The core customer problem was straightforward: contractors needed to understand how their business was performing, but our reporting couldn't keep up with what they needed to see. Reports loaded slowly, showed static views with no way to explore, and every new report required our engineering team to build and deploy across multiple sprints. We tried solving this with Tableau Embedded, but it created new problems: poor load performance, limited control over branding and UX, and the same multi-sprint deployment bottleneck.

The question became: how do we give customers the reporting they need without our team being the bottleneck for every request? We evaluated ThoughtSpot Embedded, but a straight integration wouldn't work. We needed control over provisioning and data access at a level ThoughtSpot doesn't handle natively. So we built a hybrid integration with a custom middleware layer that manages what each user can see, while ThoughtSpot handles the analytics experience. On top of that, we shipped Custom Reporting via Spotter AI, which lets users build and save their own reports using natural language. Report generation went from minutes to seconds, and customers stopped waiting on us to answer their own questions. We packaged the full experience as Advanced Reporting, a paid add-on, making feasibility easier to justify by tying it directly to revenue.