The Trade Desk, a global advertising technology company, set out to better understand how customers interact with its platform and improve product decision-making at scale. As demand for data grew across engineering, product and marketing teams, the company looked to complement its existing dashboards and analytics workflows with more flexible, self-service exploration capabilities. With Genie on Databricks, The Trade Desk enables teams to explore complex data in seconds, shifting from static reporting to dynamic, self-service insights that accelerate decisions and improve business outcomes.
When dashboards couldn’t keep up with growing data demands
The Trade Desk’s UserTrail team is responsible for analyzing how customers use its platform, from campaign setup workflows to feature engagement and performance. This data plays a critical role in shaping product decisions, improving user experience and guiding marketing strategies.
As demand for insights increased, the team relied on dashboards and manual analysis to answer business questions. But dashboards could only address a limited set of predefined queries, leaving many teams without the answers they needed.
“Dashboards are designed to answer a limited set of specific questions and create a starting point to follow up,” said Chase Holland, Lead Principal Software Engineer at The Trade Desk. “But, if your follow-up isn’t covered, the dashboard becomes less useful.”
To answer exploratory questions, teams either submitted requests for custom analysis or built one-off dashboards that were rarely revisited. These workflows would require additional coordination and time as demand for data access continued to grow.
“We saw an opportunity to make our data more broadly accessible across teams,” Chase said. “We wanted more people to be able to explore and learn from the data directly.”
Building a scalable, multi-domain Genie solution
To expand access to data, The Trade Desk implemented Genie, enabling users to ask natural-language questions and instantly retrieve insights. Early adoption spread quickly as teams realized they could reduce dependency on manual workflows and get answers on demand.
As usage grew, however, the team encountered a scaling challenge: Genie Spaces supports only a finite number of tables, while The Trade Desk manages tens of thousands of datasets across multiple product domains. To address this, the team built a Genie router using Databricks Apps — a system that connects multiple domain-specific Genie spaces and dynamically routes queries to the right data sources, combining results into a single response.
"Each Genie acts as an expert in its domain," Chase explained. "The router brings those experts together to answer more complex questions. But, by sticking with Genie as the foundational technology, we were able to scale while maintaining a lean engineering footprint and leveraging existing data governance controls."
This architecture allows users to query data across product areas such as audience targeting, geography and platform usage without needing to understand underlying data structures. To ensure trust in results, the team implemented a multi-layer validation system: automated checks reviewed generated queries for structural accuracy. At the same time, human reviewers validate outputs and provide feedback to improve the system.
"We don't just rely on the tool," Chase said. "We actively monitor, validate and improve it so users know they can trust what they're seeing."
Moving past decision paralysis
For a global advertising technology leader like The Trade Desk, the primary constraint on growth isn't the ability to write code; it's the clarity to decide what to build next — before Genie, validating a feature request required manual data analysis and several stakeholder conversations, costing significant labor and time. With Genie, The Trade Desk can engage stakeholders with the right questions while iterating faster than ever.
Now, product managers and engineers use Genie to immediately query rich signals across complex domains like Connected TV, Audience Targeting and Geography. By analyzing real-world platform usage in seconds, the team can identify the optimal way to meet customers’ needs or when projected ROI doesn't justify the downstream technical debt.
“Building the product is only part of the challenge. The harder question is deciding what to build next, and better data helps us make those decisions faster,” said Chase.
With Genie, The Trade Desk can make faster, higher-quality decisions by giving teams a more flexible way to explore trusted data, ask follow-up questions and validate where to invest next. By using the Genie router to stitch together specialized data domains, engineering effort is now reserved for high-impact work — with low-value requests filtered out before they ever reach the roadmap.
Faster decisions, broader access and better outcomes
With Genie, The Trade Desk has expanded how teams across the organization access and use data. Questions that previously required significant coordination and analysis can now often be explored in minutes, helping teams make faster and more informed decisions.
Engineers use Genie to generate precise SQL queries to build KPI dashboards and showcase the business value of new features through before-and-after data comparisons. Product and marketing teams use the same approach to analyze feature performance and customer behavior, refining strategies and informing product decisions. Senior leadership also uses Genie to engage more directly with data and evaluate initiatives in real time.
This shift is supported by a shared repository of business definitions managed by the BI department. By connecting Genie to these verified sources, The Trade Desk ensures different teams receive the same answer for the same metric, eliminating the risk of conflicting information.
"Our conversations are much more data-driven now," Chase said. "We're no longer relying on static reports. We're asking better questions and getting answers immediately."
The solution remains highly efficient to maintain — the Genie environment and routing system require minimal engineering resources, replacing a distributed effort that previously spanned dozens of contributors. The mission-critical nature of this model is most visible during high-stakes cycles: in the lead-up to The Trade Desk's annual company conference, Genie usage spikes as teams across the business self-serve the data needed for keynote presentations and executive briefings.
Looking ahead, The Trade Desk plans to expand Genie access across more teams by strengthening data governance and standardizing business definitions. As adoption grows, Genie is becoming an increasingly important layer in how the company explores data and makes decisions.
"We're moving toward a world where anyone can access the data they need, while maintaining appropriate access controls, instantly," Chase said. "That changes how the business operates."