Improving Data Literacy at GoCardless
As GoCardless grows 🌱, it is becoming increasingly more important for teams to have access to the right data to make business decisions in a scalable way. In 2021, we the Business Intelligence (BI) team have kicked off a series of initiatives aimed at Improving Data Literacy at GoCardless, where the team is evolving our focus from building solid data foundations to delivering last-mile analytics and empowering 🌟 teams across the company to take their self-serve capacity to the next level. ⏫
At GoCardless we aim to be data driven. We want every GeeCee to be able to create great data, know how to confidently navigate it, and use the tools we have to make better decisions. If we all do that, it’ll help GoCardless grow and continue being successful.
Among many fantastic initiatives, one was to host a Data Week, which was a celebration of all things data. 🦾 Among the speakers, we had multiple teams sharing how they have used data to drive decisions and the methods they adopted to improve data literacy!
Teams from around GoCardless shared stories about how they’ve wrangled their data 📊 to drive decisions.
Customer Success!
With Looker being the reporting tool for us, the Customer Success team shared how they leveraged Looker to build dashboards to track important metrics and KPIs with ease. To encourage more adoption, the Customer Success team kicked off the Looker Certification Bootcamp 💪 which is a 13-week programme aiming to help people pass their Looker certification (that includes topics such as basic tables to advanced table calculations and visualisations). This initiative has seen a shift of people becoming more confident and able to derive insights🕵️♀️ from data more independently.
Advice from the Customer Success team:
Take an explore in Looker, and just play with it! You won’t break it at all and no one will see it unless you share it with others, so don’t be scared!
Increase Market Share!
The Go-To-Market (GTM) organisation has adapted cross functional teams to increase market shares 🍰 as well as increase revenue for GoCardless. With this, the GTM needs to capture various important metrics such as account engagements, funnels, activations etc to understand what is happening.
To enable fast and effective decision making, the GTM team has been working with BI to integrate various data sources together into Looker to have good visibility as well as coming up with important business KPIs (with the ability to track them! 🔍). This has allowed the team to get near real-time data and make appropriate decisions to facilitate growth; for example, the ability to have a good overview of various channels has allowed the team to quickly ️⚡️ spot any particular channel that is overperforming or underperforming, therefore quickly adjusting budget and resources accordingly to remove potential bottlenecks before it’s too late! 🧙🏼♂️
Reduce Failure Rate!
The rapid growth of GoCardless means that many actions that had worked yesterday, might not work tomorrow. ☀️ Many teams around the organisation are tackling growth in their own way; the Data Science team is no different. Their mission is to:
Deliver the best decisions at scale for GoCardless and our merchants (powered by data and statistical modelling
One of the challenges has been how to reduce failure rates for our customers? “Failures are inevitable ⏳, but not all failures are unavoidable”. By leveraging historical data, the team has been trying to identify patterns in failures so solutions can be designed to avoid them before they happen! One method is to identify correlating metrics (e.g. the day of the week) of failures and input these into a machine learning model such as a decision tree 🤖 to better calculate the probability of failure and make a decision with the business needs in mind.
As GoCardless grows, it becomes increasingly more important for teams to have access to the right data to make business decisions ⚖️ in a scalable way. Last year the BI team ran our first survey to understand how people across GC are using Looker to interact with data. From these results and conversations with stakeholders across the company, important themes emerged around what we can do to help people become more comfortable with using data and realising value from it.
This aligns with our mission 🎯 of:
delivering a data-driven organisation supported by an analytical community.
This is a crucial time for us to rethink our efforts — we want to be able to equip users at all levels with the knowledge and tools that are needed to discover, understand and use GC data with confidence.🍷 By raising the bar of analytical and data literacy across the board, we ensure that we can scale sustainably and BI does not become a bottleneck in delivering accurate, actionable insights.
Do you feel like you want to join a data driven team and grow with us as the company scales to be more data driven? 🤓 The Business Intelligence team as well as many other teams are looking for talented individuals to join us! Have a look at our open roles!
