Phenom chooses Studio 3T to boost MongoDB productivity and data accessibility

Posted on: 18/11/2025 • Luke Jovetic •

About Phenom 

Phenom is a global HR technology company that delivers personalized experiences for candidates, recruiters, employees, and management through the industry’s first Intelligent Talent Experience platform. 

Its Customer Care Engineering (CCE) team supports these efforts by managing complex MongoDB environments to triage customer issues and ensure system reliability. As Phenom’s customer base and product complexity expanded, the team’s triage workload grew and became increasingly unmanageable. 

Current tools were slowing business progress 

Before adopting Studio 3T company-wide, Phenom relied on MongoDB Compass for triage and data inspection. But as query complexity and dataset sizes grew, it was clear that a comprehensive solution, capable of dealing with more complex requirements, was needed. 

As ticket volumes increased, Phenom’s engineers found themselves spending a significant amount of time writing and debugging MongoDB queries manually. Without visual tools to speed up the process, even simple investigations required deep database expertise. 

“It wasn’t difficult to identify where we could save time to justify the use case – the challenge was proving it,” says Rakesh Nath B, Director Customer Care at Phenom. “We estimated that even by triaging 20 MongoDB-related requests a day, we could save a little over one full-time employee’s (FTE’s) time purely spent on triaging.” 

Although Studio 3T is often viewed as an individual developer tool, Phenom realised its benefits for the whole enterprise. The Customer Centric Engineering team began documenting every point of friction and delay to quantify potential time savings. With this information, the team built a business case, secured financial approvals, and managed procurement, Infosec, and finance as distinct stakeholders, just as they would for any large-scale software adoption. 

“We started by documenting every single instance where teams felt stuck or delayed because they didn’t have Studio 3T. Then we extrapolated those numbers and built our justification from there,” Rakesh. 

By analysing ticket data and time spent per task, the team projected 60-70% faster triage, freeing the equivalent of 0.75-0.875 full-time employees per year. That reclaimed capacity could be redirected toward escalation handling, ops automation, and customer support excellence. 

“Just by making triage faster by half an hour, we could save at least one FTE. And as volumes or efficiencies increase, that could easily grow to two or three FTEs,” says Rakesh. “We estimated that if we operated at 60% efficiency, we could recover our spend in about a year, and much sooner if the gains are higher.” 

“In this space of AI and automation, missing any opportunity to do things faster and more accurately at scale would be pretty stupid. Studio 3T gives us that edge,” he adds. 

Why Studio 3T is the right choice 

Before adopting Studio 3T company-wide, Phenom relied on MongoDB Compass for triage and data inspection. But as query complexity and dataset sizes grew, it was clear that a comprehensive solution, capable of dealing with more complex requirements, was needed. 

Individuals within the team were already using Studio 3T on individual licenses and had experienced its value. But as its importance to business became clear, it was obvious to opt for a license package that would better suit its needs at an enterprise level. 

“We did look at alternatives because the process demanded it, but we were biased towards Studio 3T,” says Rakesh. “It’s the tool our teams were already comfortable with, a bit like Microsoft Office, where familiarity and usability make all the difference.” 

With Studio 3T, engineers can now bulk edit, query, and export data at scale, capabilities that were either missing or limited in Compass. 

“Before Studio 3T, there were just a handful of people who could do this work well. Now it’s much more spread out, more people can self-serve and manage their own queries.” 

The transition is also a positive for licensing and governance. “We cleaned up around a hundred machines running cracked or trial versions and now have 40 licensed users, all fully allocated. The feedback from teams has been very positive.”

Features that make a difference 

Phenom’s engineers found Studio 3T’s Visual Query Builder and Aggregation Editor to be transformative. They can now construct queries visually without needing to remember MongoDB syntax, and build aggregation pipelines one stage at a time through an intuitive interface. 

“The most popular features are around search and navigation, things like querying, aggregations, and exports. Our teams love the ease of use, especially how intuitive it feels, like working in Excel,” says Rakesh. 

Studio 3T’s in-place document editor lets engineers quickly update or correct MongoDB documents during triage, a process that had previously required manual commands and multiple tools. Its advanced search enables deep exploration of nested fields, helping engineers pinpoint issues faster. 

Meanwhile, the high-performance export engine removes previous data size constraints, allowing Phenom’s teams to export millions of documents at once in formats like CSV, JSON, or SQL. 

And with no document view limits, engineers can scroll through and analyze entire collections directly in the UI, a major productivity boost over Compass’s 100-document cap. 

Together, these features have streamlined triage, reduced friction, and empowered engineers to handle issues more accurately and efficiently. 

A partnership that stands out 

Beyond the technology, Phenom highlights the value of the relationship with 3T’s team. 

“We planned for an economy-model purchase but ended up getting top-tier value and experience. The attention we got from Kash and the 3T team was exceptional,” says Rakesh. “Even though our spend was small, Kash made sure we got the support and attention we needed. Professionally and personally, it’s been a very positive experience.” 

The success of the rollout has also prompted Phenom to streamline its internal license management process. 

“We’ve simplified the process internally, now people just need their budgets approved to get licenses. They no longer have to go through a tedious procurement process each time.” 

Could Studio 3T benefit your business?

Take a look at our other case studies to see how we’re invaluable to organizations across multiple industries, or try it yourself with a free trial. Alternatively, contact our sales team for a team trial, demo and chat about your options.