Progress Easyl was a cloud-based data blending application designed to make it easy for marketing and sales operations to combine analytic data from SaaS sources (including Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Google Analytics), Excel worksheets, and virtually any database (Oracle, MySQL, MS-SQLServer, PostgreSQL, etc.).
The product was launched in early in 2014 and went over like a lead balloon. It was described variously as “more painful than the problem it tried to solve” and “it looks like it was drawn with crayons.” I joined the team as product manager, and began a ground-up redesign, resulting in an interface that was described variously as “really cool product, awesome interface” and “this is really easy to use, I love it.” I also added core data quality features that included data profiling, calculated columns, and user-defined join types.
Regrettably, Progress decided that Easyl did not fit with their overall product portfolio and target markets (they were right), and it was dropped just weeks after GA re-launch. But in the end it was awesome!