Folders & Report Sharing

The Challenge

Reports in Freshworks Analytics accumulated with no organizing structure — no folders, no way to group related reports, no way to share a set of reports with a team without sharing each one individually. $194K in cumulative MRR, just within CX BU, sat behind accounts actively asking for this capability before it existed.

My Role

Product owner for folder organization and sharing.

• Designed the flat-folder model — deliberately no nested hierarchy for v1, to keep the mental model to 'create a folder, drag reports in'
• Defined the folder-level sharing permission model (View / Edit / Manage) that flows access to every report inside a shared folder
• Scoped the next phase — access-change notifications, report-level permission overrides, and nested folders — based on usage signal from the v1 launch

The Solution

A simple, flat structure for scattered reports, with sharing built in from day one:

• Create a folder and drag reports in — no nested hierarchy to learn
• Move any report into a folder in a single click
• Share a whole folder with a team at View / Edit / Manage — access flows to every report inside, instead of sharing report by report

The Outcome

• 1,307 monthly active users creating folders, 613 moving reports into them, 71 sharing folders with their team
• 3,649 total 'Create Folder' events and 4,041 total 'Move to Folder' events logged since launch
• 312 total folder-sharing events logged
• All three actions trending up week over week: +53% Create Folder, +70% Move to Folder, +121% Folder Sharing — organizing and sharing behavior are both accelerating, not just the initial adoption spike

Notifications on folder access changes, report-level permission overrides, and nested folders (a folder inside a folder) are scoped and next up for prioritization.

Key Learnings

• A flat structure with no nested hierarchy was the right v1 scope — it kept the feature to a single afternoon's learning curve, and the usage data (not a stakeholder request) is what will justify nested folders as a v2, not the other way around.
• Folder-level sharing (permissions flow to every report inside) mattered more to adoption than folder creation itself — Folder Sharing grew fastest of the three tracked actions (+121%) even though it's the feature furthest from the core 'organize my own reports' job.
• $194K in cumulative MRR demand sitting behind a missing organizational primitive (not a new insight or a new chart type) was a reminder that adoption friction is sometimes structural, not analytical.

Technologies & Methods

• React
• TypeScript
• Permission Model Design
• Freshworks Analytics Platform