Introducing RAD: Research, Analytics & Data Science in Intercom

Five years ago I joined Intercom to lead our then nascent Product Analytics and Data Engineering functions. At the time there was a single product analyst supporting a handful of product teams, all of which were based in our Dublin office. And a lone data engineer focused on ingesting core production data to our (new)-ish central analytics warehouse. The company was about 200 people, we had about 7K customers and had recently raised a $35M Series C.

Fast forward to 2021 and a lot has changed.

The company has grown to > 600 people and > 30K customers. We’ve raised a total of $241M and reached “unicorn” status with a valuation over $1B. We have R&D functions across Dublin and London, and ship hundreds of new features to our customers each year. We have a sharpened company strategy and a new CEO — Karen Peacock.

Our Analytics & Data Engineering teams have built a highly configurable data platform that fuels everything from self-serve analytics, controlled experiments that guide product and pricing improvements, to predictive models that drive tangible business benefits. The way in which data and evidence is used across the company is increasingly sophisticated — from shaping product & business strategy, designing new user experiences, to fueling automation and machine learning algorithms. And we’ve evolved our analytics, data and research teams.

Our Data Engineering team is now part of a larger Business Systems function. And we’ve created a new function called RAD — Research, Analytics & Data Science, which I have the privilege of leading. RAD brings together our Product Research and Product Analytics teams into a single org with the goal of creating, evolving, and improving a holistic understanding of our customers across Intercom.

One of our core company values in Intercom is “We Obsess about our Customers’ Success”. We love solving our customers’ most important, most urgent, and most valuable problems. To do this we believe that understanding our customers and our products holistically is critical. We’ve seen first-hand the value of bringing quantitative and qualitative data, insights, and perspectives together in meaningful ways over the years. And so we’re embarking on a new chapter to help Intercom drive effective evidence-based decisions and focus on what matters most.

Let me introduce Team RAD and share our purpose, mission, vision and values. In the coming weeks and months we’ll share more of our experiences in building, scaling, and evolving Research, Analytics & Data Science in a fast-growing company, covering topics like:

• How we’re structured and the partnership model we employ.
• How we democratize data and research across the company, and our approach to empowering evidence-based decision making.
• How we support key product launches, define success for our products and shape product strategy.
• How we blend, mix and triangulate methods for maximum impact.
• Frameworks we’ve created and applied, key data tools we’ve built and iterations we’ve made to our platform and processes over the past few years.

A little about Intercom

Intercom is the world’s first customer messaging platform for business growth. Founded nearly 10 years ago, we’re on a mission to make internet business personal and have built a suite of messaging-first products for businesses to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle — across acquisition, engagement, and support. Today more than 30,000 businesses use Intercom to connect with a billion people worldwide.

Introducing RAD

Meet Team RAD!

Our Purpose

Team RAD exists to build, enable, and share a deep, holistic understanding of our customers, their needs, and their product behaviors using research and data science. We empower every Intercomrade to make effective, evidence-based decisions. Our insights are used to shape strategy, to help the company focus on what matters most and to build products that deliver real value to our customers and our business.

Our Mission

Drive effective, evidence-based decisions through research and data science

Our Vision

• A holistic understanding of our customers, their needs, their perceptions, and their product behaviors is ingrained and used across the whole company to drive tangible improvements for our customers, our products, and our business.
• Our RAD foundations and tools are always in great shape. The majority of tactical day-to-day decisions that rely on customer insights and product behaviours are self-served.
• Team RAD are strategic partners across the company who work on the most impactful initiatives.
• Our world-class team is happy, healthy, and high-performing.
• We are renowned both in and out of Intercom for driving impact by combining quant and qual data in compelling ways.

Our Team Values

1. We are evidence-driven yet opinionated: We bring world class research, data, and insights to all important decisions. We inject objectivity and facts to all situations. We balance rigor with bias for progress. We take time to form, share and evangelize our own thinking and recommendations based on our findings. Our opinions are proportional to the strength of the evidence at hand.
2. We are true strategic partners: We are diplomatic, trusted partners to leaders and teams across Intercom. We invest time in building domain expertise, in asking questions and in fostering relationships. We are co-owners of problems who go above and beyond surfacing insights. We respectfully push-back. We empower and challenge our partners to think differently. We are part of the decision making team.
3. We focus on the decision: We are laser focused on the highest impact work for our team and for Intercom. We always ask ourselves “is this the right project to take on?”. We never produce insights that are simply good to know. We focus on priorities that either drive tangible decisions for the business or help our team and our foundations scale. We follow-through to ensure our work is actioned. We say no thoughtfully and often. We help each other and our company focus on what matters most.
4. We spend less time the next time: We invest in foundations that help us scale our impact and automate our work. We balance near term priorities with critical longer term initiatives. We spend time to ensure core work is consistent, reproducible and accessible to our team and to others. Our definition of done means we’ve communicated our work, we’ve driven a decision, and we’ve taken core learnings forward as a team.
5. We combine passion, creativity, and mastery: We are expert practitioners of research and data science. We hold a high bar for research and analytics quality. We invest in mastery of our craft and understand that mastery takes time and reflection. We thoughtfully explore new ways to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to drive impact. We communicate our work with creativity and conviction. We share and inspire each other and folks across Intercom with our knowledge and passion for research & data science.

We’re hiring Data Scientists and Researchers at various levels across Dublin, London, and remote in the UK & Ireland, with the goal of adding six new team members in the coming months. If you want to help shape the future of the RAD team at a fast-growing company on a mission to make internet business personal, please get in touch.

→ Here’s a link to our open data science + researcher roles