Sunday, February 7, 2016

How Big Is Your Analytics Team?

As Chief Growth Officer at TeamSnap, I am often asked how big our analytics team is.  TeamSnap has about 10 million customers.  Those customers are highly engaged in the app so we have a lot of information about what is happening in recreational and competitive sports, especially youth sports.  We have 75 employees and are quite analytical as a company.  Yet, we only have one full time data analyst.  Instead we have taken a bit more of a distributed approach that I will describe.

Our basic philosophy is to get different people around the company engaged with the data.  We do that by creating simple interactive dashboards that show our progress against targets.  For example, in business development we have a dashboard that shows how we are doing in working with other partners to drive business to TeamSnap.  The dashboards are so closely tied to comp plans that we use the same data to figure out quarterly bonuses.  At the same time, the purpose of the dashboards is to allow people in those functions to interact and drill down on the data.

What we typically do is allow the end users to filter the dashboards by a variety of factors including geo, sport, type of customer, etc.  If our business development folks are working with soccer partners in Arizona, they can isolate our performance in soccer in Arizona.  Most of the analyses are actually much more complex and deeper than that example, but the interesting thing is that they are being run by business folks who are totally abstracted from the underlying data.  They are just using a simple point-and-click dashboard.

By empowering the team with these interactive dashboards, we tend to pull out far more conclusions from the same sets of data.  We have a lot of eyes on the data and different folks approach the data different ways and ask different questions.  I often tell the team, "With these dashboards you can slice the data almost an infinite number of ways so your findings may vary." Sure enough the team often teases out all kinds of insights that we never would have seen with a more top-down driven approach where the analytics team spoon fed the data to the business team.

Several of our most analytical people in the company are ones who had little to no prior experience in digital analytics.  Many of them came out of sports backgrounds or creative professions.  It always puts a smile on my face when someone who does not have a formal data analytics background incorporates some great analyses into their work.

The vast majority of our dashboards are created in Tableau.  We love the way it dynamically syncs to various data sources and presents the data to users in a way that is comfortable for anyone who has used Excel before.  While Tableau isn't cheap, it was a much better fit for us than the half a dozen tools we tried before.

So I circle back to my question of how big our analytics team is.  Our goal is to think of our analytics team not as our one data analyst, but rather as our entire employee base. We want every employee teasing out great insights from the data and integrating data into what they do.