Driving Knowledge Discovery and Enhancing Context with Atlan
The Lively Metadata Pioneers collection options Atlan clients who’ve just lately accomplished an intensive analysis of the Lively Metadata Administration market. Paying ahead what you’ve realized to the following knowledge chief is the true spirit of the Atlan neighborhood! So that they’re right here to share their hard-earned perspective on an evolving market, what makes up their trendy knowledge stack, progressive use instances for metadata, and extra.
On this installment of the collection, we meet Ted Andersson, Director of Enterprise Intelligence at CouponFollow, who shares how CouponFollow’s important enterprise progress has pushed related progress of their knowledge, how he and his workforce evaluated the Lively Metadata Administration market, and the way Atlan can function the “glue” between their knowledge practitioners and shoppers.
This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.
Might you inform us a bit about your self, your background, and what drew you to Knowledge & Analytics?
I’ve a tutorial background in arithmetic and statistics, graduating with a Grasp’s in Statistics. I’ve been occupied with knowledge for so long as I can keep in mind, so it was a pure factor for me to go from working within the statistics realm to working within the knowledge realm.
My profession in knowledge began at a small influencer advertising and marketing firm, the place I used to be first launched to internet affiliate marketing and the tech world. From there, my journey has taken me via varied industries and roles. I’ve labored on initiatives starting from name quantity projections and optimum staffing ranges at a tax and accounting agency, to creating a chatbot for buyer assist questions. I additionally had a stint at an EMS companies firm, serving to them transition their software program from on-premise to the cloud.
I returned to Affiliate by becoming a member of Rakuten Rewards, and right here I’m at CouponFollow, the place I’m the Director of Enterprise Intelligence, answerable for something Knowledge. Anyplace there’s any knowledge that’s created, modified, remodeled, or visualized at CouponFollow, my workforce is answerable for it. That workforce encompasses Knowledge Engineering, conventional evaluation, and even the early phases of pushing into Machine Studying and Knowledge Science initiatives.
Would you thoughts describing CouponFollow?
CouponFollow has historically been a coupon and deal website. Our founder is an professional in website positioning and he’d been rising CouponFollow.com for greater than 10 years, however with the pandemic there was an enormous surge in curiosity in coupons and on-line buying.
As the corporate continued to mature, CouponFollow began to herald a a lot bigger workforce, together with me, who was introduced in to start out the info workforce. On the time, they have been working with a consultancy that had gotten all of the “plumbing” in place, however they wanted somebody to assist set the imaginative and prescient and technique for knowledge at CouponFollow.
A very powerful a part of our enterprise is natural search. When somebody goes to Google and kinds in one thing like “Macy’s Coupon,” we wish to be as excessive as potential in that rating. We use Affiliate to monetize the clicking and that’s an important a part of our enterprise.
That being mentioned, we’re at a spot now the place we’re beginning to diversify, transferring into the whitelabeling house with an providing for CouponFollow to construct branded buying experiences for choose companions. Clients for this providing is perhaps information or content material websites, the place you see coupons and buying as a part of their providing.
We now have a couple of completely different methods, attempting to scale a enterprise away from simply being targeted solely on natural search, towards extra alternatives.
What does your knowledge stack seem like?
We now have Snowflake, dbt, and we use Sigma for visualization. CouponFollow was acquired a few yr in the past by a bigger firm referred to as System1, they usually’re a Tableau store, so we use a little bit Tableau to accommodate their wants, and use Sigma for our personal reporting. Past that, we use Snowplow for real-time occasions, and a software referred to as Indicative for visualizing how our site visitors is doing in actual time.
Why seek for an Lively Metadata Administration answer? What was lacking?
This began off after I requested my workforce to doc dashboards and knowledge fashions, and they might create one thing in Confluence. Primary, no one checked out it, and quantity two, by the point it was written, it appeared prefer it was already out-of-date. So the method was simply not scalable. We might construct a dashboard, then doc it, however as quickly as somebody modified that dashboard, the documentation could be out-of-date. When someone would go to get a solution, the documentation was not giving them what they wanted.
Moreover, definitions themselves will be all over. One particular person may consider Click on-through Fee (CTR) to imply one factor, and a special workforce thinks of it as one thing else, they usually every have their very own dashboards which have CTR, however they aren’t aligned.
