Meeting Title: US | Team Meeting Date: 2025-04-10 Meeting participants: Luke Daque, Uttam Kumaran, Amber Lin, Demilade Agboola


WEBVTT

1 00:01:16.020 00:01:21.569 Amber Lin: Hi, Luke! I’m still waiting for dutem and demalade to join.

2 00:01:54.350 00:01:55.280 Luke Daque: Hello!

3 00:01:56.900 00:01:57.790 Amber Lin: Oh!

4 00:01:58.100 00:01:59.070 Luke Daque: Hi amber.

5 00:02:01.020 00:02:02.470 Amber Lin: How’s everything?

6 00:02:03.300 00:02:04.566 Amber Lin: Pretty good

7 00:02:05.620 00:02:10.750 Amber Lin: I took a nap after my 1st meeting, so.

8 00:02:12.210 00:02:17.089 Luke Daque: Nice waiting, but to take a break sometimes.

9 00:02:17.530 00:02:21.420 Amber Lin: Yeah. How are you? Did you work this whole day.

10 00:02:23.101 00:02:26.800 Luke Daque: A little bit still working on like 4 parts.

11 00:02:27.020 00:02:29.430 Luke Daque: like all of the stuff. But yeah.

12 00:02:32.960 00:02:41.829 Amber Lin: Yeah, how does how does that? Do you think we’re close to done like? Or do you think we still need to verify a lot of sources.

13 00:02:44.490 00:02:44.960 Luke Daque: Hmm!

14 00:02:48.580 00:02:51.669 Luke Daque: Well, I think we should be pretty good.

15 00:02:57.300 00:02:59.639 Luke Daque: Yeah, I think we should be pretty good.

16 00:03:01.410 00:03:03.439 Amber Lin: I’ll be creating a Pr. In a bit.

17 00:03:04.750 00:03:06.089 Luke Daque: For the changes.

18 00:03:07.580 00:03:08.590 Amber Lin: Sounds good.

19 00:03:08.980 00:03:15.049 Amber Lin: Yeah, I pinged. We have a meeting now. Hopefully they join soon.

20 00:03:16.040 00:03:16.800 Luke Daque: Cool.

21 00:03:17.590 00:03:18.190 Amber Lin: Yeah.

22 00:03:26.030 00:03:28.430 Luke Daque: Okay. Smooth.

23 00:11:08.050 00:11:11.380 Demilade Agboola: Hi, guys. Sorry about the lateness.

24 00:11:14.270 00:11:15.190 Luke Daque: Hello! Hello!

25 00:11:15.190 00:11:18.740 Amber Lin: Hello! Is Utam coming any soon?

26 00:11:20.780 00:11:24.859 Demilade Agboola: I mean he should be. We’ll literally we’re just in a meeting right now, so he should be coming.

27 00:11:24.860 00:11:25.500 Amber Lin: Meeting.

28 00:11:26.490 00:11:27.290 Luke Daque: Nice.

29 00:12:08.210 00:12:09.140 Amber Lin: So.

30 00:12:10.120 00:12:11.120 Uttam Kumaran: Hi! Everyone.

31 00:12:11.500 00:12:12.310 Amber Lin: Bye.

32 00:12:12.880 00:12:14.360 Uttam Kumaran: Sorry for the delay.

33 00:12:15.520 00:12:20.115 Amber Lin: Oh, good! I have time. I think there has a stand up later. Let’s see it.

34 00:12:20.690 00:12:25.525 Uttam Kumaran: So let me let me just let me just give you a quick run through of

35 00:12:26.420 00:12:28.929 Uttam Kumaran: what’s going on here, and then

36 00:12:29.120 00:12:33.669 Uttam Kumaran: maybe we can just work a little bit. I’ll just put some to do’s Async

37 00:12:34.150 00:12:36.710 Uttam Kumaran: on like what we can do here, so

38 00:12:38.580 00:12:42.660 Uttam Kumaran: where to begin. And then, Demo, I just fill in any like details here.

39 00:12:44.760 00:12:48.989 Uttam Kumaran: If I miss anything. So urban stems is.

