Meet Our Data Team — The Eagle Eyed Oracles Behind Quiqup’s Kick Ass Algorithms
At Quiqup, we’re building a delivery platform to redefine urban logistics. We want to empower local businesses with fast and flexible deliveries, so that retailers can level the playing field and compete meaningfully in an age of e-commerce.
A central part of this endeavour is data.
From identifying how to improve the user experience and optimising Quiqup’s logistics operations, to driving internal efficiency and creating tools to inform strategy — data is a crucial resource to every stage of the Quiqup machine. As Mehdi, our Head of Data (or Data Shepherd) would say:
When you know how and where to look, data can tell a beautiful story. And if you use it right, you can just cut through the noise to create evidenced based strategies and make strategic data driven decisions.
In this post, we want to share with you what our Data Team does — how they sift through vast, untamed fields of raw information with eagle eyes and sculpt an ever improving Quiqup experience.
What is their mission?
Broadly speaking, the goals of the Data Team are to create tools that will interact with the data to support decision making and enhance efficiency. This can be separated into:
Optimising logistics. Data is generated at every stage of the pickup journey — how long it took to get an item weighing X kgs from A to B when using a scooter, bicycle or car, for instance. Over time and hundreds of thousands of orders, that information is accumulated, and we can dissect that data to find patterns and correlations which tells us how future pickups can be made even faster.
Streamlining internal operations. Essential to running a smooth operation is to gain an accurate and holistic view over every facet of the business, and to have a reliable way to assess results and inform decision making. So, if we wanted to know how well a marketing campaign performed, and whether it should repeated or adjusted in the future — then it’s our Data Team who creates the tools and dashboards that gives us that visibility.
Making data accessible. In its rawest form, data exists as a bunch of numbers and characters, but to the untrained eye that looks more like a migraine on a spreadsheet. So, the Team has to translate the data into a readable format that is digestible for the layperson, such that the data can be accessed and utilised by people other than the Data Team themselves.
On a typical day, we might be wrangling (and sometimes outright wrestling) with data to make sure it exists, is internally consistent and represents reality. Basically, we make the data make sense so it can be used by everyone here at Quiqup.
How do they do it?
The Team works at an intersection of engineering, intelligence generation and science. That means they’re responsible for everything from collecting and processing data, to conducting analyses and visualisations of that data, and using it to construct automated decision making tools.
Data Engineering. Because raw data is rarely usable straight-off-the-bat (re: migraine), it needs to be cleaned and translated into a digestible format. So once everything has been collected and stored, it needs to be processed to ready it for analysis and manipulation.
Business Intelligence. Once the data has been cleaned up, it can be manipulated and analysed to generate insights which help monitor and inform decisions. Through the use of statistical tools, plotting tables and charts, and providing the key performance indexes, it’s how raw data can be turned into valuable information that can be easily accessed and used.
Data Science. If business intelligence is about spawning insights from data, then the data science element of the Team is about turning those insights into models and fuelling automated decision making tools. For example, that might mean building more accurate ETAs and using tracking locations to produce improvements on driver assignment algorithms, making forecasts for demand in different times and locations to efficiently provision our fleet, or segmenting our customer base to personalise the user journey and best serve our clientele.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about what our Data Team gets up to on a day to day. We’re a growing family and we’re always excited to hear from curious minds who want to apply their skills to build innovative solutions to challenging problems. So if you’re keen to join a team that’s carving out the best tech in the business, do get in touch. And as always, don’t hesitate to shoot over a message if you have any questions.
Tim, Business Content Writer
