Brainforge x CTA: Weekly!
Date: February 13, 2026
Source: Granola
Meeting ID: e2f01ffc-6e05-4811-aad1-25f47800d9c3
URL: https://notes.granola.ai/t/e2f01ffc-6e05-4811-aad1-25f47800d9c3
Participants:
- Uttam Kumaran (Brainforge)
- Kyle Wandel (cta.tech)
- Katherine Bayless (cta.tech)
- Chi Quinn (cta.tech)
- Ashwini Sharma (Brainforge)
Transcript
Them: Iced over. And so just like two days ago when it was warm, I, like, broke up all the chunks, basically, to try and make it help it melt faster. And then it got cold again, so it refroze. So my dogs are now, like, walking over landmines or, like, giant cliffs of these ice blocks, and so. My shepherd, who is, like, the biggest scaredy cat in the world, even though he’s 95 pounds and he’s a shepherd, he hates it. Like, just won’t even do it. Whereas my lab was, like, nine years old and £40. It’s just like, I got to go bathroom, so here.
Me: I’m going to figure it out.
Them: My. My lab is, like. My lab is, like, perfect. And then Mar Shepard is just like a big baby. It’s just. Yeah.
Me: She’s got to push it out the door.
Them: Basically, yeah. Like, if it’s even just raining outside, like, it was a little wet on the gr. On the gravel. He will not go. He’ll. He’ll go in the house, and it’s like, God damn it, stop.
Me: Pampered.
Them: When I was just telling Kyle, like, we. We literally so, like, we built, like, a gravel area for. Because that’s how I grew up, actually, with, like, an area for the dogs that go to the bathroom. And so because we have two dogs, and, like, they would just destroy the grass immediately, and so. We did that. I did that, too. Here. And it works really well. Like, it’s fantastic. It’s just that our shepherd is just an.
Me: How’s the rest of the week going? Or has it gone? I guess it’s already gone.
Them: Yeah, it’s already gone Good. So far. I think we’re just the biggest issue. I think Kyle’s managing, like, the. All the power bi. Like the current stuff, basically.
Me: Okay?
Them: Yeah. And I. I finished it yesterday because I did add the Fortune 500. Thank you again. Because. Yeah, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t edit it. I was trying to read a little bit about it, and then I kind of switched over to working on the list for marketing. So if I have some time, later today. I know that’s. I mean, we’re kind of moving past power bi. But I was just kind of curious. Because, yeah, it seemed like I would have access, but other than that, The report is good to go.
Me: My question, and not to change the conversation, but just a quick so who I guess exactly what is the process of notifying certain people? So I guess the people who I’ve individually sent emails to to say, hey, here’s this first the first report I put out n to update them with, hey, this is the latest one with, you know, more information beyond just the session, and it’s more about the conference attendees. So is that like a. I guess. Do I just send that to the folks who I’ve emailed prior to your question?
Them: We don’t have a formal process, quite frankly, so. Yeah, usually you just like individually message or email the big group. Basically you can BCC or cc, it doesn’t really matter. And so I think that would be good going forward if there is like, if you, you don’t view any suggestions on terms of like a blast. Not only email, but I don’t know if it’s like a notification or asana or something that we can do. Like, hey, this report’s been updated. I don’t know if that’s possible based on certain things, but that would be. Do that.
Me: No. Yeah. I think, Kyle, there’s a couple of ways. One is, like, if we’re just talking about there’s updates, then I think a global blast is fine because we can’t isolate necessarily who’s using it. Then it’s worth everybody knowing. I think on our side. Kyle, I don’t know if you have. Ultimately, it would be great. If it all kind of tracks back to a ticket. But I don’t know if you’re keeping track of that anywhere else. But that way our team has some coverage. Like, hey, we actually updated this and we sent the email. So it’s kind of documented.
Me: I think probably my only other point is if we’re talking about deprecation and we’re trying to figure out if we’re deleting dashboards in that situation, What I would suggest is. You basically kind of do like a migration plan where you’re like, hey, the staff was getting deleted. We’re going to first start by. This is going to be the deprecation date. If you have any questions, let us know, and then sort of work your way towards that date and then start to sort of. Slowly remove people from access. That’s like how I would typically both those cases, but I don’t know if that is that helpful.
Them: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Because speaking of. What, the inventory. Yeah. There’s some that are so outdated and the fact that I was looking at just the metrics of who’s using some of those reports for the past 90 days. Of course, there are cases where some are looking, some aren’t, but obviously it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not using it. It’s just season, like a report they use once every few seasons or something. So, yeah, I. Yeah.