40 00:12:48.990 00:12:53.039 Amber Lin: Oh, okay, sorry. Go ahead. We can copy the log.

41 00:12:54.331 00:12:57.000 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Is there a Pm. Handoff, Doc?

42 00:12:57.180 00:12:59.580 Amber Lin: No, but we have a template. You can keep talking.

43 00:12:59.580 00:13:00.040 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.

44 00:13:00.170 00:13:01.250 Amber Lin: Go, find it.

45 00:13:01.550 00:13:06.689 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool. So urban stems is a large e-commerce flower company.

46 00:13:07.435 00:13:11.620 Uttam Kumaran: They are like pretty typical Ecom, except

47 00:13:11.740 00:13:27.340 Uttam Kumaran: part of the biggest problem they have is they have a perishable good. And so there’s a lot of things they have to do with inventory supply chain shipping. The other major problem is that they’re on a lot of legacy infrastructure.

48 00:13:27.480 00:13:32.829 Uttam Kumaran: And so to give you a sense of like where they are now.

49 00:13:33.597 00:13:39.240 Uttam Kumaran: And this is probably. Yeah. So I do have one other.

50 00:13:39.780 00:13:43.970 Uttam Kumaran: We do have a diagram for this team almost done.

51 00:13:47.310 00:13:50.780 Uttam Kumaran: And yeah, amber. I can probably fill out that handoff, Doc, too.

52 00:13:51.453 00:13:54.040 Uttam Kumaran: But this is sort of their main structure.

53 00:13:54.771 00:14:03.310 Uttam Kumaran: So they’re bringing in data from all these sources through stitch and hevo, there’s issues with Netsuite. There’s some issues with Google sheets.

54 00:14:04.236 00:14:12.089 Uttam Kumaran: They’re bringing all this data in. It’s landing. This isn’t accurate. Right now, it’s all just coming into a single analytics, database.

55 00:14:12.310 00:14:14.989 Uttam Kumaran: analytics schema and then going into looker.

56 00:14:15.625 00:14:18.870 Uttam Kumaran: This is like a pure data client like.

57 00:14:19.030 00:14:22.930 Uttam Kumaran: we’re not gonna be doing a lot on the analysis side.

58 00:14:23.030 00:14:30.180 Uttam Kumaran: All our work is gonna be really focused on modeling, which I think is is better than having to deal with like

59 00:14:30.550 00:14:39.599 Uttam Kumaran: this area, too, we have partners in the organization that could do it. In or in terms of people. We have a couple of people. This is probably something I can list on that sheet.

60 00:14:39.600 00:14:59.170 Demilade Agboola: Before you go to people. I also want to point out that they had the migration that happened on the 6th of November last year. So in terms of modeling, it makes things very complicated. So you know, they have 2 different data from 2 different systems coming together. And as a result. The models are like all over the place.

61 00:14:59.857 00:15:08.189 Demilade Agboola: So the things for the 1st part that you know from before the migration and after the migration and things. Some things don’t just work as well as they should.

62 00:15:08.890 00:15:15.559 Demilade Agboola: and kind of tied to people as well. But you know, time was going to go into. It was built by someone called Stephen, who left.

63 00:15:16.340 00:15:33.279 Demilade Agboola: and it’s being run by someone called Emily, who isn’t necessarily the strongest with like Dbt. But she’s like learning and trying to figure it out. So there are a lot of questions that we have that don’t necessarily have answers like immediate answers. And that makes things like, you know.

64 00:15:33.460 00:15:36.770 Demilade Agboola: slow, tricky, but like we’re trying to get on top of it.

65 00:15:36.950 00:15:38.399 Demilade Agboola: But I can pass it back to Otam.

66 00:15:39.490 00:15:41.010 Uttam Kumaran: Exactly so.

67 00:15:41.940 00:15:48.309 Uttam Kumaran: I think the biggest piece is that. Yes, there are this these like pre migration sources, or like.

68 00:15:48.830 00:15:51.560 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, pre-migration sources.

69 00:15:52.910 00:16:02.340 Uttam Kumaran: that are now being stitched together like union in that’s really really complicated. They have also, like a whirlwind of like infrastructure problems.

