Looking Back: My Six Years at Quizizz
In 2017, Quizizz celebrated a milestone — 2 billion questions answered!
This remarkable growth trajectory captivated me, prompting me to learn more about the organization. My interactions with the founders further solidified my belief in the company’s vast potential. Presenting analyses and sharing ideas with Ankit and Deepak felt rewarding, and I found it easy to communicate data with them.
So, in February 2018, I joined Quizizz as a full-time data analyst.
Although it wasn’t my first gig at a web product, each step in this journey brought new insights. Joining when the team comprised merely 10 employees, I embraced the challenges and opportunities that awaited, especially around leveraging data. We had a basic analytics setup, so the first steps were laying down workflows, setting up tools, and figuring out exactly what we were storing in our data warehouse (We use Google’s bigQuery).
During my first year at Quizizz, besides establishing our main metrics, we dove headfirst into solving for growth. We zoned in on onboarding more teachers and making it easier for them to figure out how Quizizz works. In classic Quizizz fashion, we iterated quickly on various in-product prompts and product flows. Registrations and activations surged.
By the following year, I’d been exposed to technologies that facilitated search on Quizizz. This sparked my imagination and drove me to spend extra hours understanding information retrieval and search engines. I also got to put on my data scientist hat and use topic modelling algorithms to find similarities between quizzes. We now understood the content our users create and consume better, and this gave birth to the first version of our recommendation engine.
Soon, we began exploring monetization strategies. The entire team put their heads together and executed various ideas, such as connecting tutors to students, creating courses for students, showing ads, etc. This was the team’s first split into groups of two or three to work on parallel projects.
During the pandemic, we found our formula — a subscription model. Revenue finally entered our vocabulary of metrics. Things picked up speed, and the need of the hour was to hire more analysts. We also started hiring for GTM functions like sales, marketing, and customer success. The team multiplied, and as the number of stakeholders increased, I had to up my game. I had to figure out how we could serve analyses to as many people as we could, as fast as we could, while maintaining data integrity.
One thing that helped me with scaling analytics at Quizizz was predicting what questions someone would ask of an analyst at Quizizz. I’d create layers of abstractions over our core tables in the warehouse, making analyses more convenient. This has led to me taking up a central role in the team by maintaining the data platform, what they call an “Analytics Engineer” nowadays. I focus on maintaining sanity in the data warehouse, setting up automation to reduce grunt work, and advising other analysts and product/business owners. I explain this dynamic to analysts with a football parable — “I’m a midfielder, and you’re the striker.”
Where I Find Myself Today: The Highlights
At Quizizz, the analytics team has always served beyond reporting and dash boarding functions. Over the years, Ankit and Deepak have given me enough room and encouragement not to remain boxed into my role. They’ve also taken my interests into account while shaping upcoming initiatives.
The chance to work with the latest technologies is a fascinating part of working at Quizizz. We use a state-of-the-art cloud data warehouse, Google’s BigQuery, which is a dream to work with. We also employ dbt for maintaining business tables in the warehouse, Hex to build complex reports, and Metabase for product and business teams to access data in a self-serve manner.
What I enjoy most about working at Quizizz is that I get to decide how to solve the problem at hand. I have a say in everything, from the data we look at to the tools we employ and how we present our findings. To top it off, I often get to pick the problem I want to solve.
Another thing that I appreciate is how we keep onboarding stellar talent. I look forward to working with every new employee and seeing what new perspectives I can gain from them. Some of the new team members are my favourite people now; we finally have a few metalheads I can chill out with!
Insights and Evolutions: Learning Along the Way
I came in here as a perfectionist. I’d take my time to deliver solutions, beautifying every little spreadsheet for ease of consumption. That part of me has had to take a step back these days. As the company grew, so did the demand for output from the analytics function. I’ve had to become a bit more crude with my delivery while maintaining the accuracy of my insights. It makes sense because the business does not benefit from a pretty spreadsheet or dashboard for just a handful of internal stakeholders. I call this growing up in the world of analytics.
I also wish I’d gotten into fitness from the beginning. Because this drive to be fit has come from a place of necessity. The drawback of being conscientious and industrious is that a backlog of tasks can cause anxiety. I usually go to the gym or run around Agara Lake before work. It has helped me stay calm and has made me more productive. Had I been like this from the start, I think I would’ve made a more significant impact here.
Next Up : Exciting Journeys Ahead
My ambition for the analytics team is to cultivate such profound trust within the organization that we emerge as the central hub for decision-making in both product and business realms. As we’ve expanded, the team has played a pivotal role in providing clarity to our leaders, serving as a foundation for trust and collaboration with our adept leadership. This position not only honours us but also opens avenues for greater influence.
Given analysts’ natural inclination towards logical reasoning, it’s entirely feasible to envision them playing a key role in shaping the organization’s strategic direction. Holding this vision, I am eager to see how our influence unfolds, ready to embrace the opportunities the future may bring!
Do you dream of being a part of such an analytics team? We’re hiring.
Check out our open roles here.
