Feedback and Ideas

We started using Glean 4 months ago. It's such an amazing product, the way it builds its knowledge graph to dish out accurate and relevant information via the Glean chat, the way it can be easily extended with custom data sources and it gets smarter as we throw more data at it, the way it can be leveraged as a force multiplier in tools like Augment / Claude Code etc. It runs circles around competing products from the likes of Google.

But… customer onboarding is a disaster. From the very beginning until now, both from the Glean admin side and the end user side, we've had to face a mountain of issues. Let me give you two concrete recent examples:

This data source rides on the existing Google Drive data source, which is nice as it removes a lot of setup that would otherwise be duplicated. It's a bit confusing that the “master" Google datasource is “Google Drive” and not just “Google” or “Google Workspace” but let's ignore that. To setup the Google Chat datasources you need two things:

The right scopes on the Google Account used to connect the Google Drive data source.

The right scopes on the Glean-side GCP project used to host our Glean instance.

The former we can setup ourselves (especially given correct and up to date in-product setup instructions, which unfortunately was rarely the case). But for the latter we can't do it ourselves. We have to ask Glean. We have to waste time of our account team, or Glean Support, to go push some buttons for us. Why is this not self-service?

It's not an isolated example, there are more like that. I lost track of the number of times we needed to ask the Glean team for help during our onboarding when setting up datasources. And they did help! But I wish we'd gotten here without spending hours in meetings trying to set things up.

As a Glean admin I feel like I had to expand a monumental amount of energy to setup Glean and make it work for my company. And ultimately the results are great so it was worth it, but also it just shouldn't be that hard?

Whenever we hire someone and they start using Glean, their account by default is not fully connected to all the datasources (now being renamed to “Connectors” it seems). They have to go to their profile settings and provide authorization via OAuth for a number of data sources. For example for GitHub, there won't be any results from private repos until they do that. So let's say you have Slack, GitHub, Jira, you need to OAuth 3 times. But then even more confusingly, for those datasources that have action packs (now being renamed to “Tools”) you need to OAuth again. Want to be able to create a GitHub PR from Glean? Need to OAuth again the “additional tools”. Want to take actions in Jira? You need to OAuth 

 because for reasons beyond my understanding there are two separate Jira action packs ("Jira Actions — Jira (Cloud)" and “Jira Extension Actions”). Want to be able to create Google Docs then you need to OAuth the Google Drive datasource. All in all, it means a new hire has to OAuth like 6 times at least to get everything working.

And maybe there is no easy way to avoid one OAuth flow per third-party service but at least don't duplicate or triplicate the number of OAuth flows for action packs? And make sure the OAuth flow gets initiated automatically the first time it's needed (often this doesn't work in Glean).

So ultimately we're very happy with the product, but the Glean product team needs to take a long and hard look at the onboarding experience, both from the point of view of a Glean admin and Glean end user, and streamline, simplify, and ensure everything is self-service.

Glean is a fantastic product with awful customer onboarding

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