70 00:16:02.440 00:16:16.029 Uttam Kumaran: So they’re using 2 of these. These are all both very, very messy. Their redshift is super super messy. Their Dbt jobs are really messy. They they’re they’re their actual

71 00:16:16.505 00:16:21.759 Uttam Kumaran: repository is very, very messy. And so part of the part of the like.

72 00:16:22.140 00:16:30.840 Uttam Kumaran: the beginnings of our work is really gonna be on like pausing new development and basically

73 00:16:31.080 00:16:34.020 Uttam Kumaran: trying to just like refactor a ton of stuff.

74 00:16:34.620 00:16:44.049 Uttam Kumaran: So we’re considering an a new ingestion source from polytomic at this point, we’re not 100, considering Snowflake, although we could

75 00:16:44.484 00:16:57.559 Uttam Kumaran: but I think we can get away with just doing stuff on redshift for now, but part of kind of the the sense I want to give to everybody is that it’s gonna be probably at least a month or 2 of like core refactor work

76 00:16:57.680 00:17:11.999 Uttam Kumaran: where we’re going to not only be refactoring a lot of SQL, we’re going to be cleaning up the way Dbt jobs work. We want to be adding in testing and so part of the work that I think this crew can do

77 00:17:12.410 00:17:15.770 Uttam Kumaran: between now and then is basically breaking up

78 00:17:16.550 00:17:21.480 Uttam Kumaran: those high level milestones into into sprints and tickets.

79 00:17:22.900 00:17:24.910 Amber Lin: So the one thing I will share.

80 00:17:26.025 00:17:30.009 Uttam Kumaran: With everybody is, is this document?

81 00:17:42.940 00:17:58.369 Uttam Kumaran: And in this document you’re gonna see what our basically like, what our project proposal was. And sort of this is like a lot of what we’re planning on on working on. We scoped down

82 00:17:58.982 00:18:04.730 Uttam Kumaran: in terms of the current project to just focus on supporting their team

83 00:18:04.840 00:18:07.139 Uttam Kumaran: with about 15 h of work a week.

84 00:18:07.815 00:18:10.340 Uttam Kumaran: On like random fire drills.

85 00:18:10.921 00:18:16.939 Uttam Kumaran: Which we’re doing right now. However, they’ve given us. The verbal basically like thumbs up

86 00:18:17.050 00:18:20.719 Uttam Kumaran: that we, we’ll be able to move forward with this project.

87 00:18:22.290 00:18:30.419 Uttam Kumaran: as soon as mother’s day is go is is completed. So probably like a week or 2 before that, I will basically try to see whether they can get that signed.

88 00:18:30.780 00:18:39.329 Uttam Kumaran: So one of the things I think to focus on is getting linear setup basically trying to

89 00:18:39.440 00:18:43.150 Uttam Kumaran: either, like, I guess I don’t know they they sort of are using Jira.

90 00:18:43.610 00:18:56.900 Uttam Kumaran: I think if we start to involve more people in this process like it’s going to be tough to use Jira. So I feel like we should just maybe we should just start to create our own linear. For now and ideally, I I want to sort of come up with

91 00:18:57.730 00:19:02.679 Uttam Kumaran: what the 1st like month or 2 months of like work is gonna look like

92 00:19:03.216 00:19:11.300 Uttam Kumaran: a lot of that high level work is detailed here, which is like what we’re going to be doing around consolidating Etl cleaning warehouse

93 00:19:12.620 00:19:17.220 Uttam Kumaran: training. And so I just wanna like start to have like

94 00:19:17.390 00:19:23.120 Uttam Kumaran: milestones and core projects and then start to break that out into into tickets.

95 00:19:25.860 00:19:30.220 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So this is a, I would say, take a second. Read this one.

96 00:19:30.857 00:19:35.650 Uttam Kumaran: I will also share everyone on this document.

97 00:19:48.049 00:19:53.750 Uttam Kumaran: this. You’re gonna see a lot of documentation on how it works and sort of different exercises. We went on with them.

