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Without a shared approach to using Pendo, BlackLine's product teams were each doing their own thing—making it nearly impossible to compare data across products or trust what they were seeing. Good decisions require good data. And they didn't have that yet.
BlackLine built a formal Pendo Center of Excellence (CoE)—complete with defined tagging standards and clear ownership across analytics, guides, resource center, and listen. They also connected Pendo to Salesforce and Jira, giving every team a single, reliable view of what customers actually needed.
BlackLine standardized how every product team uses Pendo, trained teams across the organization in 2024 and 2025, and built a foundation for ongoing impact—including faster feature adoption, shorter time to value, reduced churn risk, and higher customer satisfaction.
BlackLine has a clear mission: move finance and accounting teams away from manual, unsustainable processes. By unifying data, automating repetitive work, and increasing visibility, the company helps customers close faster, reduce risk, and shift their focus to strategic analysis.
But as BlackLine’s own product organization evolved, one challenge became clear—driving that same level of clarity and control for internal teams.
BlackLine first invested in Pendo in 2022. But like many growing organizations, shifting ownership and evolving priorities made it difficult to fully see the platform’s value.
“After we originally purchased Pendo, there were multiple leadership changes, so we never really got the value realized,” said Shreya Venkatesan. “This actually led to the risk of potentially losing Pendo.”
That changed in 2024.
With new leadership in place, BlackLine reset its approach—focusing first on adoption, then on scale. By 2025, the team had a clear goal: democratize Pendo data across the product organization and make it a core part of how decisions get made.
The catalyst was a Pendo center of excellence (COE).
The Pendo COE at BlackLine was designed to do one thing well: ensure Pendo delivers measurable value across the business.
The team established a structured operating model with defined ownership, governance, and standards. A RACI framework (a type of responsibility assignment matrix) clarified responsibilities across four core areas:
Each area has a dedicated owner, ensuring accountability for everything from tagging and reporting to guide creation and customer communication.
Consistency became a priority early on. The COE defined naming conventions, tagging standards, and dashboard design principles—making it possible to compare data across products and over time in a meaningful way.
And importantly, the COE didn’t sit within the product team alone.
“We brought in folks from training and marketing to really foster deeper collaboration,” said Venkatesan. “That’s what really led to the successful adoption and usage of Pendo.”
With governance in place, BlackLine expanded how it uses Pendo across the organization:
Product analytics: Standardized tagging and metadata unlock clear visibility into how customers use the product
This unified approach gives teams something they didn’t have before—reliable, shared insight into product performance.
“Prior to Pendo, tracking basic metrics or measuring how our products were performing was a huge challenge,” Venkatesan said. “We’d launch something and then move on to the next thing without understanding how it was performing.”
With democratized data based on key standards and guidelines, non-measurement is a thing of the past.
The impact of the COE is already clear and growing. By centralizing Pendo governance and scaling adoption, BlackLine is delivering against key business priorities:
Increased product adoption: Usage data highlights opportunities to drive engagement with automation features
Just as important, the COE is shaping how teams think.
By embedding Pendo into workflows and decision-making, BlackLine is building a more data-driven, product-led culture—one where teams don’t just launch features, they measure, learn, and iterate.
To sustain momentum, BlackLine invested heavily in enablement.
After formally launching the COE in 2024, the team rolled out training programs to build foundational knowledge. In 2025, they expanded those efforts with hands-on workshops focused on creating guides and building dashboards.
The goal is simple: make Pendo accessible to everyone who needs it.
“We used 2025 as the year to kickstart the scaling and democratization of Pendo,” said Venkatesan.
That investment is paying off. Today, Pendo is embedded across BlackLine’s product and technology organization—and it’s helping teams align around what matters most: delivering better outcomes for customers.
For BlackLine, the Pendo COE is more than a governance model. It’s a strategic lever that ensures product decisions are grounded in real user behavior and real customer feedback.
And it’s a big reason why BlackLine earned the 2026 Pendo Admin Excellence Award.
By bringing structure, ownership, and clarity to how Pendo is used, the team turned a tool at risk into a platform for growth.
Or, as Venkatesan put it: “Without Pendo, I’m not really sure where we would be right now.”
