Meeting Title: Brainforge_Steven_Kick_off Date: 2025-03-03 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, Steven Kootz, Uttam Kumaran
WEBVTT
1 00:01:55.370 ⇒ 00:01:56.789 Steven Kootz: Hey? I’m keen.
2 00:01:57.180 ⇒ 00:01:58.439 Uttam Kumaran: Hey? Can you hear me?
3 00:01:58.780 ⇒ 00:02:03.410 Steven Kootz: I can’t. Oh, there I am. Okay. I had to download app.
4 00:02:05.000 ⇒ 00:02:05.790 Steven Kootz: Oh, sorry.
5 00:02:06.536 ⇒ 00:02:07.729 Uttam Kumaran: How’s everything?
6 00:02:07.920 ⇒ 00:02:10.180 Steven Kootz: Everything’s well, man, how is everything with you?
7 00:02:10.389 ⇒ 00:02:13.462 Uttam Kumaran: Things are good. I’m really excited to have you. And
8 00:02:13.889 ⇒ 00:02:32.893 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, super pumped. It’s been a busy. Been a busy month always like towards the month end. We’re trying to like close stuff out. But yeah, I couldn’t be more excited. So I kind of like would love to just like jump right in. And maybe we can would love to kind of do 2 things today on this call. One
9 00:02:33.399 ⇒ 00:02:36.109 Uttam Kumaran: sort of just set the stage for
10 00:02:36.669 ⇒ 00:02:41.759 Uttam Kumaran: where we’re at as a company and sort of where I think I would love to
11 00:02:41.929 ⇒ 00:02:52.369 Uttam Kumaran: pass you into the deep end. But also would love to talk about you know, goals for this next 3 days, and of course, the the days that you’re back
12 00:02:53.022 ⇒ 00:03:01.199 Uttam Kumaran: and then, you know, just start seeing how things go. Does that sort of align? Is there anything else? I can, you know, answer before then.
13 00:03:01.410 ⇒ 00:03:06.710 Steven Kootz: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s pretty much gonna show how to kind of do some things.
14 00:03:06.890 ⇒ 00:03:07.730 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool?
15 00:03:08.357 ⇒ 00:03:14.580 Uttam Kumaran: So yeah, I guess I’ll give a little bit of an overview of of
16 00:03:15.110 ⇒ 00:03:30.500 Uttam Kumaran: one of the clients that I’ll be introducing you to sort of the way I think we’ll we’ll do this, for this initial phase is really just. I’m gonna sort of add you to as many conversations we’re having as a team. That typically, I’m handling as sort of both
17 00:03:30.520 ⇒ 00:03:45.729 Uttam Kumaran: the Pm. But sort of the technical lead and so really, we have one client in particular, named Javi coffee they’re an e-commerce Coffee company. They’re like they advertise a lot on Tiktok. They sell a lot of product.
18 00:03:46.236 ⇒ 00:04:08.670 Uttam Kumaran: And we are handling their entire analytics. For them. And so the team right now, kind of a couple of challenges that we’re dealing with one. We’re dealing with just getting really clear timelines, and clear action items on what the client needs and what our team is doing to affect that. We were working in notion
19 00:04:08.710 ⇒ 00:04:18.239 Uttam Kumaran: last week, you know, things were kind of going south, and so I took over, and I was like, let’s just run things from just like a very simple to do list and figma so we started doing that
20 00:04:18.558 ⇒ 00:04:21.781 Uttam Kumaran: but that’s 1 area, I think today you’ll start to see that.
21 00:04:22.467 ⇒ 00:04:28.089 Uttam Kumaran: as as I’ve included you in some meetings, we’ll we’ll meet that team and that client pod and start to work.
22 00:04:28.700 ⇒ 00:04:47.250 Uttam Kumaran: And really, the couple of things that the way our teams are structured as a reminder is, we have typically, one pm, I mean, our goal was one pm, and one sort of like technical engagement lead, basically, which is sort of the technical counterpart. And then either analysts, analytics, engineers.
23 00:04:47.594 ⇒ 00:05:00.009 Uttam Kumaran: On the actual execution side. We were running a lot of our sprints on notion. But more recently, again, we just had some movement with our other Pm. And I sort of took over
24 00:05:00.210 ⇒ 00:05:08.183 Uttam Kumaran: kind of everything, and I’m just sort of running things either on slack or on figma. So definitely not the best right now.
25 00:05:09.521 ⇒ 00:05:24.268 Uttam Kumaran: In terms of this client we have a couple of mix of deliverable. So we have dashboards. We have a few pieces of analyses. And the dashboards really necessitate data modeling requirements. So one thing that I’m gonna just
26 00:05:25.050 ⇒ 00:05:29.486 Uttam Kumaran: sort of flash up here is really where we’ve been running
27 00:05:30.922 ⇒ 00:05:41.549 Uttam Kumaran: sort of these discussions with the team since last week. That I sort of took over on how we’re sort of getting action items and next steps. So let me just share
28 00:05:42.567 ⇒ 00:05:45.689 Uttam Kumaran: this and feel free through this whole process that
29 00:05:45.790 ⇒ 00:05:48.979 Uttam Kumaran: you know. Answer any questions. I think this will be a good exercise for me, because
30 00:05:49.980 ⇒ 00:05:52.810 Uttam Kumaran: my process is like more of like
31 00:05:53.820 ⇒ 00:06:13.581 Uttam Kumaran: I’ve I’ve been a Pm. Before, but in this situation this is, we have clients that are like, okay, things just need to get out the door. So I sort of throw out everything and make sure it happens, but I think you’ll be able to see that aspect and a little bit about you know what things were a little bit challenging for our team. So let me pull
32 00:06:19.210 ⇒ 00:06:42.049 Uttam Kumaran: So this is really like where we have been sort of housing everything related to this client. We have sort of a architecture diagrams. Also talking a little bit about things on the data value chain. So there’s a lot of information here on on this client. There’s also a lot of information in notion. Which you’ll find. And really, for the last week
33 00:06:42.564 ⇒ 00:06:44.329 Uttam Kumaran: we’ve sort of just been running.
34 00:06:44.530 ⇒ 00:07:10.039 Uttam Kumaran: We’ve just been running tasks really off of like this area. Sort of. When I took over on on last Monday, we just had a bunch of dashboards that have been lingering for like 2 weeks that didn’t get out. We had a couple of data modeling issues that haven’t been finished. And really, I just sort of put the pause on everything, and I was like, we have about a we have like 2 weeks to sort of get to do a sprint on several items.
35 00:07:10.643 ⇒ 00:07:35.899 Uttam Kumaran: And so what I’ll do today is I’ll add you to the channel for the client. You’ll see we’re still working on some tasks, and we have a road mapping session that we do on Mondays, and you’ll sort of see that what I’ll do is I’ll sort of walk through all tasks in flight, and probably continue to use some version of this notion board to sort of keep things organized. Right now, I would say, this is the least organized. This could be
36 00:07:36.410 ⇒ 00:07:49.749 Uttam Kumaran: we have other clients where there are really scope tickets. There’s documentation. But this client I want to show you what the worst of the worst is because everything else will be much easier than this.
37 00:07:50.240 ⇒ 00:08:02.250 Uttam Kumaran: so I’ll pause there like any questions. I know we didn’t talk a little bit. We didn’t talk about next steps or anything else, but I sort of wanted to set a little bit of the stage. But let me know what’s what else is helpful to hear.
38 00:08:02.840 ⇒ 00:08:12.590 Steven Kootz: Yeah, for sure. I mean, so like, this is pretty much like Project manager right now using figma.
39 00:08:13.180 ⇒ 00:08:18.780 Steven Kootz: it was today. And what’s happening now, like everything or so.
40 00:08:19.450 ⇒ 00:08:31.159 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So we actually were project managing all based on tasks here in notion. And this is probably more accurate than not like, however.
41 00:08:31.630 ⇒ 00:08:33.949 Uttam Kumaran: I’m give. I’ll give you my perspective in that.
42 00:08:34.669 ⇒ 00:08:40.310 Uttam Kumaran: If I hear from the client that stuff isn’t going out. I I really am like I don’t really
43 00:08:40.520 ⇒ 00:08:49.519 Uttam Kumaran: want to say, Okay, there’s a process issue project management issue. I’m like, what needs to get done to get it out. So we actually do manage everything in notion.
