As the second data hire at a medium-sized startup in San Francisco, a large portion of my work revolved around supporting the Product Team. They were in the middle many different projects, and I often had to support almost all of them at the same time. Although some of the details definitely vary from company to company, in general most Product Analysts have a similar pattern of work as described below.
Before I dive into my weekly schedule, it’s important to understand a little about the responsibilities of the data team and the product team.
Teams
Data Team
Our Data Team was created following a hub and spoke model. We were a central resource, built to support the data needs of every team at the company. Our most frequent customers included product, finance, and marketing. By using a hub and spoke model, we had to work very closely with our internal customers to make sure we fully understood the problems they were trying to solve.
Product Team
The Product Team consisted of 5 Product Managers, who each owned one product. Each of these managers would work closely with engineering, marketing, sales, and data as a cross-functional team for their product.
As you’ll see in my events and schedule below, my work was a mix of tasks for the Data and Product teams. In general, the Data Team projects revolved around building up a data infrastructure at the company to empower all employees to incorporate data in their decision making. The Product Team work focused on using data to answer specific questions about our products in order to continue to grow the company.
Schedule
Weekly Events
Data Retro & Sprint Planning. This meeting with the Data Team was set to discuss our work from the previous sprint and plan out the next one. We would talk about what went well and what we’d like to improve from the last sprint. We also checked in on the progress of each task and assigned out new tasks for the next sprint.
Product Retro & Sprint Planning. This meeting was identical to the Data Retro and Sprint Planning, except it was with the cross functional product team that I was a part of.
1:1. Every week I had a 1:1 with my manager. We’d discuss longer term goals, ideas for how to improve the team, and just catch up on some of the work I was working on.
Daily Schedule
7:30 AM. Coffee, breakfast, & quick email check. I start the day slowly, but I always make sure nothing urgent came up in my inbox overnight.
8:30 AM. Start my long San Francisco commute. 3 miles in 45 minutes. Thanks MUNI.
9:15 AM. Settle in the office with some snacks, comb through all my emails, and if I’ve got time, read through a data article from one of the many blogs I follow. Recently, I’ve been a big fan of DZone.
9:30 AM. Work time! If I have a task from the day before that I was in the middle of, I’ll continue on that. Otherwise, I’ll grab a new task from the backlog of tasks assigned to me in our product management tool. This process can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the project size. The general flow of my product tasks is:
- Understand and clarify the business need we’re solving
- Plan how to bring the appropriate data into the data warehouse and data endpoints. Often, this is a new type of event that we track from our app and website usage.
- Make an update to bring in the data and send it off to my QA partner.
- While my update is in QA, I start to sketch out how I’m going to answer the business problem we’re facing. Often this is a mockup of a Tableau report or a Google Slides presentation that I’ll be sharing with the Product Team.
- If my update didn’t pass QA, I’ll iterate and repeat the process. Otherwise, I start digging through the data and putting together the report.
- Finally, I’ll wrap up the deliverable, run it by the Data Team if it’s a larger project, and set up a time to share it with the Product Team. This will often lead to new streams of work that come up from interesting insights presented.
11:00 AM. Data Standup. I do a quick standup with the data team to discuss what everyone’s working on and bring up any blockers or questions.
11:15 AM. Catch up on emails.
11:30 AM. Heads down work time again where I’m continuing the same flow of work listed above.
12:30 PM. LUNCH!
1:30 PM. I tend to have at least one meeting every afternoon. This could be one of the weekly meetings, catch up time with some of my teammates, or most often longer-term planning with the Product Manager. The Product Manager meetings are my favorite because we get to think big about the direction of the product and brainstorm the best methods to define and track our success.
2:30 PM. Back to heads down work on my project. Nothing too interesting here.
4:30 PM. I like to end the day being a bit more creative. I’ll take some time to brainstorm projects that I think would be important for the company, get feedback from peers, and possibly even start a draft to understand the feasibility. I also try to look for projects that align well with the skills I’m trying to develop. This is one of my favorite hours of the day and has actually led to a few new successful projects for my product team.
5:30 PM. Finish up the day. Check my email and respond to anyone that I missed in the morning. I’ll also make notes of the priorities for the next day and wrap up some smaller tasks.
6:15 PM. Head out and take the rest of the evening for me.
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