Data Analyst Can Be One of the Most Exciting Career Paths that You Can Choose

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how is it like to be part of a data team in a startup? In the past few years, data-related fields become one of the most favorite jobs in the world. Since the digital era opens the opportunity for companies to utilize and monetize data to the next level, many employers are starting to look for a data team to help their company to leverage their business by becoming a data-driven company.

In this article, I would like to share with you my experience working as a data analyst. To be specific, the story here is related to life as a data analyst at Fazz Financial Group (FFG) — it might be different in other places, so if you are currently considering the career path as a data analyst or maybe you are part of a data team in other companies. Hopefully, this article will be a good reference.

Before we go further, let me explain a little bit about FFG. If you haven’t heard about us, we are basically a fintech group formed in 2020 that manages multiple financial services and products such as Payfazz, Modal Rakyat, Xfers, and many more. FFG market is in Southeast Asia with the goal to give financial access to everyone. You can find more detail about FFG through this link.

Data Team in FFG

As data analysts, our job is to help the stakeholders in the company in making decisions based on data by providing actionable insight. Managing data is not an easy task, especially if the data that we handle is big and complex. Therefore, as a part of the data team, we work collaboratively with other departments such as Data Scientist (DS) and Data Engineering (DE) Team to provide the analysis for stakeholders. If you are not familiar with the distinction between DA, DE, and DS positions, you can find the explanation here.

The data Team in FFG is centralized under the direction of the VP of Data. However, the way we distribute the tasks in Data Analyst is by assigning each data analyst to a specific product or service, since FFG has multiple financial products and services. With this approach, each data analyst will have expertise in a specific domain based on the financial product and services they are assigned to, but still can collaborate with other data analyst members since we are in a centralized data team.

What We Do in General as Data Analyst

In FFG, in general, our data analyst day to day tasks are classified into the following things:

1. Building an Analytics Dashboard We create an analytics dashboard for stakeholders, so they can monitor their metrics on a periodic basis. A dashboard becomes one of the important assets for the company to be data-driven, since their metrics or goal can be always monitored periodically. In FFG, we are using BI Tools such as Tableau, Metabase, and Data Studio to create the dashboards.
2. Creating Data Spotlight: Data Spotlight is a deck that summarizes the recap analysis in a specific period of time, such as the sales performance, app reliability, user behavior, etc. Commonly, we create a data spotlight on a weekly basis where data analysts will present the findings in front of product or service stakeholders. The goal of this task is to make sure people are aware of what happens during the week, so any decision and action can be taken immediately based on data.
3. Conducting an In-depth Analysis: Sometimes during the data spotlight or other instances, when we have business questions that can’t be answered directly via dashboard or data spotlight, we will conduct an in-depth analysis for that particular case. For example, you might find that from the dashboard or data spotlight, in the specific month, the number of churned users increases significantly. There are many possibilities that would make that happen, whether it causes by the app’s reliability performance, marketing initiatives, the changes in the UX of the app, or others. Every possibility should be investigated until we find the real root cause — that’s why it needs in-depth analysis.
4. Providing an ad-hoc Data: Since the company business data is managed by the data team, any stakeholder might request specific data for some purposes such as business reports, campaign targeting, and others. The data analysts will help to provide it. For instance, the marketing team has the initiative to publish a campaign to segmented users, they will ask data analysts to provide the list of users that are eligible for that campaign. After providing the list, the marketing team will publish it on our app.

Don’t forget that every task will require good documentation, since documenting is part of the task itself. In the team, our preference is to use the tools like notion and Google Docs. The benefits of the documentations is that everyone can understand and track the task easily. Especially, when it comes to task handover, it will be easier for the members to continue working on specific tasks which were done by others if it’s all well documented.

Outside of day to day tasks, we also have two periodic group activities with the data team, there are:

1. Data Team Weekly Meeting: Every Monday, we conducted a meeting with the overall data team, including our VP of Data. On this occasion, each department (DA, DE, and DS) will share their task update, such as what they have done in the last week, do they have any challenges or issues, and what they are going to do next. The goal of this meeting is for each departments to stay up to date on each task, and see if we are aligned. In addition, sharing the challenges or issues that everyone is facing will open the opportunity for others to give feedback or help.
2. Weekly Sharing Session: We believe that everyone has their own strength and expertise, especially since most of us are assigned into the different product or service, so the knowledge and experience are varied among members. Therefore, we initiated an event called Weekly Sharing Session every Friday, at 4 pm. Yes, we chose on the end of the week, since it’s time to slow down and relax 🧘. The scheme is that each week there will be a chosen person that needs to share or present something to other members. The topic can be anything, whether it is data-related skills, hobbies, books, general knowledge, or others. For example, we had presenters that shared about Tableau, how to do the proper Query, or how to use specific data tools. In other events, the presenters will share about personal development such as understanding Zen and Ikigai for work-life balance. There are no limitation on the topics. The goal of this session is to make everyone learn something from others every week, and we can have an active discussion that is not always about work. Sometimes, we also invite a presenter outside the data team to share his or her knowledge. In the beginning, the sharing session was for data analysts only, but then DA and DS joined in this weekly session, and now the Fraud team also joins our session. This activity is one of the ways for us to keep improving ourselves by learning from others, and also bonding with each member. Sometimes, we also replace the sharing session with a game, where we compete in a specific game and the winner will be rewarded haha it’s fun 😀.

Image 1: One of our Weekly Sharing Session events (Marketing Analytics by Guest Speaker from Head of Marketing)

How Good Working as a Part of Data Team in FFG

I can’t deny that working in FFG, especially in the Data Team, is one of the best opportunities that I got. The environment here is really supportive for personal growth, and we continuously learn from multiple use cases that are available. Here you will be surrounded by great people, which is good, because we try to catch up and learn from others.

People are humble here, and we are not worried to make mistakes as long as we can learn from it and improve. Even when you do, people will give you positive feedback without hurting your feelings. That’s why I’m not surprised when RevoU nominated Payfazz or FFG as the tech company that has the highest happiness index in Indonesia.

Image 2: Happiness Index Indonesian Tech Companies. Reference in this link.

Conclusion

That’s all that I would like to share with you how it’s like as a data analyst in FFG. Working as a data analyst can be one of the most exciting career paths that you can choose, because you will always find new cases and something new to learn. Working together with the various stakeholders, such as the product team, marketing and sales team, tech team, and others to support them in making better decisions every day is a challenging, but also fun task.

If you have questions or comments, I would be happy to respond. Oh ya, currently, in FFG we are also opening data analyst positions, so if you are interested visit our hiring page.

Written by: Paksi Yudha Sasmita