Methods: User Interviews, Surveys
Timeline: June 2025

Introduction
As part of a bigger product initiative to improve the data processing and data storage capabilities of Anaplan, internal stakeholders (Product Managers, Engineers, Senior Leadership) wanted to understand why certain customers were experiencing slow downs when importing data into Anaplan. From conversations with these stakeholders, we saw that their was a gap in our understanding around what factors lead to slow downs in data imports from other tools. Anecdotally, customers have expressed to their Customer Success Partners that these slow downs are a key frustration for them, but we did not have an internal understanding around why this happened and to what percent of our users.

Specifically, we wanted to understand:

• How frequently are they importing data? Through what tools?
• How frequently are they experiencing slow downs?
• How does this affect the user experience? 
• What proportion of Anaplan customers does this affect?

In order to find out, I ran customer interviews with five customers who reported slow downs. I also created a survey which was shared with randomized users to see what the average experience with data integrations and imports is amongst our user base. 30 users responded to the survey, which is lower than preferred, but rigorous enough for our purposes with the additional context from the customer interviews. 


Key Findings
From our survey and user interviews, we found that on average, Anaplan customers import data into 3 to 5 different data models in their workspace, importing on average between 1 mb to 500 mb of data per import, and running data imports daily. Customers are on average neither dissatisfied or satisfied (4/7) with how often they experience model slow downs, experiencing on average weekly slow downs.  

From our interviews with customers who import data multiple times a day, we found that the integration tool used is a big factor in customer satisfaction and slowdown occurence. Customers mentioned that Cloudworks (one of our current integration tools) can cause slowdowns due to the way it processes integrations. On average, the customers we interviewed felt that they were somewhat satisfied (5.4/7) with their integration experience with Anaplan.


Impact
These findings were interesting and valuable to share to internal stakeholders, as it challenged the current understanding that model slowdowns caused by data imports was a key issue that affected a large proportion of our user base. Instead, we saw that this is a smaller issue that disproportionately affects users who utilize certain tools.

By conducting this research, we were able to inform product decisions for a new data integration tool that Anaplan is releasing. Specifically, engineering now knows what the average and extreme values are for how much data is being moved into Anaplan, and how often. 

Links
If you would like to dive deeper into the survey design, interview guide, or other research artifacts from this study, click here