Onboarding an enterprise app platform needs to account for more than just the short term. It’s an investment in your team and its future expansion. To support that, you need a set of best practices for adoption and configuration, regardless of your organization’s size.
Developers build all types of apps and workflows with Retool, including leveraging applied AI and different modalities. We provide databases, file storage, email, forms, and more to make your apps truly custom. But, because of its flexibility, many customers have sought guidance on organizing the Retool rollout for maximum business impact.
Enter the Retool Center of Excellence (CoE), a comprehensive resource library complementing Retool University and the Retool Well-Architected documentation. This hub and coordinated education path provide a collection of best practices your teams can follow to successfully adopt our engine as part of a digital transformation journey.
We’re excited to share this living resource with you and can’t wait to see it grow and evolve.
The Retool CoE provides individuals and enterprises with a framework to orient the implementation and scaling of Retool within their organization. We document CoE phases, best practices, patterns (future features), and customer resources.
In customer conversations, we identified four typical phases teams progress through when adopting Retool and structured around them: formation, onboarding, scaling, and improving.
This is where customers identify their internal Retool owners and start to align business and technical goals.
This core enablement team (your very own Center of Excellence) also uses this time to set clear guidelines and capture initial best practices for the early stages of the journey. The formation phase usually ends when a customer’s internal team starts communicating and promoting Retool to other teams in the organization.
A company’s onboarding phase involves interviewing teams, understanding their objectives and timelines, prioritizing tasks, and establishing a standardized intake process. Your Center of Excellence team will target a handful of teams for the initial intake and use lessons learned in this process for the next phase.
During the scaling phase, a company’s CoE team will work via automation to reduce manual actions during the initial onboarding phase.
Automation uses our Terraform provider or Retool API/Events/Workflows and can perform the following example actions:
- Creation of a team space
- Team SSO configuration (e.g., SAML, OpenID Connect)
- Team SCM configuration (e.g., GitHub, GitLab)
- Creation of custom permission group and team member mapping to group
- Creation of folders/sub-folders to organize work delivered by team members
Finally, this phase focuses on reviewing data, surveys, and other inputs to help adjust and improve previous phases for existing and future teams. There is no set end point—improving your Retool operations is a continuous process!
Retool Well-Architected, now within the Center of Excellence, provides a series of constructs and underlying best practices that teams should consider when building solutions. Internal owners can use these principles in the onboarding phase of their journeys. These include design, performance, scalability, reliability, operations, and cost management considerations.
The CoE also contains written articles, videos, and diagrams on topics related to supporting development processes, security considerations, and solution architecture.
In the Source Control section, you’ll find Retool’s Software Development Lifecycle—this resource demonstrates (via video) initializing a Git repository, the feature-branching strategy used by Apps and Workflows, creating pull requests (PR) used to review and merge changes, and finally releases using either the last commit or pinned Retool releases.
Development teams often organize their software development processes and releases into dedicated environments. Environments provide a mechanism for teams to create non-production sandboxes for safe development to protect data and control releases. Depending on how you use Retool, we have options and best practices to match your organization’s lifecycle.
Retool customers often ask for security guidance. We collaborated with Bold Tech, a Retool Partner, to develop a checklist covering top security considerations and references as a guide. These include:
- Permissions
- User metadata
- Optimized queries
- Credentials/Secrets
- Auditing
Your Retool owners can use the security checklist in the onboarding and scaling phases of implementing Retool.
Solution architecture diagrams are crucial to communicating architecture between peers, teams, and organizations. Retool Iconography provides a palette of Retool Services and Resources to diagram solutions. Retool Services represent the high-level features of the Retool Platform (black background), while resources (transparent background) provide more specific identification of features within a service.
Retool iconography can also be integrated with third-party services and public cloud providers to support these developments. The following image provides a more expansive example:
The Retool Center of Excellence provides you with clear direction and guidance for establishing a dedicated internal team, phases, and best practices for scaling. Get started by contacting your Retool account team to discuss how we can best support your CoE efforts.
I want to thank Kelsey, Julie, Sophia, Andre, Michael, JD, Sean, the Retool PS team, and Alex for helping codify these practices and collecting interactions with numerous Retool customers. I would also like to thank Bold Tech, a Retool partner, who collaborated on the security checklist.
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