Building a Data-informed Team at UpCode Academy
Building a data-informed team is of high importance for many tech startups. Michael Seibel, partner at Y-Combinator, puts it succinctly:
“The best companies and employees don’t believe that only product people or founders know the solutions to problems. They believe that their users can help them understand what to build and how to build it if they are willing to implement the analytics, listen, and test.”
Data-driven decision making has become a buzz term, but for good reason, when you use data to interpret customer behaviour, you are able to give customers what they really want, and move away from intuition and gut feeling leading the way.
For a 10-month-old startup, we had experienced a fast growth in headcount — we are currently 25-strong across operations, product, marketing, and academic teams. While not all our employees have programming or data science backgrounds, we believe that when we focus on empowering everyone with a data-driven approach towards business, design, and operational objectives, we can serve our customers better. Naturally, building a data-informed team became a top priority to us, especially since we are a technology academy that teaches data science.
Instead of forcing all our employees to go through classes with no tangible sense of urgency, we wanted to challenge them in an engaging and immersive way. Nicole, our Chief People Officer, initiated a friendly internal ideathon to find and tackle bottlenecks in our company. This was how we did it.
Step 1: Training
We conducted a simple 3-session training programme that will help our employees understand the following:
- What are the user metrics that we track?
- How can we extract the raw data that we need?
- How do we test solutions scientifically and systematically?
In the first and second sessions, ZP, our CEO, went through extensive tutorials on how to use Matomo, an open web analytics platform, to understand user behaviour. They also learnt how to extract key user data from the company database using Metabase and SQL queries.
For the final session, the team learnt how to clean raw data and build data reports, complete with intuitive graphs and charts, using Google Data Studio.
To ensure that everyone could commit for the training sessions, we organized each training session twice within the same week.
Step 2: Pairing up for mentorship
After the training sessions, we drew lots to form teams for the ideathon, pairing employees from different departments together. Each team is also allocated a member from the management team, who will act as a mentor to help coach and prepare them for the challenge.
With the guidance of the mentors, each pair had three weeks to find an actual problem or bottleneck experienced in our company, develop a hypothesis statement, and find and test solutions.
Since each pair is made up of employees from different departments, they were able to offer innovative solutions based on new perspectives and insights to existing problems. What the mentors observed in this phase was that employees had the autonomy to carefully scrutinise existing processes to examine if we have been effective in giving our customers the best user experience. We felt that giving the opportunity for every team member to look at the user journey objectively is highly valuable. As our company grows, we want to encourage new and existing employees to develop critical thinking and offer innovative solutions, not follow SOPs blindly without understanding our processes and customers on a deeper level.
Step 3: Showtime
After three weeks, it was time for every pair to present their findings and possible solutions to existing problems. Each team was given 30 minutes to present and answer questions.
In this phase, what our management team found was that the teams had managed to pinpoint and address real bottlenecks that were affecting our workflow. When the team worked on building solutions and collecting data to prove their case, we realised that the employees were empowered to take ownership of the problems in the company. There was a genuine excitement in the room that built the momentum to solve more problems and build better solutions. The result was much better than what we have expected, and has brought the company much closer than any generic team-bonding activities.
Conclusion
Hiring your first twenty employees and keeping everyone aligned to the mission can be a challenge. It is usually at this stage where functions become defined and departments become specialised. At this stage, if solutions were handed top-down all the time, employees tend to keep to their lane and follow SOPs word-for-word. This could stifle employees’ creativity and capacity to contribute to the company’s growth.
When a company is empowered to take a data-driven approach to find solutions from bottom-up, true innovation can start to happen. Employees will be more motivated to take ownership of their work, and they learn how to better communicate with their co-workers from other departments.
