At the start of any networking event or interview, there's always that same request – "Tell me a little bit about yourself." Being the most common thing professionals are asked to do, you would think I have an excellent response to this, but the truth is, I struggle with it. The reason for that is because the answer isn't simple for me or, at least, not as simple as it might be for other people. That's because I haven't followed a straight career path. I'm a decade into into my career and already my professional life has forked a couple of times. While I think this adds value to what I can offer, I realize that it can cause confusion about what it is I really do.

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A brief(ish) summary of my journey is...

I spent the first seven years of my career as a strategist, first at a Minneapolis marketing agency and then in a consulting role for an internal workplace services team at Google focused on providing Googlers – yes, that's what they call themselves – with health and wellbeing products and services (think those infamous in-office massages, rock climbing walls and other great amenities). In all of those years, I spent countless hours conducting market research and competitive audits, digging up consumer and market insights, writing user surveys, conducting in-depth interviews (IDIs), facilitating ideation sessions and focus groups, writing creative briefs and full funnel marketing plans, strategizing on brand positioning, developing messaging frameworks, collaborating with cross-agency leadership, pitching new business proposals, and more. At Google, I also got the opportunity to work with the product team on their product strategy, expanding my strategic lens beyond my marketing lens.

 

Part way through my time working for Google, I began asking questions about our data, to which no one had clear answers. Being too curious, I took on managing and improving the team's analytics capabilities, exploring what data was available, auditing it, establishing QA/QC processes, identifying what metrics truly mattered and developing measurement plans, standing up dashboards and providing ongoing reporting. I also became a manager of a small but scrappy team, allowing me to grow as a leader and mentor.

 

I spent a couple of years in this split role – half in strategy and half in analytics. After a couple of years, I decided I wanted to go all in on analytics. It was scary, but I knew stretching myself would help me grow in the long term. With that, I moved over to Condé Nast where I served first as an analytics manager and then director on one of the central analytics teams.

My team's – the Audience Strategy Analytics team – job was to create standardized, global approaches for measuring audience engagement and content performance across all of Condé's brands and markets. Additionally, we set global audience KPIs each year, led the development of new methodologies to measure custom audience segments, established methodologies for identifying benchmarks and anomalies in our data, tracked KPI performance and goals, and forecast future performance.

 

My personal focus was on data education and enablement. One key pillar of that mission was ensuring Condé's broader analytics community was educated on and able to deploy our team's methodologies for their unique team's or brand's ongoing reporting and analyses. I developed training materials, held live training sessions, provided ad-hoc ongoing individual support, held weekly office hours and served as a moderator for our primary analytics slack channels. I was responsible for partnering with Data Engineering to identify slow and inefficient queries and reports, to optimize the queries at fault, and partner with the analyst or team responsible to implement the optimizations to reduce overall compute cost and improve reporting speeds. I also partnered with our Data Governance team to establish global, approved measurement definitions and methodologies and worked with them to develop reference materials for all of our internal data teams – from Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Engineering to Data Science and other Analytics teams – to refer to. In addition, I developed a completely custom in-house SQL 101 training course, including written and video content, knowledge checks and a certification test to train any new analyst or analytics-adjacent professional SQL from the most basic principles up to intermediate functions and query structures. 

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The other main aspect of this mission was helping to monitor and manage our data ecosystem, providing an analytics lens in evaluating its performance, structure, gaps and opportunities. For this, I developed a comprehensive audience analytics data source mapping, including key measures and definitions, table names and structures, and analytics use cases, limitations and watch-outs. I also helped facilitate multiple data source migrations, the biggest being our transition from Google Analytics to Parsely to Snowplow as our primary audience, consumer revenue and product data source. With Snowplow, Condé's internal Technology Team was tasked with building our analytics and tracking tools from the ground up. For this, I served as the primary analytics liaison, providing the implementation team with core requirements, exploratory data analysis, data validation support, measurement methodologies, and table optimizations and enhancements. Beyond the major migrations, I regularly met with Data Engineering to discuss database performance, and roadmap out long-term needs and enhancement opportunities. 

 

Which that brings us to today. ​​​​If you have more questions about that journey, reach out in the contact form below! I am always happy to grab a coffee and chat about potential paths and how to make connections and skills across disciplines, whether in-person or over video chat.