July brings summer vacations, holiday gatherings, and for the first time in two years, the return of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Chief Data Officer symposium as an in-person event. The gathering in 2022 marked the sixteenth year for top data and analytics professionals to come to the MIT campus to explore current and future trends. A key area of focus for the symposium this year was the design and deployment of modern data platforms.
Some time ago, we covered the key metrics that a Product Manager in a fintech organization should make a top priority when determining their KPIs, breaking them down into five groups: Session-based data, Customer Feedback, Technical Metrics, Action Stats, and Revenue. With that in mind, we conducted a series of surveys on LinkedIn, asking PMs in the fintech industry which of those groups were the most important for them while running digital product analytics.
When I first started my role as an analytics engineer, I was tasked with rewriting a bunch of data models that were written in the past by contractors. These models were taking over 24 hours to run and often failed to run at all. They were poorly thought out and contained a bunch of “quick fix” code rather than being designed with the entire flow of the model in mind.
A key part of business is the drive for continual improvement, to always do better. “Better” can mean different things to different organizations. It could be about offering better products, better services, or the same product or service for a better price or any number of things. Fundamentally, to be “better” requires ongoing analysis of the current state and comparison to the previous or next one. It sounds straightforward: you just need data and the means to analyze it.
