Gousto Data Team: Best Of 2022
2022 proved to be another challenging and exciting year for our Data team. Through all of the trials and tribulations we’ve managed to put together a boatload of exciting features on our blog. This post is a celebration of some of the wonderful stuff that our team has been working on, as we could not think of a better way to wrap up the year than showcasing how proud we are of all these talented people.
We’ve summarised some of our favourite articles from each of our 3 main areas within the data team: Data Analytics, Data Platforms and Data Science.
Analytics
We started this year with our first ever data team hackathon that catered specifically for problems in Analytics. The goal of this hackathon was to put all of our brilliant minds together to explore the changes in customer behaviours following the return to normality after the COVID pandemic. One of our Analytics Managers, Morwenna Causey, helped organise this event and put together this great post around hosting an analytics hackathon.
Later on in the year, Samuel Parrott published an Introduction to Operations Research. This post provides a simplified view into some of the key problems within this highly technical field. It also demonstrates some of the approaches that our analysts in our factory and operations space use to address these challenges at Gousto.
Experimentation is at the heart of the innovation here at Gousto — particularly the improvements we are constantly building on within our Digital Product space and CRM. The importance of metrics used for measuring the success of A/B tests is cardinal to our experimentation processes. Julian Aylward, one of our regular contributors, put together a framework for identifying and selecting primary metrics for experimentation.
Data Platforms (Business Intelligence, Analytics Engineering, Data Engineering and Data Governance)
This team was consolidated at the start of the year — and besides being a fantastic group of people, they are fundamental to how the rest of us work every day. They’ve contributed some a great mini series of posts detailing how the roles within Data Platform differ from each other — and other areas of the Data Team. Job titles and remits can differ a lot in data, but these posts do a great job of explaining how these roles differ at Gousto, a must read for any aspiring data professional. The ones that they have put together so far include:
- The difference between an Analytics Engineer and a Data Engineer
- A comparison between a Data Analyst and a BI Developer
- What to expect from an Analytics Engineer vs a BI Manager
- How a BI Developer is different from a Data Engineer
- What does a Data Scientist do vs a Data Engineer
Data Science
Some of the most interesting topics within the data team have been covered by our fellow data scientists. As well as the more technical articles that were written this year, we published this post on the daily ways of working of a Data Scientist at Gousto as part of a cross-functional team. This has helped surface how members of the data team have to cooperate with colleagues from other disciplines such as Software Engineers and Product Designers, when a data product is already in production.
On the technical side, for those interested in Natural Language Processing, our data scientists collaborated on this article about a clever way we’ve used NPL to construct embeddings to represent our recipe data. In this piece, we showcased how the creation of numerical values assigned to recipe categories helps solve a complicated obstacle in our recipe recommendation engine. We were also happy to continue our series on our recommendation engine with an insightful read by Hai Nguyen into how we tackled the cold start problem for new Gousto customers.
This year a lot of work has gone into improving the accessibility and quality of the data used for model development. Steven George’s post about the use of feature stores explains how they can be used to accelerate the development of models (and improve documentation!).
Among the many benefits of working at Gousto is the ability to take part in initiatives outside of our organisation — one such initiative has been the collaboration with Master’s students on Data Science problems. This two part series by Steven George shares the perspectives of two of our MSc project students this year. You can find part I, and part II here.
If you found this review of our work in 2022 interesting, we put together a similar review of the work done in 2021. Be sure to follow our blog so you can keep updated with all the exciting stories and features that we will be putting together in 2023!