Me: Okay? Yeah. One way also I would recommend is do you have that in, like, a dock or those metrics?
Them: That’s.
Me: Per dashboard.
Them: I. So I have it like in an Excel spreadsheet.
Me: Or even Excel is fine. Yeah, that’s more of what I meant. One way you could do that is I think that’s a great deliverable to just kind of probably share with Katherine and say, hey, here’s what we found.
Them: Yeah. Yeah.
Me: As you guys were a very seasonal business. So it is very likely that dashboards only get used like January and then are maybe not touched. So I think it’s probably good for us to probably take, what, inventory so far and then maybe regroup on that. One other thing you could do is you could look at has this been used in the last 24 months? And that’s probably a good thing to first. Because then you can assume, okay, it’s been two years. You hope that that uncovers a few. Right? The rest. I think it’s probably best to get Katherine ultimate feedback. Yeah.
Them: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll start doing that. Yeah. Because what I’ve been doing, because there’s 218 + reports, and so I’ve been going by workspaces. And so I just started off with, of course, with ces, so I kind of have, like, you know, just the first metrics on as far as who’s been viewing it for the past 90 days, but I will look into going back because I know the previous data team, they have like this.
Me: Okay?
Them: Excel extravaganza of just all power. The power BI reports. And I think they even have who usually views the reports and who viewed under reports like previous years. So I have to take a look at that and yeah, go from there.
Me: O. Kay.
Them: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the whole process. What’s in the snowflake and like, migrating now is, like, cleaning it up so we won’t have to worry about all those 200 plus reports.
Me: Yeah, I think. Kyle, even if you want help the formatting of that document or if you want me to review, I’m happy to review that, I think. Giving that organization by workspace. And then basically what we kind of want to end up with is sort of. You kind of want to get an inventory of every dashboard, and then we want to be able to rank by priority, the team, and kind of like if there’s a single owner or subject matter expert that we could tie every dashboard. And then ideally, you kind of want these other fields, which is called. What is the next decision from the daily team? Is this being deprecated? Needs to get scheduled for deprecation. It’s no action or needs changes. So that indicates what is the next step for us to take? And so those are commonly helpful fields to put in. Sort of similar. Like how we’re thinking about Asana, right? It’s like, for all these sort of inventories or like this tracking my point of view is like, you always try to make it clear, like, what is the next action to take, Right? So that way, when Katherine comes back and sees that sheet, it’s clear that she’s like, we’ve gone through. A first pass.
Them: Yeah.
Me: These are clearly. We recommend the deprecase. No one’s looked at this in a long time. And these are the rest of them. Where should we go from here?
Them: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll do that. What I’ll do because. Yeah, I know. In the ticket. I know. I guess once we look at the ticket or whatever. Because that’s what I was thinking. Like, at least for that particular task, I might have to break it down because it’s almost like, you know, CES CS Conference. One week. And then I think there were other various workspaces because there are a few workspaces that I still have to look into. And so it looks like, you know, if we’re going to go by the one week sprint,
Me: Okay?
Them: Per se, then I would need to break it down at least. And I’ll break it down by workspace, so.
Me: Yes. Okay? Yes, I think breaking it down by workspace is fine.
Them: Yeah.
Me: And again, I think the point here is just like, we don’t want to have to go through another broad inventory thing again. At least for another while, right?
Them: Right.
Me: So that’s probably the primary focus. And then once we’re like, hey, we canvas everything, we have everything in one place. We can already see that there’s a couple here that nobody’s using. As a team. Now look, what do we do with the rest? And so Katherine may have some things as like, oh, those are clearly like, this person. We probably shouldn’t touch those. Let me go investigate these. And some of these are like, oh, yeah. That’s, like, totally deprecated. Or there’s a better solution.
Me: The other thing that’s going to be really helpful is we’re going to try to move some of those people from needing to go to Power BI to go directly to Snowflake. And so another thing that we’re going to hope to see is are the metrics or insights from that dashboard now possible via Snowflake AI? So that’s probably the only other thing that could be also helpful here is are you able to get all the same information? Navia Snowflake. And that way it makes the shift really easy for folks. And then memberships, I feel like, is really our core thing. So any power bi touching memberships, I think we have a 200, but if I could even continue to just whittle down where we can focus, I feel like that’s probably going to be the theme.
Them: Yeah. You’re at a good time, Kyle, because this is, like UTAM said, the busiest time for our data usage or reports. So you have a good idea of who’s using what’s important. So, like conference games obviously is relatively important because I got to send out a bunch of lists of their part, like partners. Basically. And then for cs, like, Dave Hennessy would be a really good person to reach out to, but it really is just like prospecting lists. And then throughout the year, the other major report is like, member engagement. Like, that’s really the main one that’s used.