44 00:08:50.237 ⇒ 00:08:56.272 Uttam Kumaran: However, for the last week sprint. I sort of just tried to push things along in
45 00:08:56.900 ⇒ 00:09:06.102 Uttam Kumaran: just in figma, but you’ll see if you go to the Javi coffee in notion, you’ll see all the tickets that we worked on for them, and everything that’s
46 00:09:06.770 ⇒ 00:09:12.120 Uttam Kumaran: that’s that’s in progress, or has been completed and sort of isolated by a milestone.
47 00:09:12.530 ⇒ 00:09:13.430 Steven Kootz: Okay.
48 00:09:17.450 ⇒ 00:09:21.160 Steven Kootz: so is it just like the clients like, lit on stuff or.
49 00:09:21.550 ⇒ 00:09:24.030 Uttam Kumaran: We are, we are! We were late on stuff.
50 00:09:24.030 ⇒ 00:09:26.059 Steven Kootz: Okay. Gotcha gotcha.
51 00:09:26.850 ⇒ 00:09:33.530 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So we were late on 2 core dashboards that we should have had out like 4 weeks ago.
52 00:09:34.481 ⇒ 00:09:37.790 Uttam Kumaran: And I was like, we’re basically
53 00:09:37.900 ⇒ 00:09:40.420 Uttam Kumaran: just took over and was like, okay, let’s just do us
54 00:09:40.520 ⇒ 00:09:43.959 Uttam Kumaran: like A, basically, all hands on deck on like what needs to happen here.
55 00:09:45.460 ⇒ 00:09:48.959 Uttam Kumaran: And so that’s the current state we are with this client right now.
56 00:09:49.480 ⇒ 00:10:00.349 Uttam Kumaran: A couple of things that I think we’ll talk about in our roadmapping session on the client is one reviewing and making sure that everything is updated here in notion. In terms of tasks.
57 00:10:00.815 ⇒ 00:10:10.370 Uttam Kumaran: We also we also do have a slack channel for the client. I’ll make sure that you’re added there, so you can start to look at how the conversation was over the last few weeks.
58 00:10:11.630 ⇒ 00:10:24.800 Uttam Kumaran: but yeah, I think I think 2 things that I would love, you know some help with, and sort of. We’re top of mind for me is one really is building out like what the what, the engineering timeline, and what the so kind of. And again, this is where
59 00:10:25.430 ⇒ 00:10:49.058 Uttam Kumaran: I have an idea of this. But actually, I’m leaning a lot more on you on like, what is the right process here? Pretty. We were thinking about sort of having a customer facing timeline, and then an internal like engineering facing timeline. And really we have a couple of big milestones. We have some dashboards. We have some in project initiatives that we’re working on again. Some of these may not make sense until you see the context.
60 00:10:49.600 ⇒ 00:11:03.080 Uttam Kumaran: but our our initial process was to work on a dashboard like this, and then to also work on a engineering timeline that we would use across our core engineering functions, which is analysis data modeling and data engineering.
61 00:11:03.260 ⇒ 00:11:04.180 Steven Kootz: Okay.
62 00:11:04.470 ⇒ 00:11:09.059 Uttam Kumaran: So one is, would love some help to create this timeline
63 00:11:09.526 ⇒ 00:11:18.123 Uttam Kumaran: and I think what that this task will allow you to do is meet every single person a team get a sense of all the current tasks in flight.
64 00:11:18.890 ⇒ 00:11:20.790 Uttam Kumaran: and then, but also take something that
65 00:11:21.470 ⇒ 00:11:25.579 Uttam Kumaran: is still like on on a on a to do
66 00:11:26.540 ⇒ 00:11:40.449 Uttam Kumaran: And then, second is, we do have tasks that are working this week. So would love to to see how you can assist in getting updates for those clearly scoping them out. And learning a bit more about like how we execute data work.
67 00:11:41.125 ⇒ 00:12:00.890 Uttam Kumaran: The other piece that we are. We are working on for for them. Is this data platform documentation. And in fact, this is we as an engineering team. We spent a little bit of time talking last week about what is the best process to hand off requirements between the analyst group and the data modeling group.
68 00:12:01.451 ⇒ 00:12:06.509 Uttam Kumaran: As a primer like the analysts are the ones answering questions or building dashboards.
69 00:12:06.640 ⇒ 00:12:11.020 Uttam Kumaran: But they’re not always building data models in the Snowflake data warehouse.
70 00:12:11.270 ⇒ 00:12:19.389 Uttam Kumaran: And so one question that they always have is like, Where is this metric, or what is the definition of a metric? And so we worked on this
71 00:12:19.810 ⇒ 00:12:31.970 Uttam Kumaran: data platform documentation sheet where basically they can go in and and explain the question that they’re they’re wanting to get answered. And then the analytics engineer basically helps them map which table they can get this resource.
72 00:12:34.380 ⇒ 00:12:56.447 Uttam Kumaran: so I would take a look at this spreadsheet as well and spend some time today. There’s a lot in here around basically documentation regarding this client’s data mark, which is what tables are available. What are the core entities? I mean, this is something that we’re we’re working on. So it doesn’t have everything. Information about what data sources they’re pulling, what the costs are and what tools they’re using
73 00:12:57.160 ⇒ 00:13:03.170 Uttam Kumaran: things like that. So this will become a little bit more clear during our session later. But yeah.
74 00:13:06.300 ⇒ 00:13:07.089 Steven Kootz: Sounds good.
75 00:13:09.457 ⇒ 00:13:11.889 Uttam Kumaran: So I think this is a good
76 00:13:12.040 ⇒ 00:13:36.788 Uttam Kumaran: client to start with. We have, of course, like 7 clients in flight now. But this client. The particular reason I thought it was important is one we do have some really short term challenges. So given that you’re you have, you know, the 1st half of this week. I’m a little bit more time next week. I think it would be interesting to have you basically run alongside me as I, as you watch how I sort of pm, this
77 00:13:37.460 ⇒ 00:14:01.284 Uttam Kumaran: one. The sort of the balances is that I am pming it very much, just to make sure the work is getting done really are struggling to to move to the phase where we’re like seeing around the corner. And so that’s really, really, definitely need help with and so I I think for us, for me and you to just sort of pair today. And
78 00:14:01.950 ⇒ 00:14:06.880 Uttam Kumaran: you know, take a look at what’s currently in flight for this client, and what needs to happen by the end of the week.
79 00:14:07.010 ⇒ 00:14:09.379 Uttam Kumaran: Think that’s a good sort of chunk to bite off
80 00:14:09.812 ⇒ 00:14:19.799 Uttam Kumaran: but let me know if there’s any other area that you’d love to get involved in or poke around happy. I just tried to scope something that’s manageable where you can see
81 00:14:20.360 ⇒ 00:14:25.837 Uttam Kumaran: you could see sort of each piecemeal of the work, who the players are on the team?
82 00:14:26.440 ⇒ 00:14:33.519 Uttam Kumaran: and then also get a sense for you know how we’re running things, communication slack and and otherwise.
83 00:14:34.700 ⇒ 00:14:45.010 Steven Kootz: Yeah, I think that’s good sense. I guess. Just like, you know, kind of like seeing how this you know this. She kind of like to like you know.
84 00:14:45.260 ⇒ 00:14:48.120 Steven Kootz: Break the timeline right? I think.
85 00:14:48.950 ⇒ 00:14:53.229 Steven Kootz: You know, this is like used by team to
86 00:14:53.874 ⇒ 00:15:00.045 Steven Kootz: you know. Kind of see what things make sense understand like
87 00:15:02.410 ⇒ 00:15:03.920 Uttam Kumaran: Steven. I think your audio is kind of like.
88 00:15:03.920 ⇒ 00:15:04.550 Steven Kootz: Oh!
89 00:15:04.550 ⇒ 00:15:05.490 Uttam Kumaran: In and out.
90 00:15:06.780 ⇒ 00:15:08.050 Steven Kootz: Previous.
91 00:15:11.270 ⇒ 00:15:12.780 Steven Kootz: You guys hear me. Now.
92 00:15:13.340 ⇒ 00:15:14.920 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, so little shopping.
93 00:15:14.920 ⇒ 00:15:18.280 Steven Kootz: It’s still a little choppy. Okay, let’s see. Let’s see.
94 00:15:19.660 ⇒ 00:15:25.960 Steven Kootz: Oh, alright, I’ll try my computer microphone. Is that better? Worse?
95 00:15:27.160 ⇒ 00:15:28.310 Steven Kootz: Okay? Awesome.
96 00:15:28.701 ⇒ 00:15:32.300 Steven Kootz: Yeah, just let me know I’m in my parents house for these 3 days, because I’m
97 00:15:32.630 ⇒ 00:15:34.598 Steven Kootz: my brother had a baby, and then
98 00:15:34.880 ⇒ 00:15:35.550 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, nice!
