WNB ENGINEERS: OUR PATHS TO TECH | PART 2
Here’s some stuff that our WNB (women and non-binary) folk wanted to share with the WNB tech community, in the hopes it might help you on your path 💙
IN THIS ARTICLE:
Dinda joined Cleo back in November 2020 as a senior product analyst after working in the travel industry. After a year and a half she left Cleo for a new opportunity, before returning to Cleo as an analytics lead in February 2023.
We caught up with Dinda to find out more about her career journey.
Do You Remember Why You Initially Chose to Join Cleo?
I was living in Germany for a little while working as a data scientist within a marketing team. I’d always wanted to move to London, and I knew that I wanted a more product-focussed challenge rather than a marketing focus in my next role.
So, when a senior product analyst role came up at Cleo, I knew I had to apply. Luckily, Cleo were in a position where they could sponsor my visa, which meant I could move to London.
When I joined, Cleo had around 100 employees, but there were only three people in my team. I was also one of the first analysts at Cleo who sat outside of the data science function. The head of growth started the day before me, so we joined forces with an engineer and formed Cleo’s first growth squad.
Our aim was to get attribution tracking into a good place. We aimed to get 95% of our users attributed to certain platforms, so we could see how effective our marketing spend was. Achieving this meant having talks with third parties, and building a self-attribution form for users to fill out in the Cleo app. This attribution model is still being used today with the original data model I built, which is pretty cool.
Why Did You Leave and What Brought You Back?
After about a year and a half, an opportunity came up at a big tech company that I’d always wanted to work for. The role was a product data scientist, which came with broad opportunities to choose what you were working on.
At the time, the company was going through a big growth period. Unfortunately, that slowed down during a time of big tech layoffs, which meant the challenges I thought I could tackle were no longer an option.
I knew that moving to a different organization within that company was not my preferred option as I would need to build my reputation from zero again. So, I started thinking of the options I have where I wouldn’t have to start all over again.
Annie, the head of talent at Cleo, reached out to me to chat about an analytics lead role. I took some time to think about the role, and spoke with some of the data leadership team about what a career path would look like for me as the company expanded further. I obviously had a good background knowledge of how the company worked, and what they were hoping to achieve in the future, which helped.
I decided to rejoin Cleo in February 2023, and haven’t looked back since. My role is fundamentally different to the product analytics role I was in previously.
How Has Your Role Changed?
I’m now a people manager, which I wasn’t before. As an analytics lead, I also work closer with leadership. I try to make sure that all of our growth squads are in a good position by setting the right goals and giving them the best chance to hit those goals.
From a data perspective, quite a lot has changed. When I was here the first time around, we were working with raw data that needed cleaning. Since I’ve returned, we’re using DBT for data modelling, which makes it a lot easier. We also have more analytics engineers to help us build foundational datasets for analysis. This means analysts at Cleo can spend less time there and more time on producing insights and influencing decisions.
I’ve noticed subtle changes from leadership too. They are still able to make brave decisions effectively, but they work in a more mature way. For example, we have monthly business updates in All Hands, and squads are measured on their contribution to LTV. Everyone knows where the business stands which is great.
By nature of evolving into a scaleup, I’ve noticed that decision making has slowed down a little. When you go from having a team of three making decisions to a much larger team and following a fairly standard process, that is inevitable.
What Are You Working On At The Moment?
I currently have two main areas of focus:
Increasing Marketing Efficiency
We used to do basic reporting, but we didn’t use many predictive models or scientific methodology to help us make better investment decisions.
As I’ve already mentioned, I have experience working as a data scientist within marketing at likes of trivago. So, I’m currently working with our paid growth squad to implement Marketing Mix Model, Incrementality Testing, and predictive models. We essentially forecast users so we can allocate our marketing spend to the right places. We’ve also got the freedom to experiment in order to make smarter decisions.
Direct Deposits
We’re working on a new product and we want to prove it has value and find a way to grow the product as quickly as possible. I’m looking at this from a growth and product side. For this work I collaborate with our growth and card squads, as well as working closely with other analysts.
Do You Have Any Advice For Anyone Thinking of Applying To Cleo?
Be real. Especially in the interview process.
People appreciate differences here, whether that’s differences in ways of working, differences in personalities etc. We all know it’s productive to have diversity of thought involved in decision making.
If you like the sound of working at Cleo, check out our open roles.
FAQs
Still have questions? Find answers below.
