An Interview with JJ of APEXX Global

The first of our newest blog series ‘An Interview with …’ asks JJ of APEXX Global about spreadsheets, their advantages and challenges

Working with data and technology can be difficult and overwhelming for a lot of people. So, we at Taught By Humans are running a series of interviews with professionals to help demystify these topics for you. How are data and technology useful and/or significant within different roles? How do people learn about data and technology and their applications? How can we keep our knowledge of data and technology up to date? Our interviewees will be helping us to answer these questions and more.

Our first interviewee is JJ: the SVP [Senior Vice President] of Product & Implementation for a payments technology company, APEXX Global. He answered a few questions for us relating specifically to his experience of working with spreadsheets, including how they are used in his role, how he has learnt to best make use of them, and his advice for those new to using them.

The Interview

What is your role and what does it involve?

I’m JJ, the SVP of Product & Implementation for a payments technology company called APEXX, who are a multi acquirer payment gateway. This means that we’re a technology layer that connects our customers to multiple acquiring banks, payment methods or payment processors globally, and we connect into those and our customers connect into us. This means that our customers can have the flexibility to pick and choose who they want to work with and what types of payments they want to process, but they only have to maintain a single integration to us to do so. As a product SVP, I own all of our customer-facing products and technology. All of the functional technology that gets deployed to our customer facing environment falls within my remit. I also own the functions of implementation, on-boarding, and customer success. Therefore, how our customers go about accessing the product falls within my remit as well.

So, how do you use spreadsheets within this role?

In a whole variety of ways. Some of the really obvious ones that spring to mind are managing product roadmaps and backlogs. As a business, we obviously use JIRA [An issue and project tracking product] to manage our software development life cycle. But in order to get stuff to the point that is ready to go through the SDLC [Software Development Life Cycle], we have to prepare a roadmap plan, prioritise what is going to make it into JIRA. Spreadsheets can be really useful tools, although I find there becomes a point where you need to graduate up from Google Sheets and Excel. Saying that, the functionality within both is so rich that, in reality, until you have a really complicated set of requirements, both are very useful tools for things like managing backlogs. I have also used them for simple project planning and things like that. And ultimately, Sheets is a fallback tool for me if I need to do any basic reporting and analytics. Obviously, within payments, there’s a lot of data. And if I need to run some simple stats on how many transactions are successful in a given day, or how many different payment methods we’ve processed on a given day, then using functions and formulas within Excel, and pre built functions like pivot tables, is a really easy way for me to interrogate data. One of my favourite uses of Excel is as an interrogation tool, for example, comparing one set of data to another set of data to make sure that you’re getting expected results. So, there are a whole host of ways in which spreadsheets are often a fallback tool for me. If there’s anything I want to do with a small or large set of data, spreadsheets are so accessible and so easy to use, that I find them to be an excellent place to start.

Are there any features that you think are sometimes overlooked?

Probably, because there’s just so many of them. I think Sheets is an excellent example; I don’t know if the same is true of Excel. But because Sheets is an online tool, it has a lot of functions that utilise other tools external to just Sheets itself. When APEXX first started doing its own reporting and transaction forecasting, we used an external service within Sheets to calculate FX [Foreign Exchange], for example. I’m sure there are hundreds of other functions like that that are sitting there for people to use. Unless you go looking for them, you wouldn’t know what they were there. And this is also true for the other tools within Sheets, such as formulas. I consider myself to be an intermediate user of Excel and Sheets; I can do things up to the level of pivot tables, and V lookups. Anything beyond that, though, I probably need to use Google to find out how to do it first. With that in mind, there are the formulas that I use regularly, and then there are the ones that I don’t know exist, which I haven’t yet found the need for to serve my purposes.

Are there any advantageous features of Sheets or Excel that the other doesn’t have?

There is one that springs to mind, and it may have changed. I think TEXTJOIN is a really useful Google Sheet formula that I don’t think exists, or certainly didn’t always exist, within Excel. Other than that, I think they’re probably pretty complementary. There are aspects that are different, such as Macros in Excel, which are done differently in Sheets, and use of VBA [Visual Basic Applications, the coding language used in Macros in Excel] in Excel, which is done differently in Sheets. These aren’t necessarily things that one has over the other, but are just different ways of going about things. Something that I actually found easier to use in Sheets is pivot tables. No one had ever really taught me how to use a pivot table, and then a few years ago, I had a requirement that needed a pivot table to make it easy to quickly interrogate and summarise data. Having never been taught how to do it, I looked up how to do it through Google, and approached it in Sheets. I found that the way it is done in Sheets works well for how I think, because it’s done slightly differently. Ultimately, it’s doing the same thing as pivot tables in Excel, but there is something about how it works in Sheets that is easier for my mindset to comprehend as opposed to Excel.