99 00:15:35.550 ⇒ 00:15:41.483 Steven Kootz: Going to a wedding week in Puerto Rico. So I’m I’m visiting them. And they got old people, Internet. So
100 00:15:42.524 ⇒ 00:15:58.855 Steven Kootz: but yeah. So so this kind of sheet is like used for the analytics team. I believe to like, see, like questions and answers that they have. Yeah, like this and like, in terms of like bringing that over to like the notion notion, or like figma
101 00:15:59.800 ⇒ 00:16:15.949 Steven Kootz: what exactly is like, I guess like, how can IU utilize these like to help the team like answer questions and everything? I I think it’s like like trans transmitting that to you know, producing a timeline and whatnot.
102 00:16:16.160 ⇒ 00:16:25.740 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So you know the the I would say, the processes that you’ll see today are what we have, but probably may or may not be what
103 00:16:25.870 ⇒ 00:16:31.770 Uttam Kumaran: we need. For example, the reason why we have this is.
104 00:16:32.360 ⇒ 00:16:40.759 Uttam Kumaran: I thought it would be helpful for the analysts to conversation directly with the analytics engineers in a shared sort of area. However.
105 00:16:41.190 ⇒ 00:16:58.959 Uttam Kumaran: a lot of this is a function of these requirements weren’t captured by our previous Pm, that was on this. And so the analysts were sort of like, I have these questions, where do I go? And then the A’s were like, I don’t know where the questions are to get answered. So this document was sort of a function of like.
106 00:16:59.110 ⇒ 00:17:04.819 Uttam Kumaran: okay, we need something where those folks can talk to each other ideally.
107 00:17:05.150 ⇒ 00:17:32.479 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we have everything that’s clearly scoped in tickets. But of course, you know, there’s like a balance between just letting people ask each other directly. But what you’ll see here in in each of these tasks you’ll see that there are their description specs deliverables. You know, for most of these. I would say some tickets are better than others. But this is how we were running the process before.
108 00:17:32.985 ⇒ 00:17:36.809 Uttam Kumaran: I think one thing that is helpful is to
109 00:17:36.900 ⇒ 00:17:44.379 Uttam Kumaran: first, st I think, go through these, and we should just make sure that these are all updated with the most recent status I’ve yet to do that.
110 00:17:44.853 ⇒ 00:17:51.379 Uttam Kumaran: The second piece is for future work ideally. Yeah, they all get sort of ticketed out. With requirements.
111 00:17:52.353 ⇒ 00:17:56.690 Uttam Kumaran: So I’m I would say this process exists now because
112 00:17:57.590 ⇒ 00:18:03.399 Uttam Kumaran: of just like I need people to talk to each other in this moment. I can’t go get every requirement at the moment. But
113 00:18:03.510 ⇒ 00:18:10.749 Uttam Kumaran: if it’s possible to do this within tickets, then there’s no need for you know, a an artifact like this. Ultimately.
114 00:18:11.360 ⇒ 00:18:14.879 Steven Kootz: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. That’s good to know, too.
115 00:18:15.440 ⇒ 00:18:21.990 Steven Kootz: so yeah, just like a platform for 2 different teams to communicate and understand, everyone’s.
116 00:18:21.990 ⇒ 00:18:39.249 Uttam Kumaran: Correct. Yeah. And on the team right now, this is also a complicated client because of the the team structure. So we we sort of brought couple of people in just to sort of supplement work. But we’re also in the process of figuring out who’s going to be assigned to this client longer term.
117 00:18:39.816 ⇒ 00:18:59.040 Uttam Kumaran: You’ll meet everybody in the roadmapping session. But really distinctly, people are bucketed into analysts and analytics. Engineers and the analysts are tasked with creating dashboards, conducting analyses and answering business questions, and ideally working, doing that directly with the client.
118 00:19:00.710 ⇒ 00:19:04.170 Uttam Kumaran: The analytics, engineers are tasked with creating the data models.
119 00:19:04.440 ⇒ 00:19:16.449 Uttam Kumaran: transforming the raw data that comes in from each of these vendors, like gorgeous shopify into data models that then the analysts can query and build dashboards off of
120 00:19:16.842 ⇒ 00:19:27.270 Uttam Kumaran: so you can think of them as more on the engineering side. And analysts are more of the business side but both sort of meeting in the middle to make sure that they can run sequel and get the answers they need.
121 00:19:27.630 ⇒ 00:19:28.635 Steven Kootz: Okay, gotcha.
122 00:19:30.010 ⇒ 00:19:35.372 Steven Kootz: yeah, I think that makes sense. I know we’re kind of just digging into stuff, too.
123 00:19:36.100 ⇒ 00:19:51.549 Steven Kootz: But maybe one thing that I can go ahead and see, too, is just like how you know, like, let’s like, cause it seems that like there’s like a bog or something somewhere. In terms of like getting to the end goal of it all. How does it, I guess?
124 00:19:51.550 ⇒ 00:20:08.019 Steven Kootz: Is there like a good example I can see of like how it starts to like start to finish, or some like, do you have, like a previous example? Of like, how you guys start, and then, like all the different phases of how to like complete, you know, essentially essentially complete. The project.
125 00:20:08.020 ⇒ 00:20:15.050 Uttam Kumaran: We don’t have a completed playbook of like the most common tasks.
126 00:20:15.050 ⇒ 00:20:15.470 Steven Kootz: Yeah.
127 00:20:16.480 ⇒ 00:20:35.309 Uttam Kumaran: I mean, that’s something that I I’m definitely equipped to probably talk through but we don’t have anything documented on the end to end process for creating a dashboard for creating a data model. A lot of that is just entrenched knowledge among the engineers or myself.
128 00:20:35.730 ⇒ 00:20:40.823 Uttam Kumaran: That’s definitely something we we need. We haven’t done it because it’s not important. We just don’t have it.
129 00:20:41.570 ⇒ 00:21:02.510 Uttam Kumaran: so I mean I that’s why I think for a lot of this. I see this as a process of just like I’m here to to be available and answer any questions. I think one also helpful artifact out of this is for you to take sort of those notes. And also look at. Okay, what is an end to end process from getting the requirements from a client to
130 00:21:02.750 ⇒ 00:21:19.580 Uttam Kumaran: how does that move them across the team, and finally back up to the client? I’m happy to go through that, or sort of narrate that, or you know, again I’m I’m so I’ll sort of lean on a little bit on you, on how you’ve seen that best represented, and and document it, but happy to go through that or spend time today doing that.
131 00:21:20.130 ⇒ 00:21:22.929 Steven Kootz: Okay, yeah, I think I think that works.
132 00:21:22.930 ⇒ 00:21:23.550 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
133 00:21:25.900 ⇒ 00:21:36.119 Uttam Kumaran: So I think, I think there’s kind of a maybe I’ll what I’ll do is I’ll I’ll create a little bit of a note. In notion with a couple of our sort of
134 00:21:36.760 ⇒ 00:21:41.300 Uttam Kumaran: action items this week. And then, yeah, I think I think the biggest thing is just to spend some time
135 00:21:41.750 ⇒ 00:21:46.090 Uttam Kumaran: taking a look at the client channel, taking a look at the tickets and notion, taking a look at the
136 00:21:46.290 ⇒ 00:21:51.889 Uttam Kumaran: the the figma and then again, I’m here as a resource to sort of assist, and
137 00:21:52.100 ⇒ 00:22:09.969 Uttam Kumaran: ideally handing off as much of the ownership over. You know some of these processes that I’m taking on, but really not doing a a hundred percent job on but let me create. I’m just gonna create a shared notion. And we can sort of just both type in there and and
138 00:22:10.640 ⇒ 00:22:13.100 Uttam Kumaran: make sure we have everything sort of written down.
139 00:22:13.570 ⇒ 00:22:14.450 Steven Kootz: Alright! Alright!
140 00:22:14.970 ⇒ 00:22:15.949 Uttam Kumaran: Go ahead and.
141 00:22:16.990 ⇒ 00:22:17.740 Steven Kootz: Yes.
142 00:22:24.820 ⇒ 00:22:28.497 Steven Kootz: chug my coffee and make room on this tiny little table I’m on.
143 00:22:29.591 ⇒ 00:22:33.130 Steven Kootz: I’m gonna go ahead and make a brain forge folder to.
144 00:22:33.610 ⇒ 00:22:33.970 Uttam Kumaran: Cool.
