What happens when you put three seasoned Pendo admins in a room?
- Pink balloons automatically drop from the ceiling
- Discussion and tips on how to build a Pendo Center of Excellence (CoE)
- Best practices shared for platform governance
Of course, we wish we could automatically provide a balloon drop every time great minds meet, but the real answers are B and C.
During a Pendo admin user group, Liz Feller from Nelnet, Hannah Squiers from Strata Decision Technology, and Keith Wagner from Balboa Solutions, shared their best practices for setting the right standards.
1. Setting a rock-solid foundation: Platform governance
A reliable Pendo implementation starts with thoughtful admin settings tailored to your product’s architecture—whether you’re running single-page apps, heavy iframe usage (which is the case for Nelnet), or multi-page workflows.
Feller, manager of design systems and analytics at Nelnet, advises admins to resist the temptation to adopt turnkey defaults. She points out that most companies will need to fine-tune settings around their specific application and user expectations. After all, every industry and product has its unique variations.
“Whether you're starting from nothing or inheriting Pendo, you need to create strong platform foundations based on your application,” said Feller. “You need to meet your products where they are while providing a consistent experience for the entire organization."
Govern teams and users with proper permissions
Leverage Pendo’s new Teams feature to mirror your org structure and limit broad admin privileges.
"Permissions are a privilege and not a right," said Chase Greiser, a Pendo project manager. He advises admins to apply the principle of least privilege and grant only the access folks need to do their jobs. Group scrum teams—product, engineering, design—into Teams to share dashboards at a click, empowering cross-functional alignment without handing everyone full admin keys.
Integrations and metadata
Early on, map out your integrations—Salesforce, internal data sources, etc.—and define the metadata fields you’ll need for robust segmentation. Hannah Squires, director of product operations at Strata Decision Technology, stressed that successful governance goes hand in hand with strong relationships across product, ops, and development teams. Establish regular governance check-ins so new features get tagged, new products get onboarded correctly, and your Pendo instance never drifts.
2. Driving decisions with trusted data
“You’ve all heard: data in, data out,” Squires laughed, but the stakes are serious. Poor data inputs make it impossible to build dashboards or segments that stakeholders actually trust. Data is your foundation. Squires points out three areas where admins can exercise scrutiny over data:
Metadata strategy
- Pull in user roles, ARR tier, product modules, and verticals via Salesforce or your CRM
- Work with stakeholders across other departments to identify the data points that matter most
Naming conventions
- Decide on a simple, sustainable format for pages, features, and product areas
- Stick to your pick—consistent naming saves hours of segmentation work later
Ownership and audits
- Assign a data steward or rotate quarterly owner audits to verify that tags and feature names remain accurate
- Surface data quality issues in quarterly governance meetings so you can fix broken tags before they erode trust
Squires also reminded admins to think big picture about their overall strategy. “It’s very easy to get bogged down in the tactics as an admin,” she said. “Start with what matters, the ‘so what’?. Find out the types of questions that matter to your stakeholders.”
She stressed that an admin’s role is beyond just using Pendo, it’s about bringing true business value from Pendo data. As Squires puts it, “your job is influencing product adoption,” not just tagging.
3. Crafting seamless in-app experiences
Guides, resource centers, surveys, and experiments let you engage users at exactly the right moment—but only if you manage them carefully.
Permissions and themes
Control who can create and publish guides. Use Pendo’s custom roles and teams to let subject-matter experts draft content while a central approver team publishes it. Using themes and saved layouts help align with your brand palette and style guidelines, and ensures consistency for your users.
Resource centers & localization
Segment announcements, on-demand help, and even internal knowledge hubs via the Resource Center. Leverage your metadata to understand where to prioritize your localization efforts.
Experimentation
Use guide experiments to A/B test copy, banners, or help text before embedding it in production. You’ll discover what truly resonates without having to hard code anything.
Audit cadence
Set end dates on all guides—even tooltips—to prevent stale pop-ups. “Nobody wants guide sprawl,” said Feller. Review low-engagement guides monthly: retire ones with zero views, and refine those with poor completion rates. Keep your app lean, helpful, and delightful.
4. Always have a Pendo Center of Excellence
Keith Wagner, Co-founder and CTO of Balboa Solutions, defines a CoE as “a centralized framework that establishes best practices, standardized processes, and shared resources around Pendo.” His golden rule? Always have one, even if you’re a small team.
How to assign responsibilities
Rather than let one admin own tagging, guides, integrations, surveys, and analytics, spread ownership across product managers, UX researchers, developers, and data analysts. This prevents burnout and builds a Pendo-savvy culture:
- Tagging: Product PMs keep feature events current and can be responsible for any feature tagging changes
- Guides: A cross-functional approval team vets and publishes. Allow more people to create guides, but give fewer people publish permissions
- Integrations: Dev leads handle data syncs
- Analytics: Data analysts own dashboards and reports
- Surveys: UX researchers deploy feedback loops
“What you want is for everybody to have access and have the opportunity to use Pendo,” said Wagner. He emphasizes that having one person managing every task is typically unsustainable.
Guide documentation and approval process
Create a CoE document that outlines how you want guides to be created. Include the guide goal, brand guidelines, and a “dos and don’ts” section. Then, implement a “pending review” status so creators can draft every guide but only approvers can publish. Wagner shared a cautionary tale of a mis-segmented billing reminder sent to 60,000 users—an incident a simple two-eye approval step could have prevented.
Centralize documentation
Create a living CoE playbook that walks new hires through segments, guide activation options, naming standards, and do’s-and-don’ts. Point everyone to it on day one, and update it after every major Pendo release.
Next steps
Ready to level up your Pendo Admin practice? Join us in the Pendo Connect Slack community to swap templates, ask questions, and stay on top of new features. And watch for our next Pendo Admin user group session, where we’ll dive deeper into advanced segmentation, API-driven guides, and harnessing AI insights within Pendo.
