Dex

In most companies, a simple question about the business takes days to answer. Someone asks how revenue is tracking, an engineer writes the query, someone builds a chart, and by the time it arrives the meeting has passed.

Dex lets anyone connect their company’s data and ask in plain English. It writes the SQL, runs it read-only and answers with numbers, tables and charts. My job was to make that feel calm and trustworthy for people who have never written a query.

I started with the answer, because that’s the moment someone decides whether to trust Dex. An answer leads with one sentence in plain English, then the number, then the chart, in that order.

Every answer can switch between bars, a table and a donut, and every one can be pinned. The chart is there to support the sentence, and it’s never the whole answer.

A blank wait of a few seconds feels broken. So while Dex works, it says what it’s doing. It reads the question, finds the tables it needs, runs the query and writes the answer, one step at a time.

Once the answer lands, the steps fold into a single line that says how many tables were queried, how long it took and what it cost.

People who can read SQL want to check it. People who can’t still want to know it exists. Every answer shows its source table, row count and age underneath, and the full query opens in place with a button to copy it or open it in the warehouse.

Dex only ever runs read-only queries. I put that promise on the connections screen and in onboarding, because it’s the first thing a data team asks.

The composer shows which source a question will run against before it’s sent, and picks up table and column names as you type them. Suggested questions come from the company’s own data, so the first question is never a blank page.

Teams ask about different things, and they define words differently. Spaces group chats by team, Growth, Finance and the board deck, each with its own default source and members.

Each Space also holds shared definitions. When Growth says active user, Dex uses the same definition every time, and anyone can see what it is.

The answers people care about come back every week. Pinning an answer puts it on the dashboard, and Dex reruns every pinned answer each morning. The dashboard is a page of answers people already trusted once.

Onboarding asks for one source to start, a warehouse or a spreadsheet, and lets you add the rest later. The connections screen shows what’s connected, which Spaces use it, and what needs attention, like an expired password, with the fix right beside it.

One question costs about one credit. When a workspace is running low, Dex says so at the top of billing with the date it resets and a way to top up, before a question ever fails.