DISH reboots streaming with innovative B2B offering, using Heap to direct production

Casting the right tool

Amidst the crowded streaming playing field, DISH saw an opportunity to reimage streaming as an innovative B2B offering. This new commercial product, OnStream, is a flexible bulk streaming provider for businesses like hotels, apartment complexes, schools, and airlines, with customizable features for each business’s needs. To ensure a successful launch for OnStream, Product Managers at DISH knew they needed an analytics tool that could provide more than their legacy solutions. 

“Because we released OnStream in bulk, we had relatively no insight into the size of our active user base,” says Dalton Hertel, Product Manager for DISH OnStream. “We also didn’t have a great understanding of who our customers were and how they were interacting with our site. We needed to understand the users’ experience with OnStream to decide what to develop next and where to spend our resources.”

“Historically legacy opinions or competitive intelligence informed a lot of product decisions. Our Product Team wanted to bring on a robust analytics tool so we could become more data-driven with our strategy. We evaluated a couple options— Adobe, Mixpanel, Amplitude— and ultimately went with Heap. Ease of implementation with autocapture was a huge driving factor. Our Development Team was— and still is— extremely busy developing features, so we didn't want to bug them with additional work.”

With OnStream’s launch underway, DISH needed to get Heap running quickly so they wouldn’t miss out on crucial data. Through the Onboarding Package from Heap’s Professional Services Team, DISH was able to work directly with an Implementation Consultant to ensure a smooth onboarding experience.

Kicking off pre-production

“The Implementation Team from Heap was super knowledgable,” says Dalton. “They quickly got me up to speed on Heap basics and walked through what it was going to take to create a robust environment for us. Our Implementation Consultant helped us convert key business questions into digestible reports that provided data-driven answers.” 

“I probably would have fallen short trying to set up everything up on my own. Thanks to our Consultant’s high level of expertise, our first dashboards are so robust. There are so many charts she has helped us create that I wouldn’t have even thought to look at. It’s really helped us understand the full user journey across our site.”

“I’m not very technical, but our Consultant was able to guide me through onboarding without needing to involve Engineering. During our implementation validation, our Consultant taught me how to manage definitions created from React Native selectors that change when we push new site updates. Now I understand how to break reports, how to fix them, and what steps to take when we go through that process.” 

“Overall, our Engineering Team did very little in terms of button tagging or adding any custom API. Most tool implementations that I've seen have required a ton of in-depth work that require new approvals and escalations— things that can really delay you at a large company. The fact that we were able to implement Heap and hit the ground running was extremely valuable.”

Tightening up the script

“Even before implementation was completed, Heap was immediately able to be my gateway into insights on what features we should be developing,” says Dalton. “Heap provides such granularity into the user journey that it gives me the confidence to stand behind my product strategy because I’m able to point at exactly what user behavior justifies my decisions.”

“For example, we had just released new enhancements to our OnStream navigation bar that we were convinced users would love. But after I looked at the numbers in Heap, I realized basically no one was interacting with the new features. While it was super disappointing, it was extremely valuable to learn so we could pivot our strategy and avoid spending resources on something users didn’t actually care about.”

“Another thing that our Implementation Consultant showed us was how to explore user sessions from the Analyze view in Heap. This has allowed our Product Designers to actually see the journey of how users navigate our site with each click and action revealing where improvements could be made. Guessing is taken out of the equation. Getting the granularity of each step in the user journey is not something every analytics platform can provide.”

From data to insights to action

“Now that we’re done with implementation, we’re focused on growing Heap adoption throughout the rest of the organization,” says Dalton. “Getting our Product and Support teams fully up to speed on Heap will allow us to build a data-driven culture. It’s been really powerful to sit down with our executives and show them what analytics can be with Heap.” 

“With Heap you get a much deeper understanding about your users than possible just looking at numbers in a generic spreadsheet— a spreadsheet can’t tell you the full story. In Heap you can pull up a dashboard, look at the visualization, look at segments, and really break things down to see the full picture.”

“10 out of 10, I would definitely recommend working with Heap’s Professional Services Team. The entire experience was really incredible and provided so much value to our team. We now have access to such deeper insights into our users that have driven a lot of exciting projects for our future. Heap is really going to help us build a great product for our users.”