Data Leaders Series
Ashit Kumar Interview - Data Leaders Series
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Hello. My name is Ashit Kumar. I work as a User Growth Lead at Spotify. My team runs AB tests on the web and I'm primarily running the data team within that team. Our team manages Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Optimize for most of Spotify. And we also make Jupiter notebooks to run our optimise tests and analyse them, of course. I think from MeasureCamp,I see a big shift towards GA4 obviously because of the sunset date. But it also feels like, uh, companies are being more aware about GA4 because of the sunset date. And people are slowly realizing what kind of features they could get out of jail for and how they can boost their analysis by moving to GA4. So I feel like GA4 has been kind of the biggest highlight of MeasureCamp so far. But definitely there were so many different learning. It's definitely not enough to just list them. Yeah, mhm. Three key areas... GA4 first. Uh, Since there is a sunset date for for next year, I think October, we have made, like a more optimistic target for ourselves. Usually we try to push ourselves a bit beyond, uh so for us, the target is end of this year to get everything set up in GA4, Um, yeah, if you don't hit that target, we still have some time. But we want to make sure that we are ready with everything before that sunset date comes. So that's the first thing. The second thing closely relates to my session today. Is that we're trying to find as many redundancies as possible, So, basically having like a failsafe option when something breaks or something doesn't work as expected. So, we are trying to think more about building those redundancies, thinking about resilience a bit more when it comes to analytics and optimization. Um, the third thing is actually quite interesting because, we have just on boarded four new team members, so I'm personally going to focus a lot on their development and their onboarding. So I guess for us, when it comes to the analytics space, like making sure that our new resources are fully unloaded and they're ready to rock is kind of big, big importance for us as a team. Yeah, Yeah. Um, I touched a bit about this during my session, as well. Most of our analytics community is very tightly coupled to one or two big players in the market, and I feel like it is kind of a hard truth is that we are so tightly coupled with them that we have to do things on their timeline. So, if they tell us the solution is going to be sunset, we have to follow their lead even though that product is not fully ready to be switched over to. So I feel like we should be talking a bit more about that instead of trying to fix everything ourselves as community. I'm not saying we shouldn't do that, but we should also raise this with Google as a community and say that okay, these things are not working well. And what can we do to make sure that you fully test the product before yeah, releasing it out into the world? Yeah, I think the biggest trend that I have seen and definitely I'm speaking more from a more Spotify perspective is that there has been slow and gradual trend towards moving everything else, and I think that is more with all the cookie regulations, privacy regulations in place. Um, generally now, third-party data processors are being seen as something that is wrong with the whole digital marketing space. And I feel like slowly and steadily, everyone or maybe the bigger player in the enterprise market, would soon, like, start building their own solutions or start adopting things like Snowplow, which would allow them to kind of host and own all of the data that they collect. So I'm seeing a big shift in that direction. I feel like it's going to happen sooner rather than later anyways. For years and years and years, the standard practice was: you build a website, you deploy on it, right? And then you forget about everything. And then three years later, you get some like, high-level sessions, user metrics, and that's it, right? Uh, since there are more questions being asked about, what data are you collecting. I feel like people are being more aware about why you need tracking. And if you're tracking people first, firstly and foremost, you should tell them that you're tracking them, and this is what you do with their data. But secondly, you're also being more aware about why you're tracking this and what business value will get out of it. If there is no business value, do not track anyone, right? Yeah.