Looker Academy — How to create a successful evangelist program
Written by Lucas Ludewigs — Business Analyst at AMARO
A company is constantly striving to grow. For that to happen, employees should be able to do consistent analyses and deliver the right results, finding the best place to deploy their effort, and measuring the correct KPIs. Managers may tend to act by trusting their own experience, which can be very rich, but growth-oriented mindset can always be taken to a new level. With so many powerful and versatile tools for data analysis available today, decision-making based purely on gut feelings could be deemed as blind-acting.
Data-driven company
At AMARO, we have a data-driven mentality, trying to avoid actions based only on individual predictions. Our mindset is oriented to analysis and we make decisions mainly based on numbers. For the first couple of years of the company, people downloaded reports from transactional softwares and performed several analyses on excel, which could be really exhausting. Such habit got improved by time, as can be seen here. However, when I first joined AMARO a year ago, we still used to do many ad-hoc queries and people were still not able to extract the true power of data and analytics. I had the mission to incite people’s minds and AMARO’s culture to dive even deeper on analysis, by tracking the impact of every decision on the KPIs, including revenue, markup, shipped items and so on. For a data-driven company, it’s also expected for employees to spread data knowledge, showing numbers in meetings and evaluating them objectively, always considering that the teams should know how to bring relevant data into discussion, and not waste time with useless reports. With that in mind, it was important for everyone to be fluent in the visualization tool (Looker) provided by the BI team. That’s when we saw the need to create a training for employees.
The key concept
At that time, some teams were already using Looker, a cloud-based infrastructure where the business user can create its own reports, with the desired columns from desired [derived] tables, and build dashboards from it. We already had our sources working at full potential, our data pipeline extracting and loading data into our data warehouse, while Looker was using this data and was writing the derived tables back to database. However, many teams were still manually doing downloads from ERP and reports on Excel, therefore spending much more time than needed. In addition, people were coming to meetings with numbers that didn’t exactly match.
We then decided to motivate other teams to use the same source of data: our data warehouse, which gathers data from Ecommerce Platform and ERP (as well as from other marketing and physical retail tools as well, becoming really embracing). We started with some trainings for the teams, and then realized they were still not confident enough to do their own analysis, because the tool has several tables from several business areas and one can get lost easily while searching for a common measure. I should mention that the Data & Analytics team wasn’t fully aware of all the complications within each business area, all the particular details they had to deal with, so we needed to get closer to other teams. We solved this problem recruiting Looker evangelists — influencers within each team that would spread the data culture learned directly from the source. These evangelists would, in turn, act as ambassadors for their own teams, bringing back to the Data team specific business needs from Looker.
What are evangelists?
One day, it was commented while discussing a project that AMARO could bring the concept of “evangelists” to our daily activities. The implementation would be a perfect fit for us, since evangelists, in this context, are people with advanced Looker knowledge, but instead of working with BI, they work at another business area, and have a deep understanding of all the peculiarities and setbacks from that certain area. Evangelists’ peers should then get in touch with them in order to address problems on their analysis. They have velocity and facility to answer stakeholder’s questions, accuracy on solutions, and should be able to teach the team how to use new features and where to find the right information. Referred to as “key users”, evangelists should also know the basics about other business areas, creating a network of their own. The contact between the Data & Analytics team and the rest of the company would be through the evangelists of each department.
So how did we chose these mythical creatures from within each department? We needed to define an evangelist profile. Since they would be targeted to help their peers, the key users had to have communication skills such as good relationship with the team, drive and patience to teach, and preferably multiple touch points inside department’s processes. In addition to spending time in classes trying new features on the visualization tool — time which managers would rarely have to spare — evangelists would also support their own teams on strategic decisions, knowing which data would be relevant to look at. Lastly, evangelists had to be curious, resilient, and be interested in the analysis field. After defining these capabilities, we sat with their managers and chose the best suited people from AMARO’s departments to start the Looker Academy program.
The Looker Academy
At the beginning of the program implementation, we were not aware of each evangelist’s capability, so we decided to start slowly, with light analytical concepts and a handful of examples. At the end of the first class, we launched a survey to evaluate the initiative and it delivered to us a valuable insight: we had to execute more practical exercises. This and other insights acquired through the survey were applied on the following classes.
While developing a program, it’s worth considering how technical the classes should be and, when delivering your lesson, to be able to tell whether or not people are understanding your explanation. Another factor that turned out to be a complication is the different level of analytic skills within the class. For instance, people on performance marketing department initially had more analytic skills than people from the products department. It was therefore necessary at first to level the knowledge regarding dimensions, measures, aggregations and granularity among them, in order to further discuss more advanced Looker topics.
After the first lessons, we had already covered the main basic concepts that an analyst should know, and we decided to dig deeper and be more specific. We then scheduled a team meeting and organized all topics that came to mind in detail, organized them in a spreadsheet and correlated all topics that were already given and, in case of the topics that were not given yet, we mapped in which classes they should be given, reserving some considerable time for questions and discussions. All classes and content were organized through tasks/subtasks in Asana, Google Slides and Sheets.
We left some advanced topics for the end of the Looker Academy, because many business users don’t have the need for them on their daily activities. After the last ordinary class — the program is still running — we will start to select some specific evangelists (and also some peers) to explain advanced analysis on Looker (such as cohort). Looker Academy started in May and should end in the 4th quarter. Since it’s been running, we’ve noticed that many employees also want to become an evangelist, and were asking for next groups. The data and analytics team also realized that the number of opened connections to the database, number of reports and number of dashboards created increased expressively in the past few months, making Looker Academy an successful experience and a successful evangelist program.
In conclusion…
The evangelist program came to life because of its necessity. It was no longer comfortable that people were presenting mismatching numbers in meetings and spending loads of time in front of Excel. Neither was decision making based only on previous experience part of AMARO culture. Being digitally-native, AMARO was born a data-driven company, but this project undoubtedly leveraged the use of data.
Examples of wrong reports with wrong data were given to evangelists. But incorrect reports will always appear in every departments and we have to learn to deal with them and propose solutions. The key point here is that those mistakes will become increasingly rare, and people from different departments will understand the technical flaws increasingly faster, making the Data & Analytics team more integrated with the company and increasing productivity as a whole.
