We brought together three stellar speakers from Airbnb, Invoca and Keen IO to talk about what’s involved in “Building a World-Class Analytics Team.” We tackled this topic from a few different angles — as part of a marketing team with no immediate plans to build out a dedicated data science team (Invoca), as a data science company (Keen IO), and as a large scale online marketplace doubling their data science team year over year (Airbnb). Here are the three talks and Q&A panel!
Julia Stead, Director of Marketing, Invoca
Julia’s key takeaways for marketing teams that aren’t ready to hire a full time data scientist or data science team:
- All out-of-the-box analytics tools need some degree of customization, no matter what they try and sell you
- Easy data extraction and bi-directional syncing is essential for martech decision making
- Adding a Business Intelligence expert to support marketing tools (and other areas of the business) can really help with tracking KPIs
- Marketing teams are ultimately looking for a single view dashboard… the holy grail of marketing!
Michelle Wetzler, Chief Data Scientist, Keen IO
- Platform Engineers to build large scale infrastructure
- Engineers and designers to focus on web experience and data visualization
- Consultative Engineers to help customers understand data and data challenges
- Analysts to run analytics on Keen’s business itself
Elena Grewal, Data Science Manager, Airbnb
Q&A Panel Session
- How have you addressed diversity in your hiring?
- How do you test for data skills?
- What is the onsite analytics test at Airbnb like?
- What does it take for a Junior Data Scientist to become more senior? What advice do you have to groom them towards this?
- What were some data findings that lead to a memorable customer communication?
- How do you differentiate processes around measuring and reporting recurring metrics and ad hoc, one off analytics requests from the larger business?
We’re looking forward to hosting more informative meetups like this in 2016! To stay up to date on future events and recordings, let us know!
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