Smartsheet power users: finding the Creator Champions carrying your environment

Ask most Smartsheet admins who builds the sheets in their environment and you’ll get a shrug. Everyone, technically. In practice, almost nobody.

The minority who build everything

Across the environments we’ve looked at, only a small share of licensed users ever actually create a sheet. The large majority are consumers — they open, update, and rely on solutions that someone else built. That’s not a criticism of the consumers; it’s how healthy tools spread. But it means the real productive capacity of your Smartsheet investment is concentrated in a handful of people, and most organizations have never named them.

We call those people Creator Champions: the prolific builders who’ve quietly assembled and maintain most of your environment. They’re not on an org chart as “the Smartsheet team.” They just kept solving problems until half the department depended on their sheets.

This concentration isn’t a flaw to correct — it’s how capability actually forms. A handful of curious, determined people figure out how to make the platform do real work, and everyone else benefits from what they build. The mistake organizations make isn’t letting that happen. It’s never noticing it happened, and therefore never supporting the people it depends on.

Why finding them is a governance move, not a nice-to-have

Naming your Creator Champions does two things at once, and they pull in the same direction.

It surfaces concentration risk. If three people built most of what your organization runs on, that’s a resilience question, not a compliment. (More on that failure mode in a separate post — the short version is that undocumented, single-owner processes are fragile.)

It gives you a Community-of-Practice roster for free. The people who already build well are the ones worth pulling together — to standardize patterns, mentor newer builders, and turn scattered individual skill into shared institutional knowledge. A Center of Excellence works best as enablement, not enforcement, and your Champions are its natural founding members.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The reflex, once an organization realizes how much is being built outside of IT’s line of sight, is to clamp down — approval gates, restrictions, a governance program that reads as stop doing that. It backfires. The builders who created your value route around the friction, or stop building, and you’ve traded productive momentum for the illusion of control. A CoE that focuses on giving people clear, supported paths to build well gets you governance and keeps the momentum. Your Champions are the ones who can define what building well even looks like, because they already do.

What it takes to actually see them

Especially in large orgs, only a few Creator Champions are on your radar… These are the loud ones, always pushing the boundaries and asking for license expansions. You have many more quiet Champions. Building faithfully day in day out, never flagging a license violoation or knocking on your door. These people won’t show up on a standard Smartsheet report. Smart Admin Studio’s Champion report has the indicators that identify these pilars of innovation: who created what, across every workspace, deduplicated so one person isn’t counted as three because of how they’re listed.

Smart Admin Studio identifies Creator Champions directly — ranking owners by what they’ve actually built and maintained across the environment, on metadata alone. It maps ownership across every workspace, deduplicates the same person listed different ways, and ranks by real contribution rather than raw sheet count.

Most organizations have never seen this in one place. When they do, the reaction is usually the same: so that’s who’s been carrying us? And often a second realization right behind it — that the person carrying the most is someone the org has never formally recognized as doing this work at all.

What to do once you know

• Recognize them. Underleveraged builders lose momentum when nobody notices. A named Champion who feels seen keeps building — and starts building to shared standards.
• Promote them. A lightweight Community of Practice turns siloed skill into a repeatable capability. That’s how institutional knowledge multiplies instead of walking out the door.
• Give the important work an owner. The highest-impact processes deserve a dedicated Product Owner who bridges the technical build and the business stakeholders — not just whoever happened to create the first sheet and got stuck maintaining it by default.

There’s a resilience payoff here too, not just an enablement one. The same people who show up as your most prolific builders are usually the same people whose departure would hurt most. Recognizing them and pulling them into a shared practice is how you start turning knowledge that lives in one person’s head into knowledge the organization actually holds.

You can’t enable people you can’t see. Start by finding out who’s already doing the work.

Want to see who your Creator Champions are? Find them today.

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Smart Admin Studio is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Smartsheet Inc.