How did you learn how to use spreadsheets? What was your learning process?

I guess the earliest learning process was probably in school. But that was a long time ago, and I was not necessarily taught any particularly useful applications of Sheets or Excel. For me, it’s been a case of learning on the job. I’ve had quite a variety of roles over the last 14 years or so, and all of them have had, at one point or another, a requirement to do something within a spreadsheet. It’s just a case of picking things up as I go. I’m a massive fan and advocate of Googling. I think being able to Google something that you don’t fully understand is potentially one of the strongest skills out there. If you’re good at it, it can be a massive time saver for you. So I’d say, for me, I have grown my skills within Excel and Sheets by Googling.

And did you find that that was an easy and effective way of learning?

I think it’s an easy way of learning for me, it may not be for everybody. Some people learn well on courses; some people learn well in classroom environments; some people learn well self-taught. It’s important to know how you learn things best. For me, I need to know why I’m doing something. My learning needs a purpose. For example, I might be sitting in a room and if someone says, “here’s a load of stuff you need to do for me”, I would need to know why. What use have I got for this? How is this going to be useful for me moving forward? I find this a very useful way to work because I consider myself quite good at Googling things. However, all it takes is for the words to be in a slightly different order in your Google search, or for you to miss a key word out of what you’re looking for, and you could end up going down the wrong path. But it works for me, even though I know for a fact that it won’t necessarily work for everyone. Engaging in a classroom-style environment and having people talking through different tools and subjects with you works better for a lot of people. I think it can also help people to gauge how you would use something, or why you would do it.

How do you ensure that your knowledge of spreadsheets is up to date?

I probably don’t have a method for this right now. At the end of the day, there are probably loads of new functions and formulas that have been introduced to Excel and Sheets, and I would only have come across them if I had the need to. If there is something that I need to use, then my knowledge of this would be up to date based on that need, and based on having to do it. In reality, I don’t read forums and I don’t look at the release notes that come with Sheets and Excel. I think that’s because of the type of user I am. Spreadsheets aren’t the biggest part of my role, but they are very useful and effective tools for certain things that I do. If I was in a different role and, for example, 70% of the things that I did within my job required Sheets or Excel, then I would probably use forums or things like Google, which is especially useful as it has very good documentation. So, the forums and the documentation around G Suite are probably where I would start.

Is there any other advice you would give to someone starting to learn?

Don’t be scared by spreadsheets. Sometimes they look really complicated. In reality, once you build an understanding of something, it starts to become really clear in your mind. Try and think of why you might want to do something. Like I said, for me especially, but I’m sure it’s also true for other people who are going into something, or going into training in learning Excel, you need a good purpose. You need to know what you want to get out of it. Because if you want to get something out of it, you’ll ensure that you continually use the skills. Whereas if you go into it with a really generic purpose, such as ‘I want to learn Excel’, then chances are you won’t. You’ll learn things but will you maintain those skills in the same way? Probably not. So, know how you want to use the tools that you learn and know what you want to get out of spreadsheets. And once you’ve learnt those skills, then use them. Make sure you do have a muscle memory of them; repetitive tasks will ensure that they stick and stick quickly.

Is there any other information or advice you want to share?

I don’t think so. Like I said, the big thing for me is, don’t be scared of spreadsheets. I stopped doing any kind of science, technology and math subjects at the age of 15, and that was 19 years ago. At the end of the day, I could have really shied away from tools like Excel and Sheets, because they sit well with people that have continued those subjects until further education or until sixth form or whatever else. But I learnt to embrace them, because I had a need. And, ultimately, I wasn’t scared to fail. I think you sometimes have to fail along the way to get good at something and learn something. It’s all about having the right mindset. That would be my advice.

Amazing, that’s such a good attitude to have! Well, that’s all the questions I have for you. Thank you so much for giving up some of your time to speak to me today.

Takeaways

So, what can we learn from this interview?

Takeaway #1: Spreadsheets can be useful for anyone and anyone can learn to use them, even those who don’t come from a scientific background.

Takeaway #2: There are different learning techniques and each of these can be the best option for someone, whilst wrong for someone else. A key to building a knowledge of spreadsheets — or anything at all — is to find the method of learning that works for you.

Takeaway #3: You don’t need to be able to do everything that it is possible to do in spreadsheets. Instead, learn what is useful to you and what there is value behind understanding in order for you to use spreadsheets for your own personal benefit.

Thanks to JJ for sharing valuable advice and insight into spreadsheets, and how they can be used, tackled and learned. If this interview with JJ has been useful for you, stay tuned for more interviews which will be released in the coming weeks…