Data at Taxfix

Data Leaders Uzi Blum (VP of Data), Andre Wagner (Senior Analytics Manager), Anna Barnett (Product Analytics Manager), and Steffen Galan (Data Engineering Manager) present the Data Team’s ongoing goals, current challenges, and the leadership structure that keeps data moving forward.

Towards the tail-end of 2021, Taxfix proudly announced we had reached a major milestone: the processing of €1 billion in tax returns for our customers. And with Taxfix users now in the millions internationally, that means a lot of data. Such masses of information can be daunting, but when handled effectively, data can offer countless insights for a company expanding at lightning speed. The Taxfix Data Team is not only responsible for processing this data but also for ensuring that the insights we yield provide maximum value for both our colleagues and Taxfix’s growing customer base.

The Taxfix Data Team has two missions:

1. To facilitate decision-making in the organisation based on data and insights.
2. To create value for Taxfix customers through data products.

While our aims are clear, achieving the Data Team’s goals requires strategic planning, a solid team structure, and a working environment that thrives on innovation.

The four pillars of the Taxfix Data Strategy

Data democratisation

At Taxfix, our target is to ensure everyone in our teams can access our data and make decisions based on data. Relevant data needs to be available across the workforce and open to everyone, an approach known as data democracy. This is opposed to ‘data monarchy,’ in which managers and experts retain the insights, and ‘data anarchy,’ where the data is available, but there is no single source of truth, and the organisation lacks the expertise or data reliability to generate actionable insights.

The importance of data democratisation is widely known and has even become somewhat of a buzzword. However, to achieve true data democracy, we need to make sure our data is available and harmonised in an easy and reliable way. This work also needs to respect our customers’ privacy and security policies, of course. Building trust in our data sources and providing accessibility enables the whole company to make better and faster decisions.

Data culture

Data democratisation requires both access to data and data literacy across the organisation. The Data Team’s responsibility is to ensure that our Taxfix colleagues are well-informed about where to get the data, how to use it, and who to ask for guidance when needed. Above all else, we also aim to instil a culture in which data benefits everyone.

We foster this culture in a few ways. Firstly, data analysts work directly with mission teams as analytics business partners. As Taxfix continues to grow, our data challenges become more sophisticated. Having this close relationship allows our analysts to steer data topics at the source. Additionally, we’ve also established a data training program that’s open to anyone in the company. In this way, we empower stakeholders with more independence in accessing data insights so that the Data Team can focus on answering more challenging questions.

Advanced analytics

By enabling Taxfixers to be more autonomous with their data needs, data analysts can pour their efforts into tasks that require greater time investment and long-term commitment. These advanced analytics projects could involve developing leading indicators or more advanced statistics, models, forecasting or predictions, as well as correlation and segmentation.

Such analysis requires road-mapping, the ability to look past quick wins, and a willingness within the team to embrace long-term thinking. Having the time to go in-depth is crucial in moving the company forward and taking the team to the next level.

Impacting customers

In the second half of 2022, Taxfix plans to increase our data science activities by building more data products that directly impact Taxfix customers. This work will further improve the accuracy of our customer-facing product and aid customer decision-making, helping them simplify their user experience and maximise their refunds.

The Structure of the Taxfix Data Team

To accomplish our missions, we’ve structured the Taxfix Data Team as a mix of centralised and distributed approaches. We have two centralised teams: Data Platform and Analytics Engineering. Data Platform is essentially responsible for all the data infrastructure and different tooling, events streaming, and ingestion tools. The team comprises a core of engineers whose role is to build solutions at scale. The Analytics Engineering Team combines their engineering skills with deep insights into our business needs. They are responsible for building and maintaining the data warehouse and the semantic layer that provides self-serve analytics to our teams.

From here, we distributed dedicated analysts within different product mission teams, such as the Core Product, New Markets, and New Services. Data analysts also take up positions in marketing, operations, and finance, with other departments to be added in the future. Within these teams, data analysts’ responsibilities include building dashboards, creating data funnels, descriptive analysis, forecasting and advanced analysis, and A/B testing. Since the data space in Taxfix is incredibly varied, we expect data analysts to be active partners ready to engage with all aspects of the business. Great communication skills and business understanding are key attributes for the work.

