Scaling New Heights: How the Smartsheet Platform Empowers Enterprise-Wide Success

Cynthia Tee serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Smartsheet, where she spearheads the development of the company's innovative products and establishes the technological frameworks for agile delivery. With over 25 years of experience at renowned companies like Microsoft, Nordstrom, and Schlumberger, Cynthia has a proven track record of driving technological excellence and leading high-performing teams.

The way we work is undergoing a profound transformation. Rigid, siloed structures are giving way to dynamic, collaborative environments. The future of work demands agility, rapid innovation, and the ability to connect teams and processes seamlessly, no matter how complex the workflows or how massive the projects. It isn't just about working faster; it's about working smarter and achieving more meaningful outcomes.

As Chief Technology Officer at Smartsheet, I am inspired by helping our customers and partners succeed. A core focus of mine is designing resilience and scalability into our systems so our customers can future-proof their investment in work management capabilities. Let’s explore how we are engineering the Smartsheet platform for scale and performance, and why this is the foundation for building larger and better solutions that drive enterprise-wide success.

A Platform Built for Growth: The Foundation for Success

Modern enterprise work is about seamless collaboration, managing complex workflows and connecting an ever growing number of apps and terabytes of data across global teams. We understand that in these dynamic, high-growth environments the ability to scale is paramount. This is why we've designed our platform with two fundamental principles in mind.

First, ensuring that our customer’s workloads, no matter how large or complex, will never outgrow Smartsheet. Our platform is engineered for massive scale and elasticity so, as organizations grow and their needs evolve, Smartsheet will seamlessly scale with them. Our platform services are architected to handle significant data and traffic growth. Over the past years, rapidly increasing demand has given us the opportunity to stress-test and harden our platform capabilities::

The second principle is to deliver trustworthy performance, even for the most demanding customer workloads. We believe that enterprise-grade scale isn't a destination; it's a continuous process of improvement and adaptation to make our systems ever more resilient. This is why at Smartsheet we have embraced a decentralized service architecture that avoids creating a single point of failure and allows each component to evolve independently. Discrete platform services enable our engineering teams to make faster capacity and reliability improvements, stress-test and harden them, and continue to iterate on each service in shorter cycles. In aggregate, this design principle enhances the platform’s ability to support ever larger datasets and more complex traffic requests, withstand incidents and offer consistent performance even under peak loads.

Additionally, our teams regularly deploy observability and monitoring best practices to proactively identify and prevent incidents that could result in degraded performance or downtime for the applications our customers use every day.

Let’s now take a look at what a platform built for growth means for customers building solutions in Smartsheet. I love this quote from one of our customers in the financial services sector about how a platform that truly scales enables enterprise-wide growth:

“I am blown away by our adoption and utilization of Smartsheet… It has grown to be one of our most critical vendors and systems throughout the enterprise; we are so reliant on it, the usage is so wide-scale, and the adoption throughout all of our lines of business is truly remarkable.”

Powering Complex Workflows at Scale

A core strength of Smartsheet is its flexibility to work your way—switching between views to match your use case, work style, or project methodology. However, as platform usage and data needs grow, so does the demand for scalable, high-performance tools.

Our newest view—table view—is designed to meet this need, providing a more responsive experience for managing large, data-intensive projects. With faster load times, enhanced formula and sheet linking scale, and support for 2x larger sheets, teams can work more efficiently without delays.

And we’re just getting started. Our roadmap includes expanding table view to support all your favorite Smartsheet capabilities, such as history, automation, forms, reports, dashboards, etc. all working seamlessly with large-scale sheets. By leveraging our grid platform service, we are positioned to deliver enterprise-grade functionality, blazing performance, and solid reliability for even the most demanding projects.

A Foundation for Enterprise AI

At Smartsheet our product innovation focuses on embedding AI directly into the experience, making it an intuitive part of how people work, rather than a separate tool. From creation and configuration to analysis and workflow execution, AI is becoming a part of every aspect of how people work. This integrated approach requires a platform that can support millions of users performing calculations, analyzing data, and troubleshooting issues with enterprise-grade performance and availability.

Our work in scalability, reliability, and performance supports current and future AI demands, including existing contextual AI offerings like Generate formulas, Analyze data, Text and summaries, and Get help as well as upcoming AI innovations in our roadmap.

Enterprise-grade Project Portfolios

Smartsheet empowers organizations to automate and manage large, complex processes and programs. Our platform is the bedrock that enables project management at immense levels of scale. For example, Smartsheet Control Center -our project portfolio management capability- has enough capacity to manage multiple portfolios of up to 60,000 projects each. These are industry-leading scale levels.

The Smartsheet portfolio solutions also support change management at scale with ease, enabling enterprises to deploy updates across thousands of in-flight projects in real time as their business needs evolve over time. Delivering project portfolio capacity that exceeds the exacting demands of our largest customers and the ability to flexibly manage changes to thousands of in-flight projects are some further examples of the scale and agility afforded by running applications on an enterprise-grade platform. 

Building for Enterprise-Wide Success

At Smartsheet we believe that we are more than just a platform; we are a trusted partner in our customer’s success. That is why we are committed to deliver work management solutions for the most demanding enterprise workloads. Through continuous investment in platform capacity we provide a powerful foundation for applications like flexible views, integrated AI, and scalable project portfolios that drive enterprise-wide success, today and in the future.

To learn more about our enterprise-grade capabilities, please visit our Enterprise hub or request a live demo to see Smartsheet in action.