145 00:22:33.970 ⇒ 00:22:35.490 Steven Kootz: And in slack.
146 00:22:41.610 ⇒ 00:22:46.639 Steven Kootz: I know my dad was like I have an extra monitor if you want it, and I was like, Oh, my God, yes, please.
147 00:22:46.640 ⇒ 00:22:47.595 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
148 00:23:02.250 ⇒ 00:23:04.200 Uttam Kumaran: and let’s do the 3 of us.
149 00:23:13.240 ⇒ 00:23:16.180 Uttam Kumaran: I just sent the notion in slack.
150 00:23:18.370 ⇒ 00:23:22.006 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I think one is
151 00:23:30.670 ⇒ 00:23:31.420 Steven Kootz: It.
152 00:23:39.960 ⇒ 00:23:43.020 Steven Kootz: Go ahead and sign in. Continue
153 00:24:00.120 ⇒ 00:24:00.900 Steven Kootz: the
154 00:24:06.650 ⇒ 00:24:08.810 Steven Kootz: alright. I am in notion.
155 00:24:17.680 ⇒ 00:24:19.157 Uttam Kumaran: And I, just
156 00:24:20.320 ⇒ 00:24:22.109 Uttam Kumaran: Okay? Oh, yeah, you should see the.
157 00:24:22.410 ⇒ 00:24:23.050 Steven Kootz: Yeah.
158 00:24:27.880 ⇒ 00:24:30.540 Uttam Kumaran: Let me make sure you’re in the stock channel as well.
159 00:25:55.000 ⇒ 00:26:04.330 Uttam Kumaran: So I think the 1st place to start is, yeah. I just, I think, spend some time poking around in notion, in figma and in in slack
160 00:26:04.710 ⇒ 00:26:09.950 Uttam Kumaran: around this client. I think you’ll start to get a sense of the work and the kind of the players involved.
161 00:26:10.991 ⇒ 00:26:23.469 Uttam Kumaran: What else can we talk about during this time? I think a lot of this is also just going to be probably just discussing directly with me. I’m happy. I think it’s easy for me to walk through every process.
162 00:26:23.780 ⇒ 00:26:28.979 Uttam Kumaran: What’s hard for me to do is go write it down because I just I’m like so low on time.
163 00:26:28.980 ⇒ 00:26:29.680 Steven Kootz: Yeah.
164 00:26:30.111 ⇒ 00:26:32.269 Uttam Kumaran: So if it’s helpful to.
165 00:26:32.500 ⇒ 00:26:39.990 Uttam Kumaran: we could grab time later in the day we could even, you know I have. The next 30 min blocked off. We can go through stuff now, totally down for anything.
166 00:26:41.413 ⇒ 00:26:44.319 Steven Kootz: Yeah, I mean, if I if I have your time to, I think.
167 00:26:44.320 ⇒ 00:26:44.770 Uttam Kumaran: Claire.
168 00:26:44.770 ⇒ 00:26:47.219 Steven Kootz: Let’s just let’s just walk through things and kind of
169 00:26:47.850 ⇒ 00:26:50.285 Steven Kootz: take a better understanding of it at all.
170 00:26:54.680 ⇒ 00:26:57.999 Steven Kootz: I think that makes sense. Let’s see. So
171 00:26:58.530 ⇒ 00:27:00.809 Steven Kootz: I think I got everything pulled up
172 00:27:09.320 ⇒ 00:27:15.700 Steven Kootz: and alright, yeah. So I guess like, let’s take a look.
173 00:27:18.570 ⇒ 00:27:22.119 Steven Kootz: So in notion I’m kind of just like.
174 00:27:22.220 ⇒ 00:27:35.121 Steven Kootz: So notions like your main project management software, right? That’s like where it all kind of goes down of like, this is what you know. A needs to work on what B needs to work on.
175 00:27:35.840 ⇒ 00:27:40.610 Steven Kootz: okay, Gotcha, and the clients in the clients in their notion page, too. Right.
176 00:27:41.288 ⇒ 00:27:45.999 Uttam Kumaran: Yes. So there’s another little like complication with notion is that
177 00:27:46.490 ⇒ 00:27:50.559 Uttam Kumaran: we use like one Consolidated database for all of our tickets.
178 00:27:50.780 ⇒ 00:27:54.630 Uttam Kumaran: so we can’t share that out. But a client has access to a view.
179 00:27:54.740 ⇒ 00:28:00.109 Uttam Kumaran: A client does have access to a very similar view as this that has most of these items on there?
180 00:28:00.390 ⇒ 00:28:01.250 Uttam Kumaran: No.
181 00:28:01.360 ⇒ 00:28:05.130 Uttam Kumaran: So for all intents and purposes, for now, yes, you consider that. Yeah, they can.
182 00:28:05.130 ⇒ 00:28:13.169 Steven Kootz: Okay, okay, gotcha, so yeah. So
183 00:28:20.500 ⇒ 00:28:24.710 Steven Kootz: I guess, like, just like, understanding like the current tasks. Right? Like.
184 00:28:24.710 ⇒ 00:28:25.220 Uttam Kumaran: Sure.
185 00:28:29.320 ⇒ 00:28:34.269 Steven Kootz: kind of like? I asked earlier of like the start to finish roadmap right like, do you know, like we’re.
186 00:28:35.160 ⇒ 00:28:38.759 Steven Kootz: I guess, like for my understanding like we’re at in a project, are we?
187 00:28:38.930 ⇒ 00:28:40.470 Steven Kootz: For Joby?
188 00:28:40.820 ⇒ 00:28:47.310 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, so so we are. So we’ve signed for Joby. We’ve been signing like 3 months.
189 00:28:47.899 ⇒ 00:28:58.639 Uttam Kumaran: Sort of phase deals what we. What our typical deliverables have been for them is like core dashboards and analysis meaning. We’re building up
190 00:28:59.730 ⇒ 00:29:03.060 Uttam Kumaran: one. We’re making sure that we can get access to all of their
191 00:29:03.790 ⇒ 00:29:20.889 Uttam Kumaran: core data. So this is things like Zendesk, Amazon shopify, making sure all that data lands and snowflake. The second piece of this is data modeling. So making sure we can model the core reporting tables that they need, which this includes like orders.
192 00:29:22.146 ⇒ 00:29:29.449 Uttam Kumaran: Customers, customer reviews. Like Zendesk tickets, things like that.
193 00:29:29.580 ⇒ 00:29:36.919 Uttam Kumaran: And then we have engaged with them to basically sign up to create a few dashboards. So one dashboard is around everything around gross margin.
194 00:29:37.080 ⇒ 00:29:49.360 Uttam Kumaran: Another dashboard was everything around their Amazon side of the business. We’re also working on a few other dashboards, and a lot of that you’ll see listed here is just like Amazon dashboard, gross margin, dashboard.
195 00:29:51.340 ⇒ 00:29:54.169 Uttam Kumaran: cx engagement gorgeous dashboard!
196 00:29:56.240 ⇒ 00:29:57.299 Uttam Kumaran: Things like that.
197 00:29:57.760 ⇒ 00:30:04.690 Steven Kootz: Yeah, okay. And just like to be clear, like, the dashboards are essentially like the
198 00:30:05.090 ⇒ 00:30:07.620 Steven Kootz: where the data is being scrubbed. And like.
199 00:30:08.810 ⇒ 00:30:12.419 Uttam Kumaran: The dashboard is where the client is ultimately looking at the data.
200 00:30:12.897 ⇒ 00:30:16.760 Uttam Kumaran: And I’ll and I’ll I’ll make sure. I’ll just invite you now to
201 00:30:17.279 ⇒ 00:30:21.690 Uttam Kumaran: where this is happening. So you can also poke around there. Let me
202 00:30:24.500 ⇒ 00:30:25.769 Uttam Kumaran: let me do that now.
203 00:30:41.640 ⇒ 00:30:45.049 Uttam Kumaran: So you should have got an email for this software called metabase.
204 00:30:46.610 ⇒ 00:30:50.460 Uttam Kumaran: What you’ll see once you log in is, you should be able to see
205 00:30:51.115 ⇒ 00:30:56.810 Uttam Kumaran: sort of 2 core dashboards that I think will be helpful references. You’ll see reference several places
206 00:31:13.190 ⇒ 00:31:14.520 Uttam Kumaran: you’re able to see that.
207 00:31:39.580 ⇒ 00:31:41.260 Steven Kootz: I got a good beefy password here.
208 00:31:59.490 ⇒ 00:32:01.030 Steven Kootz: Alright, sweet, I’m in.
