What does Analytics & Search team do at CBC?
This post is part of a series on “What teams do at CBC” in 2021. In each blog post we are celebrating one of our amazing teams in Digital Strategy and Products at CBC and shed light on the fantastic work they do. Teams will be sharing about how their work fulfills CBC’s mission and serves our Canadian audience. Team members will also talk about what it is like to be on their team and what they do for fun.
Introducing Analytics & Search Team
- Richard Loa — Senior Manager, Analytics Management — 12.5 years at CBC (5 years with A&S)
- David Viscomi — Product Manager, Analytics and Search — 3 years at CBC (3 years with A&S)
- Ashanti Jayasena — Agile Team Lead — 3 years at CBC (3 years with A&S)
- Edric Sun — Senior QA Automation Developer — 5 years at CBC
- Het Patel — Senior Analyst, OTT (3.5 Years with A&S)
- Michael Kwan — Senior Software Developer — 3 years at CBC (2.5 years with A&S)
- Adam Ferguson — Senior Software Developer — 1.5 years at CBC
- John Cho — Senior Software Developer — 1.5 years at CBC
- Akash Sondhi — Senior Software Developer — 1.5 years at CBC
- Alex Lee — Product Owner, AB Testing — 1.5 years with A&S
- Scott Andrechek — Senior Software Developer — 3 years at CBC (1 year with A&S)
Q: What is your favourite CBC TV show?
Favourite CBC TV Show:
JC: Kim’s convenience
HP: Dragons’ Den
MK: Dragons’ Den
RL: Kim’s Convenience
AL: Schitt’s Creek
AJ: Schitt’s Creek (Hands down)
AS: Schitt’s Creek
SA: Dragons’ Den
Favourite hobby:
MK/JC/SA: Video games #eSports
RL: Snowboarding
HP: Playing AmongUs with AnS Team ❤
AL: Cooking and then eating
AJ: Shopping & Cooking
SA: Playing guitar
DV: Brewing Beer
ES: Solving Math Problems
AF: Board Games
AS: Playing with his dog
Q: What does your team do?
The Analytics and Search Team has two key roles:
- Collecting, processing and sending behavioural signals to analytics reporting services and machines to empower teams to make data driven decisions
- Managing and developing a site-search experience at https://www.cbc.ca/search
Both of these products rely on understanding and improving the site and content metadata that our CBC digital teams rely on. The work done to improve the health of our metadata helps improve the ability for CBC to deliver amazing content to our audiences.
Q: How does your team’s work fit in overall with CBC’s mission and Canadian audience?
- The team iterates on the data collection pipeline that feeds the data required so that CBC recommendation systems can model and recommend content to users in a personalized way to Canadians
- The team collaborates with other Product & Content teams to validate hypotheses through A/B testing
- The team collaborates with the Kids web product team to build search interfaces suited for Canadian youth
- The team builds and iterates on a web search interface to help surface local content that can get lost in the shuffle when the news cycle moves very quickly
Q: What does a typical day look like for the team?
- Wake up to the fresh smell of coffee or tea
- Morning stand up meeting with the team where we share accomplishments and any hurdles from the previous day. We then set the daily goals on what we are aiming to accomplish for the current day.
- Work towards accomplishing the goals we set in the standup meeting with possibly few tech huddles.
- LUNCH TIME WOOOOOOOOOOOoooo
- Eat food
- Drink stuff
- Bio break
- Back to work
- Continue working towards accomplishing the goals for the day
- Possibly more meetings
- Work day ends
- (Mandatory) Meet with team members online for video games and team bonding
Q: What roles does your team have?
- Product Manager
- Product Owner
- Agile team lead
- Architect
- Software developers
Q: What tools and technologies does your team use?
- We use Babel JS to convert our JavaScript into the latest version of EcmaScript
- We use Jest to run automated unit tests on our web data collection pipeline
- We use React JS to present the user with the www.cbc.ca/search web interface
- We use Grunt JS as a task runner to build artifacts for deployment to the CBC DEV, QA or PROD environments
- We use Python 3 for making changes to the www.cbc.ca/search algorithm that returns results
- We use Python 3 for the ingestion, sanitation and validation layers for the CBC mobile app data collection pipeline
- We use Java 8 for the formatting and data transmission layer of the CBC mobile app data collection pipeline
- We use Selenium to automate critical user mission integration tests to ensure the web tracking integrations are still operating as normal before new deployments go to production on CBC.ca
- We use Appium to automate critical user mission integration tests to ensure the tracking mobile app tracking integrations are still operating as expected before a new deployment goes to production
- We use Google Cloud Compute to auto scale the mobile app data collection pipeline
- We use Conductrics for A/B testing and iterating on /search
- We use Jira/Confluence for tracking and documentation
- Importantly, we use slack as our collaboration tool
Q: What are some recent exciting projects or products your team developed?
Below are a sample of projects that the A&S team has been part of:
- Every Olympics when CBC/R-C was the official broadcaster since 2008
- Every Canadian Federal Election since 2008
- Every Canadian Provincial Election since 2008
- Every FIFA World Cup when CBC/R-C was the official broadcaster since 2010
- The CBC Kids News Inaugural Launch
- The CBC Gem Inaugural Launch
- The CBC Listen Inaugural Launch
Q: What are some of the challenges your team faces?
Our build process is somewhat outdated and unreliable, we are working to upgrade it
Q: Is your team hiring?
Yes we are hiring two Developers that will be posted at cbc.ca/jobs. We can proudly say we are one the best high performing teams in Digital.
Q: What does your team do for fun?
- Somebody on the team tells a joke before we start every team meeting. This is a must for motivation.
- We have an end of the week team social where we play some kind of an online game. This is our weekly bonding time to give each other a pat on the back for a week’s hard work.
- We play online board games together
- We play online video games together on the weekends
- We celebrate each other’s milestones (birthdays, engagements, wedding showers, baby showers)
- Following our fearless leader into Verdansk
- Yearly Christmas and summer team social.
Q: Was there anything else we did not ask that you would like to talk about?
Analytics & Search has a very talented, fun and humble group of people where our motto is to share and learn. We help each other on the team to build skill sets as we grow in every way so that we have an equally shared knowledge base among each other. Working for Analytics & Search brings new challenges and experiences each day and that is what we love as a team.
To join our teams at CBC, check out our current openings here.
