Delivering new capabilities for enabling teams to manage, automate and report on work at scale is core to the mission of Smartsheet Inc. It’s about catering to specific enterprise customer groups, whose feedback guided many of the announcements the company made during its annual ENGAGE gathering today.

“We see three distinct user groups,” said Gene Farrell (pictured), chief product officer of Smartsheet. “There’s the workforce, which is at the core of where we started; the information-technology teams, which many times are there to support the workforce but also drive a lot of their own workflows; and then the business decision makers. What we’ve tried to do is make sure we were delivering a set of capabilities for everybody.”

Farrell spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Smartsheet ENGAGE event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed the company’s recent product announcements and the importance of using different ways to generate all-important customer feedback (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Conversations and context

The company made a number of new products and services announcements today. These included enhancements for making Smartsheet dashboards easier to customize, a new multi-tier capability in its Control Center product, and a multi-select dropdown option in its forms function.

The firm also released a contextual solution that turns Smartsheet into a platform for managing and holding critical work discussions.

“Probably the highlight was our new conversations and context,” Farrell said. “It’s going to enable a whole new level of collaboration and engagement within the platform.”

Smartsheet’s latest announcements did not come out of the blue. The company maintains a strong belief in listening to customer feedback for what they expect. That comes from holding over 40 user group meetings this year around the globe and allowing customers to pilot test new products before release, according to Farrell.

“Customers will talk and share best practices and give us feedback on things they would like to see,” said Farrell, who described private beta and early adopter programs for Smartsheet users. “Both of those enroll customers in interacting with things we’re building before they’re launched. We think that’s really important to make sure we actually hit the mark.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Smartsheet ENGAGE event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Smartsheet ENGAGE event. Neither Smartsheet Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE