InfluxData Delivers Faster "Time to Awesome" for Customers and Employees
InfluxData, creator of InfluxDB, is committed to helping organizations get maximum value from their time series data. InfluxDB is a highly performant time series database that offers real-time ingestion, advanced analytics, low-cost storage, and interconnectivity with popular tools and frameworks such as Grafana, Tableau, Snowflake, and Pandas. Since 2012, over a million developers and customers, ranging from startups to large enterprises like Cisco, IBM, and Siemens, trust InfluxDB with their time series data and analytics.
We met up with Jennifer Gibson and Christine Hynson to learn how InfluxData promotes that same mentality among employees in this award-winning workplace.
InfluxData’s team supports more than a million active instances of InfluxDB while working in a distributed environment. With a shared commitment to helping developers collect, store, and analyze massive volumes of time series data, InfluxData’s team relies on clear communication, strong collaboration, and unified objectives to drive success. Its customer-first mindset transcends any single physical location and allows InfluxData to recruit and hire talented individuals across the globe. InfluxData currently has employees worldwide, including in the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia.
Influxers may be separated, but they aren’t apart. “As a remote-first team, it’s really important that people get face time with each other. We also get together in person at least once a year. Keeping that sense of connection fosters relationships between departments, teams, and individuals,” Hynson explained.
Of the many things making InfluxData a great place to work, both Gibson and Hynson highlighted the importance of meaningful communication between Influxers. From the candidate experience to the employee experience, InfluxData teams value straightforward, honest, and transparent communication.
“Instead of the regular boilerplate interview questions, we immediately got down to the core of what the hiring team needed and where my skill set fit in. It was refreshing to have such a transparent and productive conversation, straying from the standard interview script. I appreciated that approach to hiring, and I really liked all the people I met from the first day on,” Gibson explained.
Hynson echoed Gibson’s positive candidate experience. “Our recruiter was transparent with me about where they were and where they planned to go,“ Hynson added. “My recruiter was sincerely interested in making the best decision for me, as well as hiring the right person for the role.”
InfluxData’s supportive environment allowed both Gibson and Hynson to grow, thrive, and make an impact in their roles.
“InfluxData enabled me to grow immensely and continues to empower me as I contribute to the team’s success,” Hynson said. “The transparency, honesty, and genuine connections with people here contribute to why I stay.”
InfluxData continues to build on that sense of close-knit community and help Influxers work effectively organization-wide. In pursuit of providing quick, easy access to information to a global workforce, the InfluxData team kicked off a search for a modern intranet. A modern intranet is a digital workplace that centralizes information, communication, and content for an organization’s employees.
“InfluxData enabled me to grow immensely and continues to empower me as I contribute to the team’s success.”
InfluxData has long been a remote-first organization. As the team expanded globally, a new intranet became crucial for strengthening connections and improving alignment across regions.
“We found Haystack at a great time,” Gibson began. “After many changes, we decided to revamp everything. At the time, our intranet was not great,” She continued. “Editing was difficult. We didn’t have a support team available to help us. We scoured Reddit looking for answers when we needed help. We decided to scrap our old intranet and find something that works for us and the way we share information.”
Having suboptimal intranet made it easier for the team to address pain points and identify the functionality needed to maximize positive impact across their organization. “We needed something with great search, syncing compatibility with all our tools, and, importantly, something clean, concise, and easy to use. Finding Haystack while we were changing the game for People Ops and our employee community was a great help. I rooted for Haystack from day one. I was sold after the first demo. I loved the features and capabilities. It was a pretty easy decision for me,” Gibson said.
“It had the right feel to it,” Hynson recalls of her first introduction to Haystack.“ At first glance, I noticed it was the cleanest-looking intranet product I’ve seen, which is so important for usability. I also liked the simplicity of how it could be set up while maintaining the ability to do everything we needed. It was a winner. We talked through all the platform’s capabilities on the admin side, and that solidified our choice.”
In 2023, InfluxData brought Haystack to its entire team. Bringing this new intranet initiative to life had the added benefit of strengthening alignment on InfluxData’s People Ops team—giving them a way to not only deliver an excellent digital experience for their employee community but also rally around what that experience should be. “Overall, Haystack really helped us to establish greater stability as a people team—especially during times of change,” Hynson said.
"I was sold after the first demo."
InfluxData’s commitment to openness and transparency is reflected not only in its internal operations but also in the value it provides to customers. With InfluxDB, developers can quickly unlock the potential of time series data, allowing them to focus on mission-critical tasks. By minimizing the time spent on infrastructure management, InfluxData helps developers accelerate innovation and deliver impactful applications. The company refers to this as, "Time to Awesome"—a faster, more satisfying way for developers to boost productivity by concentrating on their users, not on the complexities of infrastructure.
