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How to keep your Pendo wiz from burning out

By Jay Nathan, Jonathan Huhn|
Illustration of a glowing sun with several planets orbiting it

Beyond The Click - Vol. 46

Somewhere in your org is a senior product manager (or a product marketer, or a CS ops lead, or etc.) who also serves as “the Pendo person” for everyone else in the building. They already have a full-time job, and running your product analytics program is a second one stacked on top of it.

Most leaders assume a talented enough admin can still crush both roles indefinitely. But we’ve seen this assumption break down for two reasons: capacity and context. And these gaps are completely agnostic toward your admin’s experience level.

Welcome to Beyond The Click by Balboa. We’ve recently talked with several of these double-duty admins and the leaders they report to. Today we’re sharing what we learned, including:

  1. The second job keeps growing ⏳
  2. Even experts hit new territory 🧭
  3. Give them real backup 🛟
  4. Protect the work only they can do 🎯

Let’s dive in.

The second job keeps growing ⏳

“My workload has quadrupled” – from a recent conversation with a product marketing lead at a large enterprise. She joined her company to run in-app messaging for two goals:

  1. Supporting product launches
  2. Driving more transactions.

And the program worked! But then onboarding came next, followed by marketing campaigns, NPS, product surveys, pilots, and a free trial. The scope grew every year while the staffing stayed the same (one person). Today she juggles dozens of campaigns at a time, and new requests come in every few days.

Well-meaning colleagues say things like “it’s just a small tooltip, that should take you five minutes, right?” And sure, the build might be quick, but the slow part is all the context switching, since her brain has to jump out of one stakeholder conversation and into another before she can touch anything.

Notice that this power-user was the victim of her own success. Every successful campaign brought more teams to her door, which means the capacity gap widens fastest for your best admins. And when hours are tight, reporting is the first thing that slips. She scrambles to pull her reports at month end, even though those reports help justify the investment in the platform (and in her position).

Even experts hit new territory 🧭

While capacity is a gap you can see on your calendar, context is harder to spot, and it covers every scenario your admin faces for the first time.

Our example PMM’s company just renewed its contract and picked up journey orchestration and session replay along the way. “They’re great,” she said, “but I don’t have time.”

The same thing happens when a proven use case moves to a new product. Her first rollout took the better part of a year. Now she knows that product like the back of her hand, but she doesn’t yet know how the next one is structured or how its metadata works, and she needs both before she can instrument anything.

Today this gap is growing for everyone. Product analytics platforms now launch AI tagging, agent analytics, and AI connectors at a pace that makes your most seasoned admin a first-timer on a weekly basis. Experienced people do learn faster, but they still start from zero on new capabilities.

That’s two real constraints on what your Pendo admin can get done. So how do you unblock them?

Give them real backup 🛟

Adding headcount could be your long-term solution, but as our product marketer pointed out, a new person needs training from the one employee who currently has no hours to spare. We recommend implementing these changes first, which have faster time-to-value and honestly make your entire org run smoother, too:

  1. Put a front door on requests. Route every ask through a ticket queue (e.g. Jira) with a published priority order. Hers puts product work first and fits marketing in second (note: this may or may not be the best way for your org). She also asks every requester which user behavior they want to change and how they’ll measure it. If there’s no good answer to that question, it gets de-prioritized. Your role is to back your admin up on that “no” if someone tries to escalate.
  2. Hand the routine work to its owners. In most programs the admin picks up guides, then tagging, then integrations, segments, surveys, and analytics until the load is unsustainable. Assign tagging to the PMs who own the features, because an untagged feature doesn’t show up in your analytics. Then hold weekly office hours so the questions arrive all in one batch.
  3. Teach people to pull their own numbers. Our product marketer used to field every analytics question herself. She now runs sessions for her product, UX, marketing, and analytics teams on querying usage data through the company’s AI assistant, and she gets several hours back each month.
  4. Borrow hands and experience. A contractor, an agency, or an embedded partner can build at your admin’s direction and utilize “seen-this-all-before” experience on things that are new to your org. This does take some of your admin’s time to direct. But as she put it, “having a first draft that I can refine would be game changing.”

Also, name an executive sponsor AND a backup admin! Operating with neither makes your admin a single point of failure.

Protect the work only they can do 🎯

Once you take items off your admin’s plate, you can be conscious of what stays on it. These four jobs deserve their best attention:

  1. Deciding what gets built. Your admin knows which requests will actually change user behavior. “I don’t think volume is always necessarily the answer.”
  2. Defining success. She can tell you which action a user has to repeat, and within what window, to count as retained. While she owns that decision, the page-by-page tagging behind it can belong to someone else.
  3. Proving impact. The platform itself is an investment, so the people who fund it need to see what changed in the product because of it.
  4. Deciding where AI takes over. She described ongoing campaign analysis as work that “would be a full-time job for someone” to do by hand. Your admin should choose which of those repetitive jobs go to an agent.

To summarize, the most insightful thing our PMM told us was “I need help on the execution side so I can focus on the strategy side.” We know firsthand that’s the right trade, and you can make it for your own admin with a few leadership decisions about process, organization, and resources.

👉 And if you’ve tried these but your two-job Pendo admin is still stretched thin, check out our Managed Pendo Services, which we designed to help with this scenario.

Jay’s Picks 📚

  1. A Change in AI Strategy (Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures) - breaks down a (mostly) positive signal for the software world, where routing / re-selling AI compute from across LLMs may actually be a better business model than the LLMs themselves. I’m a proponent of Jevons Paradox, and this is like watching it play out in real time.
  2. What AI agents really think about your pricing (Kyle Poyar, Growth Unhinged) - these guys tested how AI handles buyer prompts about product pricing. Turns out, many pricing pages aren’t readable to agents, in which case the agent gets its data from somewhere external like Reddit instead. This makes a big difference in response favorability. Super practical and helpful.
  3. Anthropic IPO: S1 Breakdown (CJ Gustafson, Mostly Metrics) - been wrapping my head around the upcoming Anthropic IPO, and this is the clearest and most entertaining breakdown I’ve found. Talks about that crazy 900% NRR number, how they apparently have SaaS-level gross margins now, and the state of the AI industry at large.