CFO.
Ron Hanna
VP of Technology Operations, Oportun
“It means we're not having to manage all of these different apps, while the icing on the cake is when you can take the cost reductions to the CFO,” says Ron Hanna, Vice President of Technology Operations at Oportun. Coda quickly replaced several other software tools and saved the admin team hours, helping them cut costs across the board.
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How much margin could Coda add to your budget?

 Consolidating tools, cleaning up data organization, and getting your team on the same page may seem like ambitious goals for a single program, but Coda can meet the demands of even the largest of enterprise teams—both in the short term and for years to come. When we say this platform is all in one, we mean it can replace and integrate data from hundreds of other programs. This allows teammates who only need view-only access to apps like Salesforce to use Coda to view the data without needing to buy more expensive seats.
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