Meet our Data Leaders

Uzi Blum, VP of Data — “As the organisation is growing, my responsibility is shifting from operational to strategic. I focus on how data can shape the company’s product and decision-making and how to assure there is a healthy and sustainable collaboration and partnership between data experts and business units at Taxfix. Building the strategy, vision, and roadmap is critical to know where we are going in the future”

Andre Wagner, Senior Data Analytics Manager — “I lead Taxfix’s Data Analytics Team, which is divided into two parts: Marketing Analytics and Operations Analytics, which also includes finance. Both teams are there to support the Marketing and Operations departments in their data-driven decision-making, with analysts embedded into the teams to provide direction and support. In this way, Data Analysts are positioned where they can make the most impact but still enjoy a central exchange with other members of the Data Team.

I’m also currently building up a new team, Marketing Data & Measurement (MDM). Their mission is to supply a stable and reliable marketing data foundation that directly informs the Marketing Team and other Data Analysts.

We are finding that as the team grows, there are even more opportunities to learn from each other. As a manager, my role is to create an environment where individual contributors can flourish. Roles here are flexible: the company encourages horizontal changes and collaboration between teams and allows you to experience all aspects of the business.”

Anna Barnett, Product Analytics Manager — “The Product Analytics Team currently owns the analytics of our core tax filing solutions, both web and mobile apps, across our three markets. Our main goal is to provide product teams with relevant insights and enable them to make decisions based on data. We are currently a team of five analysts and will continue to grow over 2022. Data Analysts are an integral part of the product mission teams. Day-to-day, my team works very closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and user researchers. We help to find customer problems that are worth solving and develop analyses to inform product decisions. For instance, we ensure that teams have the right reporting, assist them in designing and analysing experiments, and help determine the right success metrics. We also deep dive into customer behaviours and try to understand what drives them.”

Steffen Galan, Data Engineering Manager — “The Analytics Engineering Team is responsible for extracting data from various sources and combining them into meaningful data structures, which can be accessed through queries from our analysts or in a self-service environment accessible to our wider teams. We develop prototypes for our analysts, and if we find that a certain pipeline provides valuable insights, we assess potential technical constraints and business requirements to ensure that pipeline is scalable. We consolidate various data sources, make them usable in a click and drop environment, and use data visualisation tools to make our processes transparent. We believe it is important that our teams have an understanding of how data is being processed and bear this in mind when developing new data structures. We want to ensure that data democratisation is not blocked by a lack of transparency.

The Data Platform Team is essentially an infrastructure and tooling team for data. We provide infrastructure and ensure we have an outstanding data product by which to create such data pipelines and achieve greater data democratisation throughout the company.”

How we approach development and innovation

Every month, the Taxfix Data Team hosts an Innovation Day. During this day, the team takes time to focus on their personal development goals or work on innovative projects that are not part of their daily activities. Inspired by our core values of Understand, Deliver, Develop, and Trust, taking the time for personal development and innovation are important ways for us to continuously raise the bar and stay competitive in the market.

Some of our team members decide to use this time to read a book or learn new libraries and technologies, while others focus on building proof of concepts (POC). Some of those fresh ideas even end up becoming key projects in the Data Group roadmap. A few of our recent technologies were first tested in Innovation Day and later became part of our production use, including dbt (data build tool) for data processing and Robyn for marketing mix modelling.

Looking ahead

Our Data Team’s structure and ambitions have come a long way since the early days of Taxfix — though we’re happy to say some of our very first data experts are still with us. And to help us reach the next stage in our data evolution, the Data Team is hiring at all levels in 2022. From internships to senior and managerial positions, we’re excited to offer numerous opportunities for growth and impact. This quarter alone, we’re looking to add 15 new Data Team members, including Data Engineers, Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists.

As our company continues to grow, so will the strategic importance of the Data Team. With this next stage in our journey, we’re looking forward to building even more value for the Taxfix community and our customers.

Ready for the challenge? Find our Data Team’s open positions on the Taxfix careers page.