Part 1: Ritual’s Data “Office Hours”
Growth and Growing Pains
As Ritual has been growing as a business, we have also grown the complexity of problems we solve and decisions we make. With this growth comes new innovation, opportunities, but also, the common growing pains of a startup. One of these (welcomed) growing pains that affects the data team at Ritual is having members from across teams learn and adapt to our growing data, tools, and infrastructure in an organized and efficient manner.
To support an ever-growing team, data, and more complex systems, the data team at Ritual takes inspiration from Airbnb, Qlik, and more in implementing structured and interactive programming to empower employees to use data in their everyday work and make more data-conscious decisions.
Data “Office Hours”
We had a general understanding of data strengths and weaknesses at Ritual, but wanted to live up to our words and have a data-backed approach to determining the content and programming to create and implement for office hours. The data team conducted internal surveys to determine the initial following areas of opportunities for team members to grow their data skills: data fundamentals, internal BI tool-skills, and more advanced data concepts and skills.
After determining where the strengths and weaknesses with our team lied with our data, data tools, and data infrastructure, we established the following requirements for what we coined Data “Office Hours”:
- Accessible: While data is more regularly used by key stakeholders and specific teams at Ritual, it was important to the data team that the concepts and materials we covered were accessible and understandable to anyone who was interested. Having content that is simple and impactful for all is important to living up to our company values of transparency and inclusiveness.
- Recurring: We wanted data education to be something our team members were regularly excited for to learn and share knowledge. Conducting office hours on a regular basis was fundamental to establishing the importance and excitement for data education.
- Interactive: While it was important that the content for office hours was structured, it was also important that attendees were integrated in materials we created. We found it valuable to make lessons not only educational, but fun, interactive, and something to look forward to for attendees.
- Rewardable: We understood we needed strong incentives to encourage repeated attendance and participation, and we came to rely heavily on vegan baked goods and other treats to help keep up good participation!
Initial Results and Next Steps
Since implementing data office hours in summer 2019, we have covered over 10 different data concepts and have created a regular base of attendees coming from all corners of the company, from engineering to acquisition to customer experience.
We are continually learning how to improve the structure and content of office hours, and are excited to grow our material as our team, business, and data grows in parallel. As our team becomes more empowered with their data knowledge and skills, we also look to grow the complexity and interactivity of lessons, and hope to expand office hour leaders to members beyond the data team.
Keep an eye out for part two where we discuss changes made to our office hours during a virtual work experience, and how we measure success for data office hours!