Them: I’m trying to think off top of my head, if anyone else really uses much. But I mean, it’s really it from my perspective, I know that from sales I don’t really have much perspective on because they’re very siloed and very close guarded, but. That’s from. I think that was the big one is membership. And then right after CES is CES metrics, basically. Okay? And that’s a wide range, as you’ve known as, as you notice, a wide range of topics of what that looks like. Yes, exactly.
Them: So switch it over to Snowflow, Utah. I don’t know if Katherine told you. We did a couple, like, demos for the membership team. It was actually really, really cool. So one day we basically built a streamlit app for them from scratch.
Me: Cool.
Them: Basically looking at renewals. So they helped us kind of develop the logic and develop everything from that standpoint, and it works really, really well. So there’s a Streamlab app. I can’t remember what it’s called exactly. Let me look really quick. But it. Yeah, Renewal tracker. It’s really, really cool. Really, really in depth and works really well, so. And they were blown away by it, basically, so I think they are pretty interested in maybe creating some of their own apps as well.
Me: Awesome.
Them: Pretty nice.
Me: Yes.
Them: So. But that’s from. I think that was a nice little update. Nice. They seem very interested in it, so that’s cool.
Me: Okay, perfect. Yeah. So on our side, related to that, a lot of the ask on our team was to just make sure that Snowflake is in a really good place, like clean. And so One of the PRs that I pushed that, I think I’ll just kind of waiting for Friday afternoon because it’s. Going to change some roles and stuff to execute. Is really just all the sort of role hierarchies and making sure that we give the streamlit viewers a role where they can view prodmars and they can create streamlit apps and they sort of have, like, there should be nothing else basically on the screen. So that’s what I’m going to get out, make sure all of those people that were added have that role. And so I feel like that’s a big win for us. Additionally, we’ve kind of added a ton of documentation on that right into there.
Me: So for the future, it’s all really clear how to create new roles and things like that. It’s hopefully not something that we’re going to spend more time speaking about on a weekly basis, but I think probably quarterly. We could just new people if new types of users need to come in. We can support them with the right Snowflake rules. So that’s really on our side, I think. Also, Ashwini was able to ship a lot of PRs this week. Some of those. I feel like small changes from the membership team. I think we got a lot of them. There’s some on my review list this morning. To continue to get out. We’re just sort of, like, marking those sauna tickets is done as we get through them.
Me: But I think, Ky, it’s probably more of a question is like, yeah. Should we make those asana changes in terms of. For example, if we take a good example, like, hey, we need to add this field. The way it kind of works with the development side is like, one of us will make that change. I typically review it. And then the field is there. Wondering for that ticket. Should we put that into waiting for sign off? Basically, Maybe Katherine is like the. Or whoever. This is kind of like an internal request, right? But yeah.
Them: Yeah. I I was going to I updated the fields or I added the fields I know, like for the work type and the in the other field that I can’t think of on top of my head. But I did add that and I wanted to update the sections, but it looks like I’m might not have the permissions to do that because. Yeah. So I just have to wait, I guess, until.
Me: Okay? Great. Okay? Any chance you could just walk me through? Because I’m used to Jira and Linear. I would use asana in a while. If you could just walk me through how to use that, then I could start to do that.
Them: Sure. Let me see. Yeah, it’s funny because I’m. I previously used Jira more so. So I’m just getting used to asana. So I’m. I guess I’m technically a newbie.
Me: Okay?
Them: As well. Let me see. Okay? Hopefully you can see that. So what I did was basically I just added the two other fields, the work type and the team. And what I did was so I go up to customize fields and then I just add, add, create new, and yeah, it’s pretty straightforward from there.
Me: Great. Perfect. Three. Okay? Okay. Oh, I see the team now. Okay, I just didn’t click it. Okay? Perfect.
Them: Yeah. And this. Yeah. And so I tried to change this or update this, but it looks like a moment. I don’t have the permissions, but I can. Or one of us can update it. But, yeah, I do like the waiting for sign off, because at least for me, I like confirmation, you know, when I pass something along.
Me: Yeah, I’m the same way. He said it perfectly.
Them: Yeah.
Me: I don’t like throwing stuff in the ether, so I’m like, so what do I do? It’s like, okay, then I’m just gonna probably just ping Katherine Slack. But I feel like that’s kind of not really organized way.
Them: Y. Eah.
Me: Another question I had is like, should we, is there any, should we make those fields required?