209 00:32:03.450 ⇒ 00:32:05.329 Uttam Kumaran: I just put the 2 links
210 00:32:05.540 ⇒ 00:32:09.259 Uttam Kumaran: in our notion, Doc. At the bottom of the 2 core dashboards.
211 00:32:09.450 ⇒ 00:32:15.170 Uttam Kumaran: What you’ll see is, you’ll just see that that this is really what the end deliverable has been for
212 00:32:15.690 ⇒ 00:32:20.435 Uttam Kumaran: this client. In that they, we work with them on basically determining what
213 00:32:21.330 ⇒ 00:32:28.390 Uttam Kumaran: what sort of data they want to look at. And then this is kind of like all the work sort of culminates into this final artifact.
214 00:32:29.230 ⇒ 00:32:32.819 Steven Kootz: Okay, so let’s see. So.
215 00:32:38.430 ⇒ 00:32:42.200 Steven Kootz: okay, so sorry if I’m asking this again. But so essentially.
216 00:32:43.470 ⇒ 00:32:47.079 Steven Kootz: everything gets kind of compiled into here. This like Meta base.
217 00:32:47.410 ⇒ 00:32:47.870 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
218 00:32:47.870 ⇒ 00:32:50.829 Steven Kootz: Like so alright. So I’m looking at like.
219 00:32:51.830 ⇒ 00:32:55.059 Steven Kootz: And is this just, Javis? Or is this.
220 00:32:55.429 ⇒ 00:32:55.799 Uttam Kumaran: Mean.
221 00:32:56.140 ⇒ 00:32:56.840 Steven Kootz: Okay?
222 00:32:57.100 ⇒ 00:33:00.250 Steven Kootz: Oh, okay. I see joby coffees. Okay?
223 00:33:00.580 ⇒ 00:33:02.170 Steven Kootz: Alright. Alright. I see.
224 00:33:03.166 ⇒ 00:33:05.590 Steven Kootz: Okay, that makes sense. Okay, cool. Cool.
225 00:33:07.000 ⇒ 00:33:10.969 Uttam Kumaran: So ultimately like this was what we were going for.
226 00:33:12.490 ⇒ 00:33:14.179 Steven Kootz: This is the end deliverable.
227 00:33:14.880 ⇒ 00:33:15.580 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
228 00:33:15.820 ⇒ 00:33:20.449 Steven Kootz: Okay, and we’re currently building it out. And the client hasn’t seen it yet. Correct.
229 00:33:20.450 ⇒ 00:33:29.879 Uttam Kumaran: So let me tell you where. Let me tell you where we are with this. So we signed up to create 2 dashboards for them. One was this gross margin. Second, was Amazon.
230 00:33:30.010 ⇒ 00:33:38.344 Uttam Kumaran: So let me talk to you about. Let me tell you the ideal process, and this may be helpful to take notes, although I can give you this recording to app. After this.
231 00:33:39.120 ⇒ 00:33:41.480 Uttam Kumaran: let me walk through the ideal process.
232 00:33:41.610 ⇒ 00:33:47.030 Uttam Kumaran: and then let me also walk through what happened here, and then.
233 00:33:47.140 ⇒ 00:33:55.084 Uttam Kumaran: you know, the the right path is somewhere in the middle, or maybe closer, of course, closer to the perfect process. So
234 00:33:55.620 ⇒ 00:34:00.509 Uttam Kumaran: Joby. Coffee has been a client with us for like 6 months. I don’t know, Robert. When did we start with them?
235 00:34:02.550 ⇒ 00:34:04.529 Robert Tseng: Like, August, yeah, something like that.
236 00:34:05.010 ⇒ 00:34:11.719 Uttam Kumaran: So start with them with all on August they in August we have sort of building towards
237 00:34:12.139 ⇒ 00:34:33.509 Uttam Kumaran: like just giving them. Really, they signed up because they’re they’re pretty big company, and they just want insights into how their business operating and they want us ultimately to help them make more money or save costs. Using data, which is our sort of shovel in in this side of the business. So over the last 3 months, we signed a renewal with them on January 10th
238 00:34:33.977 ⇒ 00:34:55.400 Uttam Kumaran: and our main task was sort of 3 things. One. We were moving to us. One part of the project was moving from one Etl provider to another. Etl provider is really just a data pipelining tool. How does the data actually get from shopify into the data warehouse for our team to model. We were previously using a tool
239 00:34:55.400 ⇒ 00:35:08.589 Uttam Kumaran: and called 5 Trend, and we migrated to a tool called Portable. You’ll see a notion that there are tickets associated with this. So that was one piece. This ended up saving them, you know, roughly, like 2,500 a month.
240 00:35:08.945 ⇒ 00:35:29.190 Uttam Kumaran: or more. And so we we worked on that. And that work got closed out last month. There are 2 other deliverables that were really really core. Of course, the only reason there are only 3 deliverables is because we’re still working on them. So that’s part of the one of the bad parts about what’s going on is that these were basically supposed to be done in like early Feb.
241 00:35:30.139 ⇒ 00:35:53.920 Uttam Kumaran: the 2 really core things are gross margin, dashboard, and Amazon dashboard. Gross margin dashboard is really just an overview of their gross margin, and I’m not sure again. I’ll just probably go deep. But stop me if you’re like I get what gross margin is. It’s basically just a calculation. Gross margin is the amount of money they make minus a bunch of different other kpis like cost shipping discounts.
242 00:35:54.250 ⇒ 00:35:54.620 Steven Kootz: Yeah.
243 00:35:54.620 ⇒ 00:36:10.209 Uttam Kumaran: It’s just a metric. So they want to see several breakdowns of this metric by by like storefront, by product, by customer types right? And what you’ll see in this dashboard. You see, a lot of those different cuts. We.
244 00:36:10.610 ⇒ 00:36:16.779 Uttam Kumaran: our ideal process is actually we would have worked with them to gather the requirements on what
245 00:36:16.880 ⇒ 00:36:41.180 Uttam Kumaran: they, what cuts they want to see in the dashboard? Some clients have a really clear idea about this. Some clients are not. They’re not so sure. So commonly what we would prefer to do is do what’s called like a doing like a dashboard. Mock up and I’ll give you like a little bit of a sense of like what this process typically looks like. This is an example of a client
246 00:36:41.430 ⇒ 00:37:04.230 Uttam Kumaran: for which this phase is going well. Where the analysts on the team actually worked with the client to produce this mock up. These are all. This is all dummy data. This is all just the design, but basically agrees with them on what metrics they want to see how they want it displayed. And sort of this is the requirements gathering.
247 00:37:04.340 ⇒ 00:37:12.691 Uttam Kumaran: actually agreeing on, like what the end artifact is. We did not do this for the 2 dashboards we signed up for for Javi.
248 00:37:13.900 ⇒ 00:37:15.010 Uttam Kumaran: We just didn’t do it.
249 00:37:15.549 ⇒ 00:37:16.599 Uttam Kumaran: So that’s probably.
250 00:37:16.600 ⇒ 00:37:23.900 Steven Kootz: So if I so if I’m correct, this is like, essentially, when we’re we have a new client, we show them like
251 00:37:24.300 ⇒ 00:37:28.579 Steven Kootz: a mock up of what everything is gonna look like when we deliver it to them. Correct.
252 00:37:28.780 ⇒ 00:37:35.039 Uttam Kumaran: Correct and ideally we work with them on producing this, because every client wants to see something different. However.
253 00:37:35.570 ⇒ 00:37:39.790 Uttam Kumaran: for work streams that involve dashboards. We want to start from
254 00:37:40.260 ⇒ 00:37:50.400 Uttam Kumaran: this area where we agree. Here is what we can measure. Here’s how you want it displayed. And this is the end artifact that we’re that the analyst team is tasked to create
255 00:37:51.870 ⇒ 00:37:55.799 Uttam Kumaran: for the for the Javi dashboard. We didn’t do this. We
256 00:37:55.970 ⇒ 00:38:15.570 Uttam Kumaran: we had a sense that they wanted 10 or 15 things, and we just jumped right into doing it for better, for worse. So we jump right into doing it. But there’s several. So then let’s say we have this dashboard mock up. What happens is the analyst team then goes to the analytics engineering team and says, I need this, these 15 metrics
257 00:38:15.620 ⇒ 00:38:31.539 Uttam Kumaran: would cut these 5 different ways. Then the analytics team, the analytics engineering team can go say, okay, I need to make sure. I can bring that data into the warehouse. I can model it. And then I can make it available. So those those that’s typically the phases we have the requirements from the analyst team.
