Each day, everyone at Springworks comes into work with a true passion for building products and tools for the HR ecosystem. We are artists, innovators, achievers, and dreamers, with a one-track mind to fine-tune the products that we build. Through this series of posts, we showcase our team members, their roles, and what a typical day looks like for them. You can check all the posts here.
Shiba Singh joined the Springworks team remotely in September 2020. Before joining Springworks, Shiba was the Data Analyst at an ed-tech startup based in Mumbai. Prior to it, she worked on data visualisation as an Application Development Associate at Accenture and maintained client and stakeholder communication.
At Springworks, Shiba works with an e-commerce client, helping them analyse the data and make better business decisions.
Let’s dive into it right away and take a peek into the life of a Data Analyst.
What does your job as a Data Analyst entail?
As a Data Analyst, I connect the stakeholder request to the business and the impact they want to drive.I interpret the client data and turn it into information which can offer ways to improve the business, thus affecting business decisions. This involves gathering information from various sources and interpreting patterns and trends.
The gathered information is stored in a dashboard that I create by writing SQL queries that visually tracks, analyzes and displays key performance indicators (KPI), metrics and key data points to monitor the performance of marketing campaigns, surveys or overall health of the business.
Being a Data Analyst must present a unique set of challenges. How do you go about solving for them?
Explaining data to non-techies is a bit challenging because simply showing a table of numbers without explaining the context and business impact is not useful.
To overcome this challenge, it is imperative to explain to the stakeholder how the numbers relate together using charts to show trends and point out relevant information.
Being able to communicate results, a stakeholder can understand, and use to make decisions are essential skills of a good analyst and help in solving the problem of data literacy.
What’s your favourite part of your work?
The favourite part of my work is to closely work with our client’s marketing team. I love how I am able to improve their marketing ROI by providing insights from data on the activities of the marketing department. This helps the team and executives better understand the performance of their activities.
Walk us through a day in the life of Shiba!
- Get up
- Have breakfast and water plants
- Check Slack and emails
- Check my to-dos
- Start work at 1.30 pm(late shift)
- Work until 6 pm
- Tea break
- Talk to the client
- Work on upcoming projects & map them out
- Work until 10 pm
- Chill for a while after work
- Dinner and sleep
What advice do you have for other Data Analysts?
To become a great data analyst, it’s important to understand the company business, how the company makes money, and to learn the KPIs used to measure success. Learn how to present data results in a clear manner.
It is important to always ask why, identify the problem and provide a solution. For example, if the company’s website recently had a drop in traffic. You need to ask questions to the team responsible for the website to confirm if any changes have been made recently. If you’re told there were changes made. Now you can go back to your stakeholder and say “traffic dropped to the website from organic search visitors due to changes made on the website that caused a drop in Google search rankings”. Going this extra mile shows you not only found the source of the problem but took initiative to provide a solution.
