I. Introduction: Tide’s data & analytics team

Tide is the leading provider of UK small business accounts and one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the UK. Tide is live in the UK and India with over 550,000 members in the UK and more than 150,000 in India. Their platform not only offers business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of highly connected admin tools for businesses, such as full integration with accounting systems.

Sai Anil Kumar, Staff Data Platform Engineer at Tide, was one of our earliest supporters, and therefore, there is no one better than him to give us some insights about, well, ourselves.

When it comes to what I value in a teammate, I appreciate someone who can not only build something but also fix it if it breaks. While being smart is important, being adaptable and critical of your own work are just as essential, if not even more important. So needless to say, I work with these kinds of people at Tide.

II. Challenges: failed dbt™ jobs and inflexible tools

I was actually trying out Paradime for feedback purposes when you were still in stealth mode. During this time, we started encountering problems with our current tech stack, such as failed dbt™ jobs and decided to look into what tools were out there. Some of Paradime’s competitors have been around for longer, but what made you stand out was, for example, multiple workspaces. We also felt that we got more bang for the buck with Paradime compared to your competitors.

III. Solution: implementing a more user-centric development experience

Paradime’s user-friendly Code IDE has helped my team work more effortlessly, reducing complexity in problem-solving, with a User Effort Score of 93 out of 100. The attention to even smaller details, such as a simple folder structure and navigation, plays an important role in this as well. Not every feature needs to be world-changing. Speaking of features, there are, of course, some standouts.

Paradime’s user-friendly Code IDE has helped my team work more effortlessly, reducing complexity in problem-solving, with a User Effort Score of 93 out of 100.

Multiple workspace

Having the ability to work on multiple workspaces is a game-changer. It provides us with the flexibility and structure necessary to drive our data mesh project forward - and at the speed we want to drive it. As you know, many companies and people in the data and analytics industry are talking about data mesh, but only a few are successfully implementing it. So for us, it was crucial to find a tool that could support us in building the data mesh architecture we need.

Bolt Schedules

Before using Paradime, our team spent a considerable amount of time on maintenance work to ensure dbt™ jobs were not failing. However, with Bolt Schedules, the team can now actually focus on development. This feature makes their work much more manageable by, for example, enabling them to set up new jobs as simple YAML files. So less troubleshooting and more work done with Paradime Bolt Schedules!

Webhooks

Webhooks offer us the freedom to customise our alerts to match our preferences, as with data mesh, every team needs different kinds of alerts. By integrating Slack and Paradime via webhooks, we've streamlined error notifications for our Analytics Engineers, enabling us to focus on essential tasks, optimise resource planning, and reduce notification overload. In the past, before we implemented Paradime, we would receive multiple alerts for the same run. For instance, if a job failed at midnight, we'd wake up to 20-30 alerts in the morning. Now, we can also track the resolution of these failures through automated notifications in Slack and via email, preventing duplication of work due to communication gaps.

IV. Impact: less context-switching and improved productivity

Since implementing Paradime, close to 90% of the data and analytics team has experienced a smoother, more user-centric analytics development workflow due to, for example, reduction in context switching. Additionally, nearly 60% of the team has noted a significant increase in time saved weekly since adopting the platform.

V. Conclusion: what makes Paradime truly stand out among the competition?

The dedication to your customers is truly remarkable. Not only did you help us get the platform up and running by migrating all our pipelines in less than two weeks, your continued support in everything from feature implementation to bugs helps my team work more efficiently.

Being an early-stage startup operated by a lean team and still being able to provide us with this level of support and attentiveness is impressive. The Paradime team operates at a pace I haven’t seen many startups do, or even more mature companies too, for that matter.

I find great comfort in knowing that the Paradime team is always there to assist me or my team with any challenges that arise.