258 00:38:31.600 ⇒ 00:38:35.999 Uttam Kumaran: Those get handed off in terms of which metrics and which dimensions are needed.
259 00:38:36.090 ⇒ 00:38:40.139 Uttam Kumaran: The analytics engineering team, then, can go model that data.
260 00:38:40.250 ⇒ 00:38:45.029 Uttam Kumaran: make it available for the analyst team. And then the analyst team can build the dashboards.
261 00:38:45.530 ⇒ 00:38:48.010 Steven Kootz: Okay, catch it.
262 00:38:50.873 ⇒ 00:39:16.249 Uttam Kumaran: So for for these again, we we had some of. We had some of this data ready. We had some that wasn’t ready, and sort of. We’ve been working sort of iteratively back and forth for a few weeks. On trying to get this to a completed state. One of the issues we had for this is that we didn’t have. We had a moving target, right? So like because we didn’t agree on what the final dashboard looked like
263 00:39:16.280 ⇒ 00:39:21.110 Uttam Kumaran: we sort of were like giving sending them. Hey? Does this look good? They were sending us back feedback.
264 00:39:21.150 ⇒ 00:39:24.730 Uttam Kumaran: so there’s never a pause moment on like, let’s get everything
265 00:39:25.020 ⇒ 00:39:28.040 Uttam Kumaran: define, so we can close out a 1st version of this.
266 00:39:28.190 ⇒ 00:39:30.190 Uttam Kumaran: The second piece is
267 00:39:30.430 ⇒ 00:39:43.670 Uttam Kumaran: none of the tickets. The breakdown of the tickets was not very clear meaning which analyst was tasked to work on what part of the dashboard and how actually their requirements then went to the analytics engineer.
268 00:39:43.880 ⇒ 00:39:45.890 Uttam Kumaran: That process was broken.
269 00:39:47.210 ⇒ 00:39:53.219 Uttam Kumaran: right? And so in the last week I really came in and was like, what are the 3 things that needs to get done for us to ship this.
270 00:39:53.710 ⇒ 00:39:57.769 Uttam Kumaran: and then just sort of ran things off a simple to do list
271 00:39:58.249 ⇒ 00:40:01.540 Uttam Kumaran: but that’s sort of the end to end process for
272 00:40:01.820 ⇒ 00:40:07.380 Uttam Kumaran: one key work stream, which we have for several clients, which is just dashboard development.
273 00:40:08.470 ⇒ 00:40:10.419 Steven Kootz: Okay. Alright, I get that.
274 00:40:16.040 ⇒ 00:40:18.040 Steven Kootz: Okay. Yeah. So it’s just moving
275 00:40:18.160 ⇒ 00:40:21.959 Steven Kootz: the Etl provider than the 2 other dashboards, gross margin. And Amazon.
276 00:40:22.270 ⇒ 00:40:22.980 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
277 00:40:23.650 ⇒ 00:40:24.280 Steven Kootz: Okay.
278 00:40:29.620 ⇒ 00:40:36.259 Steven Kootz: okay? And so like, currently. Now, like, like, is there like with Javi, is it pretty much like
279 00:40:36.490 ⇒ 00:40:44.450 Steven Kootz: everyone’s working on the right thing that they need to be working on? Or is it still like developing like who needs to like be on what exactly.
280 00:40:45.310 ⇒ 00:40:54.860 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So you’ll see the current state of like updates that came in last night. And today, if you go to the Javi slack channel.
281 00:40:56.120 ⇒ 00:41:02.250 Uttam Kumaran: Basically. Robert is tasked with delivering this to the client right now, both of us sort of
282 00:41:02.650 ⇒ 00:41:13.110 Uttam Kumaran: we just pushed everybody that was on this off and sort of this couple of engineers, Solana and me and him are sort of running point. He’s running point on the client. I’m running point on assigning things to engineers
283 00:41:13.320 ⇒ 00:41:34.889 Uttam Kumaran: ideally. Of course, neither of us are running point on any of those things. So. But what you’ll see here in the slack channel. Is that a bunch of questions came in from Robert? These questions ideally should have came from our analyst team. Robert went in yesterday, looked at. Okay, what are the things that are remaining to get this out the door? And there were several questions that came in.
284 00:41:35.380 ⇒ 00:41:40.350 Uttam Kumaran: Some of these are questions for analysts? Some of these are questions for the whole team.
285 00:41:41.067 ⇒ 00:41:46.749 Uttam Kumaran: questions about data, validation, questions about models, things like that.
286 00:41:46.880 ⇒ 00:41:52.200 Uttam Kumaran: What you’ll see here at the bottom is that I I’ve just broken it out and try to organize across
287 00:41:52.370 ⇒ 00:41:54.870 Uttam Kumaran: the team of who’s taking what question today.
288 00:41:56.050 ⇒ 00:41:56.780 Steven Kootz: Okay.
289 00:42:06.980 ⇒ 00:42:08.850 Steven Kootz: okay, I see. I see, I see.
290 00:42:28.420 ⇒ 00:42:30.799 Steven Kootz: Okay. And these are all slack
291 00:42:31.420 ⇒ 00:42:34.519 Steven Kootz: questions and stuff. Or let me see, here.
292 00:42:36.520 ⇒ 00:42:37.630 Uttam Kumaran: What do you mean?
293 00:42:38.320 ⇒ 00:42:39.529 Steven Kootz: Oh! Like the links.
294 00:42:39.940 ⇒ 00:42:44.940 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So yeah, they’re just links to literally the I questions that just came in.
295 00:42:46.780 ⇒ 00:42:52.510 Uttam Kumaran: And so what you’re saying here is this is the back and forth that we expect from the analyst team
296 00:42:52.620 ⇒ 00:42:54.549 Uttam Kumaran: and the analytics engineering team.
297 00:42:54.760 ⇒ 00:42:55.860 Uttam Kumaran: Right now.
298 00:42:56.822 ⇒ 00:42:59.190 Uttam Kumaran: Right now again, we’re
299 00:42:59.380 ⇒ 00:43:03.989 Uttam Kumaran: we’re sort of shifted people on the team. But right now it’s really Robert is
300 00:43:04.100 ⇒ 00:43:09.169 Uttam Kumaran: trying to get these dashboards out to client. I’m sort of coming in and figuring out, Okay.
301 00:43:09.350 ⇒ 00:43:11.169 Uttam Kumaran: who can take on these tasks.
302 00:43:11.640 ⇒ 00:43:12.250 Steven Kootz: Okay.
303 00:43:12.710 ⇒ 00:43:17.399 Uttam Kumaran: You’ll see that another problem is, there are 11 people in this channel
304 00:43:18.740 ⇒ 00:43:23.750 Uttam Kumaran: of which only 3 of them should be working on this client, if if not less
305 00:43:24.130 ⇒ 00:43:29.289 Uttam Kumaran: so. One of the problems we’ve we’ve had is just people taking ownership
306 00:43:29.560 ⇒ 00:43:33.830 Uttam Kumaran: and getting assigned clear tasks with having clear deadlines.
307 00:43:34.390 ⇒ 00:43:50.080 Uttam Kumaran: I’m sort of tasked as like the engineering leader to just make sure that we’re resource appropriately. So for today, for example, we have the analytics engineers on this client is out today. The analyst who was previously on this client rolled off. And so I was like.
308 00:43:50.410 ⇒ 00:43:54.670 Uttam Kumaran: I was just like just every anyone who’s available to take on stuff today.
309 00:43:55.200 ⇒ 00:43:56.040 Uttam Kumaran: But
310 00:43:56.520 ⇒ 00:44:11.060 Uttam Kumaran: I would like us to. One of the things long term for this client is we want to really have a clear idea of who’s working on what and making sure that they have tasks, they can point them, or, you know, T-shirt size them, and then they have due dates. That’s another thing that we haven’t been able to get
311 00:44:11.370 ⇒ 00:44:12.330 Uttam Kumaran: to here.
312 00:44:13.240 ⇒ 00:44:17.310 Steven Kootz: Okay. Alright, that makes sense. And it’s like
313 00:44:17.430 ⇒ 00:44:20.260 Steven Kootz: the project’s pretty much built out with, like
314 00:44:20.900 ⇒ 00:44:25.540 Steven Kootz: everything that’s needed to be done? Or is there like still tasks that need to be made.
315 00:44:25.800 ⇒ 00:44:30.909 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Everything that came in this that last night from Robert is to do.
316 00:44:31.260 ⇒ 00:44:32.629 Steven Kootz: Okay. Sounds good.