Them: For. I would, you know. It’s funny enough because I want to say yes. And I guess I was trying to think of use cases or, you know, a situation where, you know, maybe we wouldn’t need it. And I couldn’t think of. I mean, at the moment, I couldn’t think of anything.
Me: Okay?
Them: But I. ‘m. I’m all for adding tags, but because it would be good for reporting purposes, like once we, you know, review, like the work and everything, I think it would be great. More so on the internal side as far as the forms, like for people to write on the forums. I feel like for now that would be optional because some may not have, like, the definitions that we might apply. It might be different for people outside of the team. When they put in, you know, their request, they might have, oh, it’s this. But it might be something. I mean, that’s something we could change internally. But I was thinking about that as far as, like, making it required. I would say. I. Would say sure. More so internal. But I’ll have to think about that. Let me. Let me think about that.
Me: Okay?
Them: I’ll let you know when it’s at. Monday or the next time we meet.
Me: O. Kay. Perfect.
Them: Is there a way to make a mandatory by step, so not necessarily by the creating of the task, but like let’s say if we want membership to review, they get notification, then we need them to. Do it basically, before we can hand it off over. I don’t know. That’d be the only. That’d be the way I would think that’d be mandatory, not necessarily having to do it from the very beginning. Yeah.
Me: Yeah, we’re thinking about this. I’m gonna go back on our tickets and just try to update them. But, yeah, I feel like it just helps. So we’re not. Because I feel like if we don’t fill out in the beginning, we may just get lazy. I’m just gonna forget to kind of make sure they’re all filled out. So having them come in that way, at least we can adjust it. Even if it’s wrong, we can just adjust it. But at least it’s filled. Because I think probably in, like, three, four weeks, you’ll start to have some good data on, like, where all our requests are coming from.
Them: Yeah, I think so.
Me: Okay? Cool. Okay, great. I feel like. Let me just check my list. Yeah. I don’t know, Kyle, Ashwini If you guys had a chance to hop on, to sort of go through that pr.
Them: Yeah, we did. It was nice. It was nice through the whole process. Go through. And I, I now understand that it’s like a, like a 24 hour automatic update. So that was really cool. And so now I can go in and I feel much more confident. I feel confident, like, building the pipeline. Now I feel confident. That it will show up, so.
Me: Okay? Yes. So that’s the thing. I was like, I don’t want you to have to worry about, like, oh, I need to. I need to, like, be able to build the orchestration architecture. But it’s really helpful for you to know that how it works.
Them: Yeah.
Me: So that you, as a data model developer, are like, I can comfortably push models. I know when they have to get executed in staging to go verify. And then I know that there’s this review process, and then they get merged. And we can tighten all that up. Right. So over time. But that was sort of my goal. So that. That’s. That’s great.
Them: No, that’s perfect. And I think I was talking to Katherine, but I’m like, I didn’t think she told you as well, but I’m like one of those kids that likes to play until it breaks it basically.
Me: Yeah, that’s great. I’m the same way. I’m not. Like, I don’t read the book or I don’t read the instructions in school, so I always miss the, like. If you make sure to read this bar and, like, add this thing to the end of your homework, I never do that, so. Always run back, run right in.
Them: Y. Ep. Yep.
Me: And so I feel that. So that’s why, like, there is, I would say, very low risk right now breaking anything.
Them: Y. Ep.
Me: Except you’re just going to get annoying, like alerts on your laptop or like git stuff is probably it.
Them: Yeah.
Me: It will become a little bit more safeguarded, probably like a few months where, like, there’s, like, a lot of reporting builds on it. But again, a lot of the ways we’ve architected Snowflake and the DBT process is to guard against anybody making sort of mistakes like that, you know, so that’s really great to hear.
Them: That works. And I’m. I’m. So today I’m just kind of, like, finalizing some of the reports that you guys. Not really finalize, but updating some of the reports. So mainly the CES one. I don’t know if I’ll call it member engagement, but I’ll update it to be attendees. Basically the the registration report is in ProDMarts, but I’ll do the attendee pipeline now because I will be another report that people like is more they really only care about attendees. But it’s nice to have registration for our own data analysis purposes.
Me: Okay? Okay? Okay, cool.
Them: But, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Everything’s going well. From. From my standpoint, I think Kyle’s working pretty well in power bi. And the. The amount of data people want is slowing down a little bit, which is good. Okay, back up here and there. And then we have one big super user that we’ve. Been told is, like, just having fun. So he has been sending Katherine a bunch of queries to basically QA to make sure he’s pulling the right information. So that’s good to know.