98 00:19:54.183 00:20:00.469 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t think like I, I think, just poke around at this. I think we probably need to do another more focused meeting

99 00:20:00.580 00:20:03.919 Uttam Kumaran: on like what the core milestones are

100 00:20:04.306 00:20:12.569 Uttam Kumaran: but I just wanted to sort of set the stage for this client. I’ll sort of wait to give access to the code and everything, but we have everything here.

101 00:20:13.394 00:20:37.390 Uttam Kumaran: But sort of in terms of team structure. I think it will most likely be demalade. And, Luke, you guys leading ae, I’ll still be on as well, and then amber. You sort of being the liaison between our team and their team. They have a product lead on their team as well as a like back end, technical lead and an analyst.

102 00:20:37.590 00:20:41.459 Uttam Kumaran: I, the analyst, will basically become our product owner. Emily.

103 00:20:42.430 00:20:42.960 Amber Lin: Okay.

104 00:20:43.700 00:20:45.850 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. And then we’ll basically just like.

105 00:20:46.680 00:20:54.690 Uttam Kumaran: probably hit the ground running on stuff. This is definitely gonna be more technical than any of our

106 00:20:56.360 00:20:59.600 Uttam Kumaran: like other current clients, and also more focused on just

107 00:21:00.060 00:21:03.240 Uttam Kumaran: like a lot of modeling and engineering work.

108 00:21:03.420 00:21:05.610 Uttam Kumaran: So don’t worry if it’s like a little bit

109 00:21:07.250 00:21:19.200 Uttam Kumaran: technical like. I think you’ll get the hang of it. But it’ll be, I think, for the Ae. Crew on the call. It’ll be up to us to really support amber. So she can project plan and then basically own all communication on timelines.

110 00:21:20.930 00:21:30.900 Uttam Kumaran: they do have a really really strong expectation that we plan things out, and I think we can impress them with how good we are at at planning and sort of setting together those roadmaps.

111 00:21:31.426 00:21:34.469 Uttam Kumaran: And the nice thing is, I don’t think the technical work.

112 00:21:34.750 00:21:39.810 Uttam Kumaran: I think the technical work is more straightforward than if we were to have to do something across the entire stack.

113 00:21:40.250 00:21:46.889 Uttam Kumaran: There are really really complicated models in here, though, that haven’t been updated in years that we’ll have to go take a look at. So

114 00:21:47.582 00:21:50.399 Uttam Kumaran: just a lot of work to do.

115 00:21:50.930 00:21:52.329 Uttam Kumaran: But I’ll pause there.

116 00:21:53.130 00:21:57.879 Uttam Kumaran: That’s a sort of a lot to absorb, but like any high level questions I can answer.

117 00:21:58.650 00:22:01.150 Amber Lin: So what I assume that there’s a lot of

118 00:22:01.640 00:22:10.980 Amber Lin: things we need to update and less of, we need to create new ones. More of them is updating their old infrastructure.

119 00:22:12.637 00:22:24.080 Uttam Kumaran: It’s sort of both. It’s I. I’m not. I’m not until we break it down. I’m not 100% sure what we can. What we’ll have. So basically, we’re gonna start to create stuff in parallel.

120 00:22:24.601 00:22:32.899 Uttam Kumaran: Because we don’t want to. We don’t want to affect their existing reporting. Yeah. So this one will have a lot of like migration related

121 00:22:33.090 00:22:34.190 Uttam Kumaran: sort of work.

122 00:22:35.760 00:22:38.280 Uttam Kumaran: Where we’ll have to basically like

123 00:22:38.450 00:22:46.829 Uttam Kumaran: migrate some of their legacy models to new models. And then do a cut over, and and so basically do like sets of migrations. I believe.

124 00:22:49.570 00:22:58.719 Demilade Agboola: I also decided to flag. I don’t know how soon look and amber joining projects, but their most important day.

125 00:22:59.450 00:23:03.780 Demilade Agboola: or one of the most important days of the year. Is mother’s Day.

126 00:23:04.510 00:23:29.399 Demilade Agboola: and as a result, they’re just like skeptical to make any major changes to the infrastructure before mother’s day, because they don’t want things breaking apparently, between Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. That’s like half of the entire yearly sales. So those 2 days are really important. So like they’re looking to like any like major changes happening after mother’s day, so that, you know, whatever exists, even as like weird as it is, can still give them what information they need.