317 00:44:33.212 ⇒ 00:44:44.329 Steven Kootz: But in terms of like the the project to meet that like end date right to like. Give them that like Meta base. Right? Is it pretty much like, built with all of that completed essentially or.
318 00:44:44.330 ⇒ 00:44:46.829 Uttam Kumaran: All these questions are related to that.
319 00:44:47.050 ⇒ 00:44:47.970 Steven Kootz: Okay. Gotcha.
320 00:44:47.970 ⇒ 00:44:51.440 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So these questions are all related to the gross.
321 00:44:51.650 ⇒ 00:44:55.450 Uttam Kumaran: These are all. All these metrics yesterday are related to the gross margin, dashboard.
322 00:44:55.710 ⇒ 00:44:56.430 Steven Kootz: Okay.
323 00:44:57.260 ⇒ 00:45:07.970 Uttam Kumaran: There are other tasks like to give you a sense of like the. So this is one work stream we’re doing, which is these dashboards. There are several other dashboards that yeah, Robert, go ahead.
324 00:45:08.570 ⇒ 00:45:10.290 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, I’m just trying to
325 00:45:10.750 ⇒ 00:45:39.000 Robert Tseng: knowing Steven’s background and coming from a creative agency in terms of like, I don’t know. I just want felt like I wanted to say so with data work like, we only really have one visual that we present to the client. And that’s at the end. That’s like the that’s the dashboard, right? So I think we’re maybe we have an intermediary step now where we’re doing mock ups, which I think are have been effective for other clients. But yeah, one of the things that we struggle with is like there’s so much technical
326 00:45:39.050 ⇒ 00:45:41.540 Robert Tseng: stuff that happens in the background.
327 00:45:41.590 ⇒ 00:46:00.360 Robert Tseng: and the clients always asking like, What do I? What am I supposed to look at? And we’ll just show them like the dashboard. But and then they’ll give feedback off of that. But there really isn’t that much. There’s not that much visual iteration that we could do. I mean, we’re open to trying to see how we can break that down more and provide better checkpoints. But
328 00:46:00.887 ⇒ 00:46:07.499 Robert Tseng: yeah, I think to Tom’s point, like all of these, all this feedback is all the work that goes into just this one
329 00:46:07.710 ⇒ 00:46:15.889 Robert Tseng: dashboard that we ended up like, yeah. So I don’t know. I think that’s just like a nuance to consider as you’re thinking about. What does
330 00:46:16.250 ⇒ 00:46:17.940 Robert Tseng: client experience look like?
331 00:46:18.080 ⇒ 00:46:18.500 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
332 00:46:18.920 ⇒ 00:46:23.941 Steven Kootz: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, too. Yeah, I think you know, coming from, you know my side of things, too, I think.
333 00:46:24.290 ⇒ 00:46:33.405 Steven Kootz: you know, seeing this right? It’s like how to, you know, kind of package it up and everything. But okay, that’s good to know that it’s all just for that dashboard.
334 00:46:34.580 ⇒ 00:46:35.350 Steven Kootz: yeah.
335 00:46:37.120 ⇒ 00:46:53.960 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I don’t know if it may, if it would make sense for us in the future. I mean just giving you some idea like the mock ups or giving piecemealing at one report at a time, and like not like waiting until we get to like what we consider to be a final draft and pushing it, and then like getting like a bunch of
336 00:46:54.120 ⇒ 00:47:04.579 Robert Tseng: random feedback that we end up it just like slows us. The iterations are quite slow. It’s kind of the issue with that. So yeah, I don’t know. I think that’s that’s another kind of
337 00:47:05.090 ⇒ 00:47:07.849 Robert Tseng: looming problem for you to think about.
338 00:47:08.180 ⇒ 00:47:14.852 Steven Kootz: Okay? Oh, yeah, that that’d be to know, too. Cause I guess. Like what the illuminations or the mock ups and everything that’s like, kind of like
339 00:47:15.800 ⇒ 00:47:21.800 Steven Kootz: in my, you know, my creative experience, right? Like I’m showing a client, you know, like a
340 00:47:22.080 ⇒ 00:47:29.280 Steven Kootz: graphic design, right? The 1st review. And then it’d be that easy. They look at that before they look at the final review, which is the final.
341 00:47:29.450 ⇒ 00:47:32.289 Steven Kootz: you know, deliverable of the dashboard. So.
342 00:47:32.560 ⇒ 00:47:32.875 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
343 00:47:33.190 ⇒ 00:47:36.399 Steven Kootz: Yeah, okay, okay, that makes sense. That’s good to know
344 00:47:37.520 ⇒ 00:47:46.010 Steven Kootz: and that like, first, st iteration is that like something that’s like, what we’re so is that what we’re building out right now, or
345 00:47:48.470 ⇒ 00:47:48.910 Robert Tseng: Well.
346 00:47:48.910 ⇒ 00:47:50.600 Uttam Kumaran: Probably. Yeah, go ahead.
347 00:47:50.930 ⇒ 00:47:54.099 Robert Tseng: I was. I was gonna say, I mean, we should.
348 00:47:54.340 ⇒ 00:47:59.179 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I guess as far as which stage we’re at. This should be the final thing. So
349 00:47:59.350 ⇒ 00:48:08.679 Robert Tseng: I think we’re kind of our hands are a bit tied here, because I think it would look really bad if we were just like, let’s go back to the drawing board. So that’s why I’m just trying to
350 00:48:08.800 ⇒ 00:48:19.779 Robert Tseng: whatever changes we make. I’m just, gonna I’m just gonna bring it to. I’m just gonna finish it, and try not to make a big fuss about like, Oh, yeah, we completely redesigned this thing or whatever.
351 00:48:19.980 ⇒ 00:48:20.730 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
352 00:48:21.020 ⇒ 00:48:28.671 Steven Kootz: Okay, got it. Yeah. Cause now, we’re we’re just trying to get Joby out the doors. Essentially. Okay. Alright, it’s all connecting. Now.
353 00:48:29.210 ⇒ 00:48:29.940 Steven Kootz: yeah.
354 00:48:30.880 ⇒ 00:48:35.950 Uttam Kumaran: And it’s. And again, please ask any questions. The technical stuff will take some time, but
355 00:48:36.300 ⇒ 00:48:44.200 Uttam Kumaran: you know, in in Pm. World it’s like the widget passes the next person, the widget pass the next person. I can help you break things down like that.
356 00:48:44.871 ⇒ 00:48:57.900 Uttam Kumaran: But in our world again, the final deliverables are typically, a piece of analysis which is like, go find this out about my business like, tell me what the lifetime value averages for our customers.
357 00:48:58.468 ⇒ 00:49:13.360 Uttam Kumaran: That’s like a distinct analysis. The other. Another question is, we want an ongoing artifact like a dashboard, so that we can look at it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to understand if our decisions are impacting the health of our business positively
358 00:49:13.490 ⇒ 00:49:16.050 Uttam Kumaran: right, those are our typical to.
359 00:49:16.260 ⇒ 00:49:26.179 Uttam Kumaran: I would say. Most of our work boils down into either an analysis or a dashboard. We want to expand
360 00:49:26.520 ⇒ 00:49:38.670 Uttam Kumaran: into things like Qbrs, or like monthly business reviews where we’re like leading. And you know, like an analysis of their own business things like that things that are more proactive
361 00:49:38.780 ⇒ 00:49:52.150 Uttam Kumaran: both of those pieces are. If you think about are all reactive historical measurements, right? Like those are, we’re not providing any strategic guidance on decision making. We are just breaking down the data they already have.
362 00:49:52.310 ⇒ 00:50:14.460 Uttam Kumaran: But I think that’s a good way to frame. This is like we are this initial phase for many of our customers. We’re just measuring their historical data. The phase that we want to go as a business, though, is to help them on what decision they should make. Right? So, moving from just looking at the historic to then saying, we noticed something, and you guys should go act in this way on it.
363 00:50:15.320 ⇒ 00:50:16.240 Steven Kootz: Okay. Alright!
364 00:50:16.240 ⇒ 00:50:22.729 Uttam Kumaran: But again, that we don’t for Joby we don’t have any like immediate deliverables on that second category.
365 00:50:23.630 ⇒ 00:50:24.270 Steven Kootz: Okay.
366 00:50:29.030 ⇒ 00:50:34.549 Steven Kootz: yeah, I know it’s also hard, too, because it’s like, the more I dig in, the more I see stuff to the more questions I’ll have as well so.
367 00:50:34.550 ⇒ 00:50:37.970 Uttam Kumaran: That’s fine. That’s anything. Yeah. Again, I wanna be here.
