Executive Assistant
So this wasn’t a full internship but a project that I was given by our VP of Data Science at my job (with my manager’s approval). In my 1:1 with Sergey, we talked about my career goals and when I mentioned my major, he mentioned that a good portion of his team were MIS majors who ended up in the Data Org. After showing interest and being honest in how little I actually knew so far because I’m taking minimal classes, he offered me a quarter long project of working with his team to gather the KPI’s for each month so that I could learn what it all meant and how to understand how it affects the business. This consisted of:
- Partnering with 5 of the Data leaders to gather information of their goals and objectives and how they split it month by month over a span of a quarter
- Working with leaders on the importance of the goals, learning the acronyms and exactly why each goal is important to the company
- How to gather and read the information related to those goals on Tableu and compare my results to what the leaders obtained in our 1:1’s
- Working with Stakeholders in different functions to retrieve missing information or confirming the data we have is correct
- Adding that information to our leadership tracker sheet
- Presenting the information while being shadowed to the leadership team during our weekly team meeting
I learned that companies are moving (if they haven’t already) to be heavily data-driven and are in need of good, accurate data. One thing I learned from experience is that companies also need to have a central and true source of data that can be accessed by people within the company. Some of the KPI’s that I had to retrieve, I had to wait for Engineering or Sales to have the final numbers and that took so much time because they were overly protective of the information. I learned how the Data org measures success with Data when compared to company goals and though I didn’t work on it exclusively – I learned how some leaders take the data from the KPI tracker and use it to build a story to inspire their teams or take to eTeam to help t hem see how to prioritize. The biggesst advice that I received was to always relate the stories to actual dollar amounts each and every time to build your case for pushing towards a goal you feel is necessary to accomplish a business objective”