Our goal is to give you an analytics tool you love to use. To do that we’re building a tool we love to use.
Today is the first in a new series about what our product teams are building at Density.
We plan to give you an early look at the products, prototypes, tools, and technology we’ve been investing in behind the scenes. While everything we share here is subject to change, we believe there is more value in being open about what we’re building than doing so behind closed doors.
Since our founding, eight years ago, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the science of how people use buildings. But we’ve always learned the most when talking to you: our community and customers. You are experts in the design and management of the most iconic workplaces in the world.
Our beliefs about buildings, the hybrid workplace, remote and “dynamic work,” and the ingredients for a sustainable future have all been shaped by thousands of conversations with you all. Building in Public is meant to facilitate more of these conversations out in the open.
We’re going to share and talk about our work openly because we believe it will make our products better. We’ll get more critique, more criticism, more copycats — but we’ll learn faster than we would if we just built in the dark.
We’ve always learned the most when talking to you: our community and customers.
Up first is an internal project we call “Atlas.” The project focuses on navigation, labeling, and benchmarking. Atlas was designed to improve on our current analytics platform.
Our customers manage billions of square feet of space. These office portfolios can range from 250k square feet to 50m+. When you’re operating at that scale, the datasets can get overwhelming and it can be easy to lose track of how and why all this space is used.
Customers want fast, data-rich systems, that make benchmarking the performance of any given space or building a breeze.
A building is like a nesting doll. Rooms within floors, floors within buildings, buildings within a campus, and so on. The right context can breathe life into these space types. It just requires the right tooling.
Mini-maps are useful because they provide context and situational awareness. This map is designed to do the same.
Over the years, we’ve learned there’s a simple but often forgotten second part to the question: “How often do people use X?” What most users are really asking is: “How often do people use X when compared to Y?” It seems comparison (at least in real estate) is at the heart of understanding.
Atlas is a snappy and forgiving interface. It’s borderline fun. Our goal is to give you tools you love to use. To do that, we’re trying to build tools we love to use. In that spirit, there are lots of little quality of life improvements to Density’s core platform in Atlas v1.
Here are a few:
Atlas' benchmarking and API will be available to a small set of customers in July, and the landing or "insights page" will follow. We’ll be expanding access and pushing updates throughout the Summer.
Atlas is in active development with updates pushed every week. If you have any questions or feedback or just want to push our thinking, please feel free to contribute in the comments of our accompanying LinkedIn post.
And if you’re a Density customer and would like early access, you can send us an email at [email protected].
Andrew Farah, Density CEO
ps. At the moment, "Atlas" is just an internal codename but I kind of dig it as a potential product name.
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