127 00:23:30.320 00:23:39.530 Amber Lin: Oh, sounds good. I’m gonna put all these documents soon that you shared in a notion, Doc, so it’s

128 00:23:39.810 00:23:43.370 Amber Lin: centralized, and then we can access them.

129 00:23:43.770 00:23:44.240 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

130 00:23:44.240 00:23:44.800 Amber Lin: But.

131 00:23:45.830 00:23:51.150 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. And I think, damalade, I’m gonna I’m sort of messaging Zack and and talking through. I think

132 00:23:51.290 00:23:55.879 Uttam Kumaran: I will ask him like how close we are to being able to loop more people in

133 00:23:56.210 00:24:02.169 Uttam Kumaran: the biggest pushback is probably gonna be like, oh, we don’t want to spend time on like that right now. Blah, blah.

134 00:24:02.621 00:24:11.639 Uttam Kumaran: that’s okay. I’m just gonna say, like, we need to plan ahead if we’re gonna get you any of that work. And of course, like this is a much bigger project than

135 00:24:12.160 00:24:17.033 Uttam Kumaran: sort of, I think. Just me and you can handle, in addition to like timelines and everything.

136 00:24:17.736 00:24:21.460 Uttam Kumaran: And I think they trust us now, like they know we’re good. So

137 00:24:22.820 00:24:34.319 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, mother’s day is A is a big like sort of nervous, sent like center for them. So I think we just want to nail everything leading up to that. And then, yeah, let’s just keep talking in slack and

138 00:24:34.680 00:24:43.929 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know. Maybe we. We just have, like at least a meeting once a week to share updates from our end on how it’s going, and then just make sure we’re accountable to sort of loop you guys in on stuff.

139 00:24:44.369 00:24:48.760 Uttam Kumaran: and then, if I’m able to get more hours and loop people in, I I will as soon as I can.

140 00:24:50.920 00:24:52.270 Uttam Kumaran: But I think that’s

141 00:24:53.320 00:25:00.529 Uttam Kumaran: that’s most of what I had. I think the biggest thing. So the nice thing about this client is, we do have a couple of weeks before we like kick this off.

142 00:25:00.830 00:25:08.880 Uttam Kumaran: So I think between me and you, Amber, we can take it out like core planning and timeline activities that we want to take on

143 00:25:09.390 00:25:14.820 Uttam Kumaran: documentation filling out that sheet. Blah blah blah. So if you want to go ahead and just kick off a

144 00:25:15.170 00:25:18.949 Uttam Kumaran: urban stems. Notion linear.

145 00:25:19.950 00:25:20.480 Amber Lin: Bye.

146 00:25:21.530 00:25:26.209 Uttam Kumaran: And then we can just start adding tickets there, like around this planning work.

147 00:25:26.850 00:25:27.330 Amber Lin: Cool.

148 00:25:27.330 00:25:28.359 Uttam Kumaran: You know that’d be great.

149 00:25:28.360 00:25:33.309 Amber Lin: I can do that, and I can. Probably I’ll find a slot where we can all meet

150 00:25:33.961 00:25:39.739 Amber Lin: at least next week to just check in on progress, and see how the status is.

151 00:25:40.380 00:25:40.980 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

152 00:25:42.930 00:25:43.505 Luke Daque: And

153 00:25:44.690 00:25:51.200 Luke Daque: What what kind of work has been done so far for this client like you mentioned firefighting, or something.

154 00:25:59.018 00:26:02.840 Uttam Kumaran: So yeah, we’ve been mainly doing like helping them, just like patch

155 00:26:03.070 00:26:09.440 Uttam Kumaran: accuracy problems and like, fix Dbt jobs, like.

156 00:26:09.850 00:26:13.989 Uttam Kumaran: like, just help them create new prs like isolate logic.

157 00:26:14.240 00:26:16.490 Uttam Kumaran: like just doing a lot of debugging.

158 00:26:18.410 00:26:19.240 Luke Daque: I see.

