Basic model
Your workspace is your mission control inside Steep, where all your metrics and interactions live. Most organizations will stick to one workspace for their whole company.
Metrics are defined calculations on top of your data that power all the visualisations and calculations inside Steep. You can define any metric you need using built-in templates or custom SQL expressions. For each metric you can also define dimensions used for breakdowns, control access rights, add documentation and much more.
You can connect any supported database to access your data in Steep. Steep generates SQL under the hood and supports most SQL databases.
Using metrics
Once defined, your metrics can be explored and analyzed by anyone in an intuitive and powerful UI. With a single metric you access multiple vizualisations, you can zoom in and out in time, use a daily or monthly time grain, break down by different dimensions, overlay with targets, combine with other metrics and much more. This flexibility is available to all users and is at the heart of what makes Steep so powerful.
With the same metrics you can also set up widgets to customize team dashboards. These are designed for an at-a-glance overview of metrics that makes sense for an entire team to track. All widgets are responsive and look great on mobile devices.
Organizing content
Teams are a helpful way to organize your Steep workspace. All teams can create their own team dashboards, where they can choose which metrics to track, and organize widgets in multiple sections. And the teams you have joined show up in the sidebar for easy access.
Most Steep "teams" map to your real organizational units (such as marketing, operations, product or management) but can also be a project, like a market launch or product launch that cross-functional teams want to follow.
Controlling access
There are two roles in Steep, users can either be members or admins. Members can explore all defined metrics, view all public content and customize dashboards. Admins can also create and edit metrics, connect databases and manage private teams.
All users that are invited to your workspace in Steep get access to all public metrics and teams. If needed, you can use private metrics to restrict access to specific teams.
It’s up to you decide who gets what role, and there are no differences in pricing. For data-savvy teams, most people might be admins to allow for fast iteration on metrics. For mixed teams where focus is on using metrics, you might opt to have fewer admins and more members.
Collaboration between users
To make sense of metric movements together, you can add comments to each metrics timeline. For most teams, comments are a useful way to ask questions around events (e.g. “Registrations are up, was this when we launched the campaign?”) or for celebrating (”We just hit an all-time-high!”) or to annotate the timeline with important events (”Product release #25”, “New pricing model launched”).
Using comments can dramatically increase the amount of context you and your organization have available when interpreting trends. And since all metrics have an identity, all comments for a given metric will be in the same place.
For deeper discussions, you can share deep links to specific views in Slack or Teams. This makes it very easy for others to jump right into Steep and see what you are looking at.