People, Learning and Data: Why Paul Vithayathil is #BlueToTheCore
At Bluecore, we put our people front and center in everything we do. To better understand what makes our diverse team tick and really get to know the individuals that make up our people machine, we decided to find out why different Bluecorians are #BlueToTheCore.
Today’s interview is with Paul Vithayathil, a Manager of Data & Insights at Bluecore. Paul first joined Bluecore in March 2017. When he is not exploring retail data, his passion is hiking around the world with friends to places like Zion, the Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier!
Tara Sussman: Tell me about the path that led you to Bluecore.
Paul Vithayathil: My passion for numbers started as a kid with sports statistics, and that led me to study math and statistics in college. Post college, I started my career as an analyst, but my passion for climbing led me to found a startup with indoor climbing exercises called Redwall. It was a great learning experience, and when I began to search for my next role, I knew I wanted to work with large sets of data and do so at a startup. I found Bluecore and knew it was the place for me for two reasons: The people were smart, passionate and humble and there was a rich data set for retail, so I ended up trading in my red for blue.
TS: What does your typical day at work look like?
PV: While there is no typical day at Bluecore, I like to start my day with activities that need to be done on a regular cadence like checking dashboards on Looker and monitoring quarterly report cards. Then I’ll focus on ad hoc projects for clients. For example, a client might ask Bluecore about future email campaign opportunities and my team will look for insights within our data to provide tips on how to optimize those campaigns. Other times, we’ll take on a big project like building a custom model for a client that we can then replicate for others. Ultimately, our job is to help clients maximize the value of the Bluecore platform.
TS: What differentiates Bluecore from other high growth companies?
PV: People are open to ideas and actually available to hear them out and give feedback. I get to test a lot of ideas and iterating on feedback.
TS: Which Bluecore value do you most represent?
PV: Learn from the past to build the future. My team regularly digs into data to find opportunities that cover everything from reporting on insights to building actionable, custom models for a specific clients. We continue to refine our work based on our learnings and customer feedback. It’s all about having a growth mindset
TS: How well do we walk the walk when we say we put product and customer first?
PV: Really well. The way that we think about feedback loops is always about the customer. A great example of this way of thinking is our concept of the Email Death Spiral. We understand that in the world of email, more volume does not necessarily equate to more value. So everything we do is geared toward making our customers’ lives easier with efficient workflows while also making emails more personalized and relevant to the end consumers. Even our pricing model is based on customer performance, so we only make money when our clients make money.
TS: If you could switch jobs with anyone, who would it be?
PV: The engineering team because they build our products.
TS: What about Bluecore do you value the most?
PV: The learning and the people. Data insights is all about growing technically and telling stories. As Bluecore grows, so does my and my team’s ability to tell better stories from our data that lead to better actions for our retail clients.
TS: What are you most looking forward to accomplishing this year?
PV: Scaling out the data analytics team! We need to keep operating as a data-driven company so we can continue to drive better results for our clients and enable everyone at Bluecore to talk about our data in a meaningful way.
TS: What are you most proud of, either personally or professionally?
PV: Building custom models at Bluecore. You learn about it in school, but there is no real world application. The dream is to spend your time building models at work. Not everyone gets that chance, but I do at Bluecore. Not only do I get to build custom models, but they are statistically significant and impact our clients.
TS: What keeps you at Bluecore?
PV: All of the above. People, learning, data.