159 00:26:19.850 00:26:26.500 Luke Daque: Yeah. And then this project, basically, from what I understand, is mostly migrating all their systems to

160 00:26:28.010 00:26:32.030 Luke Daque: to whatever like portable for the data ingestion and

161 00:26:32.540 00:26:37.639 Luke Daque: depends on like, how, what, what else we we see from the documents that they need to

162 00:26:37.800 00:26:43.129 Luke Daque: migrate right? Like all the models, I guess, like refactoring everything stuff like that.

163 00:26:45.670 00:26:46.530 Luke Daque: Cool.

164 00:26:47.860 00:26:51.780 Luke Daque: Yeah, I’ll I’ll read through that stuff here.

165 00:26:52.890 00:26:53.320 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

166 00:26:53.320 00:27:00.440 Luke Daque: India probably also reach out to them about it, for if I have, like any questions.

167 00:27:05.560 00:27:06.770 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, perfect.

168 00:27:07.380 00:27:13.550 Demilade Agboola: Yeah, sounds good. I also have a bunch of questions like I said, the infrastructure is like, really, really bad.

169 00:27:13.660 00:27:16.240 Demilade Agboola: And there are times when I literally have to take

170 00:27:16.510 00:27:31.669 Demilade Agboola: like 30 min an hour, just to like understand what the person was trying to do. What’s going on. And Emmy herself is also trying to figure that out herself. So sometimes she she has context, and sometimes it’s helpful talking to her. But then also, sometimes it’s just like

171 00:27:32.040 00:27:34.840 Demilade Agboola: I still like, you still need to be able to go in there.

172 00:27:34.970 00:27:37.759 Demilade Agboola: figure out what the problems are, and by yourself.

173 00:27:37.760 00:27:38.440 Luke Daque: All right.

174 00:27:38.820 00:27:39.530 Demilade Agboola: Yeah.

175 00:27:40.390 00:27:41.120 Luke Daque: Cool.

176 00:27:42.090 00:27:48.729 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, ideally, Emily becomes our our product owner. And then we just work a lot through her and then just try to avoid

177 00:27:48.890 00:28:01.089 Uttam Kumaran: stuff on the analysis side sort of push it on to her. But yeah, this is a lot. There’s a lot here. So it took me for it took like I was basically took me a month to like, wrap my head around everything

178 00:28:01.260 00:28:06.589 Uttam Kumaran: so like it’s gonna take some time. So just spend a little bit of time here and there, poke around at it.

179 00:28:06.730 00:28:08.779 Uttam Kumaran: and then we’ll start to sort of break it up.

180 00:28:09.304 00:28:11.709 Uttam Kumaran: And I’ll try to get you guys involved as soon as I can.

181 00:28:12.700 00:28:18.010 Luke Daque: Cool. Can you grant me all the access I need, like the repository, or whatever.

182 00:28:18.340 00:28:23.120 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I have to ask them first.st There I have to get. I have to get, you know, approval from them.

183 00:28:23.709 00:28:27.380 Uttam Kumaran: On looping other people in. So this is like what I can do right now.

184 00:28:29.110 00:28:29.850 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.

185 00:28:31.910 00:28:32.450 Amber Lin: Sounds good.

186 00:28:32.450 00:28:33.020 Luke Daque: Sounds good.

187 00:28:33.020 00:28:36.219 Amber Lin: I’ll go dig into the docs, and

188 00:28:36.390 00:28:38.800 Amber Lin: when you have some time we don’t just

189 00:28:39.100 00:28:46.028 Amber Lin: spit out some of the project management handoff. I sent a link in our channel.

190 00:28:46.820 00:28:50.079 Amber Lin: yeah, I think that will be a lot less technical and

191 00:28:50.840 00:28:56.829 Amber Lin: less less urgent. I would say, I will go through the docs you sent first.st

192 00:28:57.830 00:28:58.390 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

193 00:28:58.860 00:29:00.720 Amber Lin: Okay. Thank you guys.

194 00:29:01.360 00:29:02.790 Uttam Kumaran: Thanks, bye.

195 00:29:03.350 00:29:04.170 Amber Lin: Bye.