When these groups aren’t aligned, they ask “What’s the BI Workforce doing?” or “Why are they saying that” and you find yourself with a lot of questions and confusion. CouponFollow ingests an amazing quantity of knowledge from every kind of various locations, and it’s very difficult to maintain observe of all of it.
Due to all of this, a software like Atlan actually turned top-of-mind.
Why was Atlan a very good match? Did something stand out throughout your analysis course of?
We started after I talked to someone who was working with Atlan and beneficial it. Due to that, Atlan was the start line in our search, however we all the time love to do our due diligence.
So I did some buying round to take a look at the opposite choices, like Alation, Castor, and Collibra, and had conversations with all these firms. A few of them actually appear to be they’ve good instruments, however they is perhaps targeted simply on very giant organizations. That’s not us, and that’s not what we have been searching for. So, it got here right down to Atlan and Castor.
Castor supplied a reduced price beneath what Atlan was charging. However I feel what pushed me and my workforce over the sting for Atlan was it simply looks like Atlan is the extra complete, state-of-the-art software, and that Castor is enjoying catch-up. They simply appear to be they’re a little bit bit behind Atlan.
And I appreciated the gross sales method of Atlan. Usually talking, I didn’t discover the workforce to be pushy or “salesy”. It was extra like “That is our software. We all know what we’re about, we stand behind what we’ve got, and we wish to work with you as a accomplice.”
Typically we’ll get these bizarre gross sales pitches speaking about options which can be coming within the pipeline, perhaps in six months, perhaps by no means, saying, “Nicely if you happen to go together with us we’ll be good in two years.” Or there’s throwing shade on the competitors.
The Atlan pitch wasn’t about that. I discovered Atlan to be very direct, easy, and that you’re what you might be and also you’re assured in your product. I like working with firms like that.
What do you propose on creating with Atlan? Do you will have an concept of what use instances you’ll construct, and the worth you’ll drive?
My workforce is within the planning phases of a fairly large reorganization. The position of knowledge at CouponFollow has grown tremendously from what was initially referred to as the Enterprise Intelligence workforce, however we’re actually a Knowledge Engineering workforce.
We began with pulling knowledge into the warehouse, and constructing some restricted visualization and reporting. Now we’re in a spot the place we’ve gotten traction, and there’s a whole lot of completely different instructions to go in, a whole lot of knowledge, and a whole lot of scale. So the primary precedence is getting this reorganization accomplished so we will account for all these new, completely different processes we’re following with our knowledge.
I would like Atlan to be the glue that pulls all of this collectively, and supply a single, shared place the place all people can go to grasp the info, the way it flows, and the place it comes from. Our first three months contain rolling Atlan out to my very own workforce, and never an excessive amount of finish consumer or enterprise stakeholder involvement but. We’ll use it everyday, perceive what’s in Atlan, after which we’ll do restricted rollouts to particular stakeholders who’re a bit extra data-savvy to get them engaged.
Down the highway, I’d prefer to see our enterprise customers empowered to make use of Atlan as a form of “social place” the place they’ll are available and make a remark if one thing seems to be bizarre. If they’ve questions like “What’s the supply?” or “Who’s the proprietor?” they’ll do their very own exploration, they usually’ll know the place knowledge is coming from, and which particular person to speak to.
Proper now, if we don’t give enterprise customers a hyperlink to the dashboard they’re searching for, it’s very laborious for them to seek out one thing on their very own. Atlan will likely be an ideal place for them to seek for one thing like the preferred dashboards to allow them to perceive how they may use them. That’s the sort of habits I’d prefer to see extra of.
Did we miss something?
For the needs of anybody studying that’s looking for the correct software, I might say the differentiating issue with Atlan is its place out there. It’s this “candy spot” the place I feel Atlan can work with any firm, whether or not it’s an organization that’s our dimension or an early stage startup, so long as they’ve considerably of an information stack. And I can see it rising to assist somebody like Procter & Gamble, as properly.
I feel Atlan can develop with our firm because it grows, too. The product is properly built-out, and any options I wish to have seen in my wishlist have been already there. There wasn’t something missing the place we felt we must purchase early, then sit and anticipate options to return on-line.
So I feel there’s a singular worth proposition that the competitors can’t fairly match. Even with their reductions, it was form of a no brainer to go together with Atlan.
Picture by Julio Lopez on Unsplash
