“I was ready to go the extra mile and grow fast”: insights from a Data Analyst

Julie started her career at Delivery Hero as a Junior Data Analyst in September 2018. Two and a half years later, she is leading a team that analyzes complex datasets to answer business questions towards one simple goal: “How do we deliver an amazing service experience for our users?”

As a Senior Data Analyst for Delivery Hero Service, what exactly does your role entail?

Delivery Hero Service manages the global operations of our contact centers worldwide in c. 50 countries, builds products to enable task automation and self-service resolution of user issues, as well as improving agent productivity and driving customer satisfaction. 

Our scope is global and entails dozens of tools, products, processes and applications, which generate hundreds of gigabytes of data every day. Our role is to ensure that we are covering the operations holistically and with excellent quality, while always thinking about scalability to support the massive growth of the business. 

We work closely with the data engineers, Operations and Product stakeholders in Service, and other business units across the organization in order to provide data and visualisations to get insights and feedback for the operations, as well as drive product development.

You started in 2018. What did your day-to-day work look like back then?

I started as a Junior Data Analyst in the Pandora Business Intelligence team, which was handling the reporting of one of our platforms (which includes foodora and foodpanda in Europe and Asia). After only 2 months I became a Specialised Analyst to support the then-called Global Contact Center department (which had about 15 people from Operations). 

This was quite a challenge, taking over an entire stack after only a couple months in the company, but I was ready to go the extra mile and the ownership I was given allowed me to grow fast and bring value quickly. 

Back in the day we were working with a lot of manual reporting on top of a couple of integrated data sources; my day to day work involved a lot of troubleshooting, data cleansing, and setting up new processes, as we were largely focused on the needs of the day. 

Our mission is to build an amazing service experience for our customers

Towards early 2019, scalability became a main focus, as the business was growing and the volume and diversity of data was getting exponential. Since then, we followed suit with recruitment and infrastructure to support and enable growth, as the department is now 95 people, among which we are 6 dedicated analysts, looking to grow to 8 by the end of 2021.

Delivery Hero Service started developing its own products. How did that change your work?

Towards the end of 2019, the department started recruiting developers and building its own products to answer the challenges brought by scale: automation, self-service, optimisation. This increased the scope of our squad in terms of reporting, but also brought new topics such as data tracking design, stack architecture, and later product analytics, in order to enable the department to make data-driven product development decisions. 

[My job] is like a giant puzzle that needs to be solved and that will enable my team to deliver better solutions.

Today we are moving completely towards analytics and insights, and monitoring became a smaller part of our day to day work. Topics like compensation and customer satisfaction became central themes of our priorities.

What is the most exciting part of your job?

What I love to do the most is to design smart, efficient and scalable data solutions that make analytics effortless, and easy to access for any of our stakeholders. The scale and velocity of our business requires that we achieve excellence in our architecture and pipelines in order to focus on providing insights rather than firefighting. This is quite exciting, like a giant puzzle that needs to be solved and that will enable my team to deliver better solutions.

What are the most important traits to be an amazing Data Analyst?  

Curiosity, diligence, communication. At the crossroads between data engineering, operations and product development, one needs to thrive in an environment that is complex, vast and changing, to be able to deep dive into key topics, to reach alignment with very different stakeholders, and to communicate clearly the solutions that one designed.