“Our company is here for customers, and our biggest job is to deliver faster ‘Time to Awesome,’” Hynson explained. “Haystack empowers our People Ops team to do the same internally for employees. Our goal is to make information readily available and easily searchable so people can find what they need quickly and get back to their work.”
For Gibson, Hynson, and their team, implementing an easy-to-use company-wide information-sharing product, like Haystack, for employees presented a unique opportunity to compound the value customers experienced even further.
“It allows us to put all shareable information in one place,” Hynson said. “Nobody wants a thousand logins to a thousand different tools. Instead, Haystack is a centralized one-stop shop for employees. When someone is looking for something, they can search through our Google Docs and other areas at the same time. They don't have to dig for information or wait for someone’s response.”
“Haystack helps our managers significantly—especially new managers looking for policy information their teams come to them for,” Gibson noted. “Before, they’d ask the people team over Slack. Now they’re able to find the information directly. It gives them a lot more autonomy to help their team with questions they’d normally come to us for.”
“Making information accessible to everyone also empowers people to find answers to questions they may not have thought to ask about,” Hynson added. “Having information available makes it easier for them to do their job, which is a big part of my job.”
In addition to providing a centralized repository for organizational knowledge, resources, and people, Haystack made creating and sharing information quicker, easier, and more inviting.
Sharing information effectively is also a vital component of good communication, and the InfluxData team makes great use of Haystack’s integrations and automated multi-channel delivery. “I’m a fan of how easy it is to create content in Haystack. We don’t have to train anyone,” Hynson said. “It’s so intuitive, you can just add people, and they can create content immediately. Haystack’s product and sales teams have a page where they share weekly updates. We have all these things now, and we don’t need to train people on how to create them.”
“I love Haystack’s integrations because each user has preferences for receiving information. Some people like Slack, and some prefer email communications. I like that I can send something once, and people get it everywhere. You can’t miss it!” Gibson said.
The same simplicity and ease of use extend to company event management, with the team leveraging calendar and mail integrations to make event invites simple to share and easy to see. “Our Outreach Club does a lot of great work with events, and they use Haystack to organize them,” Gibson explained. “Nearly all our events go through Haystack.” Hynson echoed, “Having automatic invitations sent to and into everyone’s shared calendar is incredibly helpful.”
“I’m a fan of how easy it is to create content in Haystack."
Intranets are often a burden for IT administrators. Haystack has been a refreshing change and even a value-add for InfluxData’s IT department. The department is no longer on standby waiting to fix issues with the company’s intranet.
“Our IT manager really loves Haystack,” Gibson said. “He participated in its initial implementation and remains an administrator. The IT team has dedicated pages with resources for the team that are easy to create. Now Influxers don’t need assistance with the platform.”
“It’s such a relief to have this off IT’s plate. With our old intranet, I was constantly asking our IT manager, ‘Do you know how to fix this?’ and we’d end up digging through forums, Google, and Reddit together, trying to find a solution.”
“Our IT manager really loves Haystack."
Lack of support and documentation were some of the more challenging aspects of InfluxData’s previous intranet. Onboarding Haystack was a stark contrast to this experience.
“Haystack’s team has been great to work with—especially during integration and launch, when we were setting everything up and built out the platform internally. They were always willing to hop on a call any time we needed,” Gibson shared.
“If people do have an issue, maybe there’s something Haystack doesn’t do—or doesn’t do yet—the team is so good about taking suggestions and feedback. And because of that, we’ve never run into an issue where someone is frustrated that they can’t use the platform or create what they want to—unlike our old intranet, which absolutely was frustrating and complicated.”
“I love how easy it is to get in touch with our CSM, Meghan, and how willing she is to jump in and help, offering solutions and ideas. Sometimes it can feel like a burden to reach out. Haystack is the opposite, and I really appreciate that,” Hynson said.
Everyone—from direct reports to managers and senior leaders—sent positive feedback about Haystack to Gibson and Hynson. “Our leadership team appreciates that communications and internal events go out across all our channels and can’t be missed. We share photos from company offsites and conferences. They’re really pleased with the reception and are glad that everyone is on board with it,” Gibson explained.
“Haystack saved us quite a bit of money, too,” Hynson mentioned. “We had a Learning Management System but removed it from our tech stack after integrating Haystack. Haystack has everything we need to build up our Learning and Development environment.”
"Haystack saved us quite a bit of money, too."
As members of the team that built and supported an engaging digital employee experience for a remote-first organization, Hynson and Gibson shared advice for others working to achieve the same goal.
“You can never over-communicate critical information,” Gibson said. “Whether it’s about a new platform, a new product, or open enrollment, you can never share it too many times or in too many places.”
“It’s important to build muscle memory for self-service,” Hynson shared. “Don’t be afraid to drive people to the system. The more work you put in during the beginning, the easier it will be. If you have everything organized and you’re confident you can send people there and they’ll find what they need, you can help people get accustomed to self-serving, thinking, ‘this is probably in Haystack’.”
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