Looker & TaskRabbit

Looker & TaskRabbit
Presentation given at the first "Look & Tell" event in January 2014

Transcript

2. Lean BI everyone can be a data analyst! Looker & TaskRabbit Evan Tahler Director of Technology evan@taskrabbit.com
3. What is TaskRabbit? TaskRabbit is a marketplace where people and businesses can go to outsource tasks and longer-term jobs to fully vetted people in their neighborhood. Our Mission: Empower people to do what they love. Our Vision: Revolutionize the world’s labor force.
4. Who are the TaskRabbits? There are currently over 20,000 TaskRabbits and growing rapidly. All TaskRabbits must complete a 4-step vetting process, including a criminal background check.
5. What is BI at TaskRabbit? In June 2013 • 2 data analysts • a handful of engineers who understand the schema(s) • 0 data science expertise In Jan 2014 • 1 full-time Data Scientist • every engineer familiar with major tables • a data subject-matter expert in every business area • no need for full-time analysts
6. Where did the Analysts go? • We noticed that our analysts were spending the majority of their time creating reports for other teams ◦ ...and that others were spending a lot of time waiting for reports • Analysts are valuable, but at our stage we needed to focus on tools to enable product development. • This is only possible when you can empower everyone to become comfortable with data
7. How can you tell when your team is comfortable with data?
8. Everyone is an Analyst? There should be 0 friction between you and the data you need to do your job ...of course there are times you might need help or custom development, but for 90% of your day, you can find what you need in Looker
9. Every department now has a subject-matter expert in the data for their group, and is trained in SQL and LookML
10. Looker Spin-Up Timeline • (2-weeks) Looker Analyst On-Site for to learn our schema and help build out our key models within looker • (1 day) Looker on-site to train “power users” on LookML • (2 weeks) TR “power users” build out remaining looker models • (2 days) Looker on-site to train business users in reporting and exploration • (6 weeks) company becomes comfortable using Looker for day-to-day activities ◦ Beware the stages of acceptance
11. Data Pipeline Production mySQL Analytics Replica HTTP + Ruby API Production Elastic Search Forklift (ETL) LOOKER WEB SSH Tunnel Data Warehouse Vendors (Mixpanel) Replication ElasticDump Ruby + MySQL • ForkLift (github) • ElasticDump (github) • WaistBand (github)
12. What do we do with Looker? Easy view into device adoption & release correlation
13. What do we do with Looker? Single source of truth for financial reporting (from 3 tools to 1)
14. What do we do with Looker? KPI Reporting (from 90 min to 15 min)
15. What does it mean to become more data driven? Individual teams & initiatives now have the ability to course-correct faster Experimentation becomes less risky
16. What does it mean to become more data driven? With all team members having the ability to directly “play” with the data they care about, trends can be explored. Examples: • Moving tasks posted at the end of the month ◦ Change the distribution of marketing efforts to correlate and become more effective • Posters accept one of the first 10 bids ◦ Change the UI to direct rabbits to bid on tasks with less bids, leading to more tasks getting bids
17. Lean BI everyone can be a data analyst! Looker & TaskRabbit Evan Tahler Director of Technology evan@taskrabbit.com