Me: Okay? Okay? Okay? Maybe. One thing also, if you like, want some light Friday reading, is to have a look at kind of this doc on like, what progress we made on the ID stitching.
Them: Yeah, yeah, I actually made a comment. So, yeah, yeah, I took took a quick glance. I think I should have a comment and then my own little analysis in terms of just how it ran. And so, yeah, that’s really good. It’s really good to progress you guys made. Looking forward to that table since we have that table, like everything becomes a lot smoother, a lot more accurate.
Me: Oh, cool. Okay, okay. Nice, okay? Great. Awesome. So this is exactly sort of what we explained is like we’re going to do waterfall, we’re going to match as many ways possible and then we’ll come up with some logic on, like take this one first, if not this one, if not this one. And, like, sort of, like, continue to, like, look at this number as, like, our KPI, which is, like, how many are stitched? And then ultimately, like, we want to get this to 100. And then it sort of. Then we look at the accuracy next, because then the accuracy is going to be like, okay, for some. We need to take this versus this.
Them: Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense.
Me: To get accurate or some of these. This data source is, like, often inaccurate. We need to bring in sales, intel or whatever. So that’s sort of like the. The order of operations.
Them: Yep, that’s perfect. I mean, like I said, fantastic work at the beginning and like the hardest part will definitely be like the registration data set. But doing on day morganizations will be really nice. The biggest thing is that definitely I was doing a Sweeney. This like 90% of the emails in or the people in registration will not be in remembrance. So like the. The stitching of it, from an individual standpoint, probably not important, but trying to tie it back to the organization as best as possible is what’s important.
Me: Okay? Okay?
Them: It’ll be really messy. Democratization should have everything, basically. But register it from CES data will have a lot of nulls.
Me: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Okay? Okay? Okay? Cool. Well, that’s all I had. Well, yeah. Let me know how I can be helpful today. And then. Yeah, Kyle, if I can be helpful on anything on the Power BI XL thing, I think Katherine out until, like, Wednesday.
Them: Yeah, Wednesday.
Me: Is that right? Okay. We’ll plan on chatting. I think we have. I don’t know if that’s. Maybe I’ll grab time on Monday for us to just, like, regroup. Is there, like, a particular time that works best for everyone, or,like, just morning? Actually, Is Monday a holiday, by the way? I don’t even. Okay. Okay, cool. All right.
Them: So we’re off. Yeah. So let’s. Let’s enjoy that. That long weekend.
Me: All right. Okay. Yeah, let’s see. Maybe we do Tuesday sometime.
Them: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.
Me: Maybe. Yeah.
Them: I can’t remember if she gets back Wednesday or she’s. If she’s. She gets back Wednesday, but she wants to take the rest of Wednesday off. I can’t remember what it is.
Me: You’re right. Actually, I feel like I think she may be off the rest of the week, the whole week. But she’s like, I may.
Them: How do you. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s what it is. Y.
Me: She’s like, I may, like, poke in and see stuff. So maybe we just, like. I can send a note Tuesday, and we could either do Async or we can hop on briefly, like. How about that? I’ll just put it in my calendar.
Them: Eah, that’d be great. And I know she’ll. She’ll want to, like, show should. She’ll be curious. She’s.
Me: Yeah, I could. Totally. So I will. I’ll send a note. On what we talked about here today.
Them: Perfect.
Me: And then similarly, on Tuesday, we’ll just do that in the channel so she can see that. I’m sure she’s just like, what does the team up to? I just want to make sure everyone’s okay.
Them: Exactly. She’s. She’s like, she can’t enjoy her time away from work. We’re working on, so.
Me: I didn’t ask her where she was going, so maybe I got to ask.
Them: Exactly. Italy, right?
Me: Yeah. Oh, wonderful.
Them: Yeah. They’re doing. I can’t remember what she said, but there’s like, some big gala or basically a big event. Like, really to do basically. Really, Richie, you have to be in the know. And so one of her friends is in the know. Really? Well, and so Katherine going to wear, like, a full on dress and everything, so that would be surprising.
Me: Nice. Okay? Let’s go. Let’s. Go. I feel like this weekend we’re gonna go in Austin. There’s a really fun pop pop cover band that plays, like, on holiday, so we’re going for Valentine’s Day. At Saturday night.
Them: That’d be dope. Maybe. Do it.
Me: That’s my, like, fancy, fancy gala event that I pumped for is to hear, like, rebate and my demographics.
Them: Perfect. We’re stay. We’re staying in. So you enjoy it, though?
Me: Nice. I appreciate it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. Okay.
Them: All right, thanks, guys. Have a good night.
Me: Thank you. Bye.