368 00:50:38.370 ⇒ 00:50:46.199 Uttam Kumaran: you know, today and the next 2 days to answer any of that, I guess so like, maybe I know we only we have, like, you know, 9 min left.
369 00:50:46.778 ⇒ 00:50:59.429 Uttam Kumaran: I want to give you some time to poke around and look at those things. I mean, I think the most one thing that could be very helpful. Short term is really help to put together both an engineering and a
370 00:50:59.550 ⇒ 00:51:03.340 Uttam Kumaran: client facing roadmap.
371 00:51:04.560 ⇒ 00:51:06.400 Uttam Kumaran: How how do you feel about that?
372 00:51:07.006 ⇒ 00:51:10.049 Steven Kootz: Per. Yeah. I think that’d be good. I think that works.
373 00:51:10.460 ⇒ 00:51:18.339 Steven Kootz: I think that’d be helpful for me, too, because then I’m like poking around and seeing everything have how it kind of, you know, starts to end and finishes. I think that helps so.
374 00:51:18.690 ⇒ 00:51:21.550 Uttam Kumaran: I think, additionally, what could be helpful, too, is
375 00:51:21.780 ⇒ 00:51:25.789 Uttam Kumaran: taking that and then breaking that down into tickets for our team.
376 00:51:29.150 ⇒ 00:51:30.749 Uttam Kumaran: So I’ll just add that here
377 00:51:39.850 ⇒ 00:51:54.150 Uttam Kumaran: that would be super helpful. And then the last piece is so breaking down road map into tickets for the team assignments and timelines, and then also, I think, even during this phase, would love for you to also think about
378 00:51:54.400 ⇒ 00:51:57.409 Uttam Kumaran: what are the common work streams like?
379 00:51:57.920 ⇒ 00:52:00.970 Uttam Kumaran: We talked about dashboard. You talked about analysis, but
380 00:52:01.170 ⇒ 00:52:07.189 Uttam Kumaran: that’s something I think we could use some help with, and I don’t know how how you did this before, which is like
381 00:52:07.850 ⇒ 00:52:13.770 Uttam Kumaran: all of our clients commonly have these 2 or 3 deliverables like, how can we break down a playbook?
382 00:52:14.256 ⇒ 00:52:23.669 Uttam Kumaran: For each of those right and almost like as you’re going through this, it’s almost like creating that documentation as you’re seeing it for for one client.
383 00:52:24.050 ⇒ 00:52:24.760 Steven Kootz: Okay.
384 00:52:28.130 ⇒ 00:52:31.670 Uttam Kumaran: Is that? Is that what you call like execution, playbook, or something?
385 00:52:32.490 ⇒ 00:52:34.632 Steven Kootz: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think,
386 00:52:37.450 ⇒ 00:52:41.519 Steven Kootz: yeah, like a playbook. Yeah, that’s that’s common. Yeah, we’ve said that.
387 00:52:46.760 ⇒ 00:52:48.549 Steven Kootz: Okay, yeah, I think that works.
388 00:52:48.800 ⇒ 00:52:49.609 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool
389 00:52:51.750 ⇒ 00:53:03.770 Uttam Kumaran: any other questions again, and just hit me with stuff on slack nonstop today. Like I will, I will answer every single question. The one thing that will be hard for me to do is hop on a call until like
390 00:53:04.460 ⇒ 00:53:11.589 Uttam Kumaran: later today, like probably around like 3 o’clock, your time. But like we’re being calls.
391 00:53:12.060 ⇒ 00:53:22.540 Uttam Kumaran: But again, my expectation is that like, I just get hit with a million questions I’m happy to answer. Send voice notes, send resources. So just please hit me with everything. I’m here. I’m here
392 00:53:22.660 ⇒ 00:53:23.989 Uttam Kumaran: for you. So.
393 00:53:24.390 ⇒ 00:53:27.367 Steven Kootz: Perfect, perfect, perfect. Yeah, I’ll be doing that.
394 00:53:28.340 ⇒ 00:53:31.255 Steven Kootz: no worries about that. Let’s see, I guess.
395 00:53:32.150 ⇒ 00:53:41.700 Steven Kootz: yeah. Then just these 2 other calls the data road mapping, and then looks like the Javi road mapping. So I have the road mapping for Eden and then one for Javi.
396 00:53:42.470 ⇒ 00:53:44.570 Steven Kootz: note. Those are coming up.
397 00:53:44.990 ⇒ 00:53:45.380 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
398 00:53:45.380 ⇒ 00:53:46.279 Steven Kootz: Let’s see.
399 00:53:46.620 ⇒ 00:53:49.760 Uttam Kumaran: So there’s actually one more call. I’m gonna add you to it.
400 00:53:50.200 ⇒ 00:53:53.399 Uttam Kumaran: Now. It’s I don’t know. Actually, I’ll have you.
401 00:53:54.620 ⇒ 00:53:59.499 Uttam Kumaran: actually have you just give a brief intro in this next call, which is, this is just our weekly kick off.
402 00:54:00.420 ⇒ 00:54:23.080 Uttam Kumaran: It’ll probably be short like I don’t. I don’t. I think I’ll just go around the Horn and just make sure that everybody on each team is aware of the core priorities. And then, yeah, we have an Eden roadmapping session. I invited you there. I just just to see like how we’re doing road mapping for another client, and then we have the roadmapping session for Joby. That’s where today I’m gonna be really my
403 00:54:23.560 ⇒ 00:54:31.130 Uttam Kumaran: my job today as the Pm. Is gonna be looking through all active tasks and then really understanding.
404 00:54:31.420 ⇒ 00:54:37.590 Uttam Kumaran: When are they gonna get out for the core problem, which is the core issues related to this gross margin dashboard?
405 00:54:37.930 ⇒ 00:54:46.460 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know whether I’m gonna have time to look further past that today. Because that’s where like mine, mine needs to be.
406 00:54:46.640 ⇒ 00:54:51.859 Uttam Kumaran: But again, I think you’ll see sort of 2 clients in 2 different phases. And that should
407 00:54:52.240 ⇒ 00:54:54.279 Uttam Kumaran: continue to be helpful. Context.
408 00:54:55.880 ⇒ 00:55:01.549 Uttam Kumaran: What’s your what’s your schedule like the next 2 days like? Is it sort of similar.
409 00:55:02.405 ⇒ 00:55:07.544 Steven Kootz: Let’s see, I can actually tell you that right now. So I have.
410 00:55:08.120 ⇒ 00:55:11.079 Steven Kootz: I think what I could do is just like send you when I have meetings, right
411 00:55:11.790 ⇒ 00:55:15.385 Steven Kootz: client meetings, everything. Let me do that. I’ll send you like when I have client meetings.
412 00:55:17.430 ⇒ 00:55:25.840 Steven Kootz: tomorrow and Wednesday I I should have some like
413 00:55:31.460 ⇒ 00:55:32.802 Steven Kootz: I should have
414 00:55:33.440 ⇒ 00:55:39.084 Steven Kootz: a good bit. I I have more time tomorrow on Wednesday with like meetings. I don’t have like that many meetings and everything stuff
415 00:55:39.550 ⇒ 00:55:42.269 Steven Kootz: tomorrow. Monday is always just kind of like a kickoff day of everything.
416 00:55:43.302 ⇒ 00:55:49.290 Steven Kootz: But yeah, I’ll send you that time. But should be should be like a pretty decent
417 00:55:49.640 ⇒ 00:55:54.799 Steven Kootz: week. I kind of try to like scramble on it and get everything but yeah, we should be good. So.
418 00:55:54.800 ⇒ 00:55:55.105 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
419 00:55:56.010 ⇒ 00:56:02.307 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool. Alright, then. Yeah. Let’s keep chatting slack, and then maybe I’ll plan on giving you a call at the end of the day sometime
420 00:56:03.560 ⇒ 00:56:04.789 Uttam Kumaran: and then we can go from there.
421 00:56:05.410 ⇒ 00:56:08.420 Steven Kootz: Alright! Sounds good. Oh, we got the kickoff call in 3 min. Alright!
422 00:56:08.420 ⇒ 00:56:09.080 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
423 00:56:09.590 ⇒ 00:56:10.080 Steven Kootz: Perfect.
424 00:56:10.080 ⇒ 00:56:10.600 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
425 00:56:11.020 ⇒ 00:56:12.489 Uttam Kumaran: Alright. Thanks. Guys.
426 00:56:12.490 ⇒ 00:56:14.349 Steven Kootz: Alright! Thanks everyone. Bye, all.