Meet Coralie Betbeder-Déchelette: from McKinsey to Data Analyst

This week, let’s meet Coralie Betbeder-Déchelette, Data Analyst at Joko since January 2021!

Can you tell us about your background?

I was born and raised in Lyon, and ever since I was a child, I have always loved subjects that require scientific and rigorous reasoning. I was really into Maths and Physics, which led me to join scientific preparatory classes after the baccalaureate (I also loved Philosophy, Latin and Greek but this love was not fully reciprocal). I did my preparatory classes at Lycée du Parc and I keep great memories from this period, I met amazing friends and teachers (in particular my Maths teacher who played a key role when I was preparing exams). I entered Polytechnique in 2016 where I studied Economics and Computer Science.

When I was looking for an internship, I discovered consulting firms during events that took place at Polytechnique and joining one of these companies seemed to be a perfect opportunity to discover the corporate world. I prepared the interviews with friends and entered 6–7 recruitment processes with consulting firms. I enjoyed all the interviews and I learned a lot from the people I had the chance to meet. In the end I had a strong preference for McKinsey which I joined in 2019. Even if my internship was very business oriented, I wanted to keep studying science, in particular Computer Science, so I decided to join Télécom Paris for a master specialised in Artificial Intelligence.

Can you tell us more about your career so far?

As far as I remember, I made career decisions with 2 drivers in mind: (i) the opportunity to learn a lot in different fields of interest to me and (ii) the opportunity to work with smart and caring people.

During my last year of studies I remember asking myself questions about management consulting because I was attracted by more technical jobs but I was very convinced that starting my career at McKinsey represented a great learning opportunity.

I still had a chance to do a project followed by an internship at INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) during my year at Télécom. This was a great experience in which I worked on Natural Language Processing algorithms applied to medical reports.

I re-joined McKinsey as a full time employee at the end of Summer 2020, until I joined Joko’s adventure in 2021 as a Data Analyst which sounded like the perfect mix of business and technical topics.

What made you decide to join a consulting firm?

I was quite sure that consulting was a great fit for me. It was mainly due to discussions I had with consultants and the idea of working on solving complex problems on concrete company cases was exciting. I enjoyed the recruitment phase of consulting firms, it strengthened my impression that it was a great opportunity to quickly learn a lot with brilliant people. And I think it was a very good decision! I really appreciated my experience at McKinsey, I met amazing people with whom I loved working and I enjoyed the work environment. I learned how to work in a team, understand an industry, handle client relationships, and we were always setting the bar high in our missions.

Why did you leave consulting and why were you interested in the startup ecosystem?

When I re-joined McKinsey after my last year of studies I worked on a transformation project that aimed at improving the efficiency of several departments in a company.

It was a great project but it made me realise that a real driver for me was to be the owner of a project leading to results that I will witness in the mid to long term. Of course, switching between projects is very exciting but it did not fulfill my will to be part of a longer-term project on which I could see my impact. I also wanted to work on more technical projects and I missed coding.

However, I wanted to leave consulting if and only if I had a strong conviction that I was joining a really exciting project with a great team and product. I wanted to keep learning as much as possible while having strong ownership and autonomy in my missions.

Why did you choose data analytics after consulting?

I picked data analytics because it seemed to be the perfect mix between technical skills (coding in python, SQL, using analytics tools) and business topics.

At Joko, I enjoy working on different topics and it’s perfectly fine for me to switch between marketing, product, and financial projects over the same week or month. Working with multiple people on diverse projects gives me the impression that time flies and I’m never in a boring comfort zone.

Why were you interested in Joko in particular?

The people I met really play a key role in my decisions and that is clearly what made me think that joining Joko would be the right choice.

I remember very well my first call about the Data Analyst role at Joko and I had a great fit with Xavier, Joko’s CEO, who handled this recruitment at the time. I met 4 other team members during the process and it gave me a strong positive impression of Joko’s culture.

It was very important for me to be aligned with Joko’s culture and mission. It became apparent to me during the recruitment process that I was willing to work with such smart and caring people. Additionally, the fact that Joko is a B2C product that brings value to everyone is an exciting challenge. It made me feel that the projects on which I was going to work would be substantial and complex since the product is in the hands of millions of users.

Since I joined Joko I have never regretted my choice. My missions are very diverse and I have the chance to work with all teams as we truly have a data driven culture. I’ve worked on technical projects related to data engineering but also on business related topics with the B2B or marketing teams. We have a broad scope in the Data team from loading and transforming the data to empowering team members with tools that allow them to run their own analyses to make data driven decisions.

What did you learn in consulting that you use at Joko?

I learned a lot at McKinsey about how to be organised and efficient in my job. I would mention 2 skills that are useful on a daily basis as a Data Analyst at Joko:

Prioritisation

As a consultant, prioritisation is critical since we need to bring the maximum value to clients in a limited amount of time. In my current job, I need to share time between projects for different teams and stakeholders in order to bring maximum value to the company both in the short and mid/long term. Finding the right balance requires to regularly take a step back and define relevant prioritisation criteria.

Handling interactions with stakeholders

Since I joined Joko, my stakeholders are mainly internal from different teams but these interactions have a lot of similarities with client interactions during a consulting project. I learned in consulting how to prevent misalignment during a project, how to prepare meetings so that time is used efficiently, and how to explain why a project is or is not prioritised. All these learnings are extremely useful in my current job.

If you had one last thing to say, what would it be?

I would mention that I love seeing the team grow, we went from 25 people when I arrived to more than 40 today.

It also impacted the data team, I was the only Data Analyst until February 2022 and we have now 2 amazing team members that joined me. It was a pleasure to onboard them, now it’s very satisfying to see how much we can do as a team and it’s only the beginning!

If you want to know more about Joko, our culture and open positions, do not hesitate to visit this page!