Smartsheet provides an intelligent work management platform that lets teams plan, track, automate, and report on projects and processes across an organization. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Smartsheet CTO Cynthia Tee to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Cynthia Tee’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Tee said:
“My name is Cynthia Tee, and I’m the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Smartsheet, an enterprise-grade intelligent work management platform. I joined Smartsheet in 2021 as the company’s Senior Vice President of Engineering. Prior to that, I worked at companies like Microsoft, Nordstrom, and Schlumberger, where I led engineering and development teams focused on digital commerce, product development, and more.”
“In addition to my work at Smartsheet, I’m also an advocate for community involvement. Throughout my career, I’ve held board memberships with Seattle area nonprofits and previously served as the CEO of Ada Developers Academy, a non-profit organization that conducts tuition-free coding classes for women and nonbinary individuals in order to close the tech skills gap.”
“As CTO of Smartsheet, I lead our technology vision and strategy to enable organizations of all sizes to achieve meaningful outcomes with our enterprise-grade modern work management platform. By driving innovation in automation, AI, and scalable cloud technologies, my team works to deliver a secure, intuitive, and powerful platform that helps teams collaborate, plan, execute, and report on work.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Tee shared:
“My favorite memory is how my entire team – engineers as well as engineering leaders – rallied around the use of AI tooling to improve our productivity and upskilling. Engineers of all levels jumped into using AI tools day to day and have taught others how to use them, improve their prompting, and discover new use cases. Our leaders have worked together to revamp our engineering role guides to include proficiency levels for using AI tools, adoption of interview practices on AI tooling, and establishment of training and onboarding for AI tools. I am very proud of how my team, both individual contributors and leaders, have worked together to make AI a part of our daily workflow and to onboard new engineers to do so. It’s a great example of how positive reinforcement and collaboration can lead to a huge change throughout a large organization. Instead of focusing on the existential meaning of what AI does to their jobs, they leaned into the technology to change the way we do our jobs (in a positive way).”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Tee explained:
“Simply put, we help teams manage their work better. Our no-code, AI-powered platform is designed to transform how teams manage projects, portfolios, and processes, empowering organizations to achieve results faster. It takes the familiarity of common spreadsheet software, but goes far beyond that to offer integrated project management tools, workflow automation, and real-time collaboration.”
“Smartsheet enables everyone, from executives to frontline workers, to build custom solutions for their work, from simple project plans to sophisticated global programs managing hundreds of multi-million dollar projects. Teams of all kinds can organize complex project data, automate notifications and emails, track time spent on project tasks and phases, and much more.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Tee acknowledged:
“One challenge we’ve faced recently is around product-led growth. We want our customers to quickly realize the value of Smartsheet and easily learn how the product can manage their projects, from small tasks to large portfolios. Our goal is for the product to grow with their needs, powering their efficiency as they manage more projects easily and effectively.”
“Over a year ago, we began investing in capabilities to simplify customer onboarding, facilitate trials of advanced features, and make tools more discoverable. We’ve redesigned almost every pixel on the screen to create experiences that are easier to navigate and delightful to use for projects of any size. While we’ve made significant progress in ease of use and learnability, we’re not done. We’re excited to increasingly leverage AI to help our users more easily discover—and utilize—the full power of Smartsheet.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Tee highlighted:
“Many of your favorite organizations use Smartsheet to streamline their work, and one example is Operation Smile. Operation Smile provides care to hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide by performing cleft surgeries and providing comprehensive health care. As one of the world’s largest volunteer-driven surgical nonprofit organizations, Operation Smile relies on more than 6,000 medical volunteers from across 67 countries to deliver safe surgery and training programs worldwide, and they needed a better way to manage their operations.”
“Before Smartsheet, Operation Smile relied heavily on paper, spreadsheets, and email to manage their work. With manual processes and disparate tools, they lacked visibility into their programs in the field. To fix this, they sought to implement software to help collect data in one place for better consistency and visibility.”
“Operation Smile initially adopted Smartsheet to help their marketing team manage internal branding and marketing projects. This quickly expanded into a comprehensive solution to manage field staffing schedules, budgets, and track surgical and non-surgical programs globally. They use Smartsheet to get consolidated, almost real-time data from employees and volunteers in the field, which enables them to better plan how to utilize volunteers and respond quickly to local health and environmental impacts that could delay their programs. Using traffic lights (red, yellow, and green) to track the status of projects in Smartsheet, Operation Smile can quickly highlight any changes to a project’s schedule, such as dates or volunteers needed. In addition, the organization relies on Smartsheet dashboards to summarize program status and planned activities for leadership teams. This has resulted in a 50% reduction in weekly meeting time and 30% faster planning time.”
“With better visibility into what’s happening in the field and the time saved on meetings and planning, Operation Smile can focus on what matters most: delivering medical programs around the world to help kids smile.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Tee affirmed:
“Smartsheet sets itself apart by offering a unique blend of enterprise-grade power and flexible, no-code usability. Unlike traditional project management tools that require training or rely on IT support, we empower users to build custom solutions, automate workflows, and generate insights without writing a line of code.”
“On top of this, we grow with our customers. Individuals, teams, and entire organizations can adapt their Smartsheet solutions as the volume and complexity of work grows, all on an enterprise-grade platform. Our customers can scale with confidence with a platform architected for managing work at unprecedented speed and scale. Whether they are managing six projects or 60,000 projects at once across multiple portfolios, Smartsheet is there for them. No other collaborative work management tool can support that kind of scale. Smartsheet also protects users and data with robust security, streamlined manageability, and strong data governance.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Tee concluded:
“We are more committed than ever to creating bold, transformative solutions that our customers rely on to do their most important work. Over the past few years, we’ve made significant investments to strengthen our platform, from cutting-edge automation to smarter workflows and powerful security. But this is just the beginning. Looking ahead, we’re going to double down on the foundation we’ve built to help our customers—no matter their size—stay agile, keep their teams aligned, and drive real outcomes with the confidence they need to tackle what’s ahead. One of the ways we’re doing this is by applying AI across our platform in smart, strategic ways that empower our customers to uncover new insights from their data, unlock the full power of the Smartsheet platform, and remove some of the drudgery from work.”
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