Jordan Christensen, Head of Data and Platform at Wattpad, presents "Becoming an Effective Data Driven Organization"

2. Effective Data
Driven
Organizations

4. Jordan Christensen
Head of Data
Wattpad

5. Jordan Christensen
Head of Data
Wattpad
Canada, Eh?

6. Joined Wattpad in Sept 2014
Before that, founding team member at Kobo

7. Only real world-wide competitor to Amazon Kindle
Built Product and Data
Also consulted with other orgs on how to build their
Data Orgs

11. ⃠

13. Effective Data
Driven
Organizations

14. Warning!

15. ?

16. X

18. Also:

19. I made most of
this up. From my
experience.

20. Working with
small to medium
sized startups.

21. Lots of info out
on the web. HBR,
and a few books

23. Finally, this isn’t
a prescription.
Tools and
Techniques

25. We let people discover and share
stories about the things they love
A new storytelling experience that is mobile and social

26. Last month 40
million people
spent
13 billion minutes
on Wattpad

27. More than 150 million
stories have been shared
on Wattpad

28. Wattpad stories are
available in over 50
languages

29. After 3
39 Parts, Ongoing
2.6M
READS
27.5K
VOTES
4089
COMMENTS
MOBILE
Optimized for mobile
consumption
PERSONALIZED
Via social & machine
PARTICIPATORY
Create story worlds of fan
content on/off Wattpad
SERIAL
Maintain an ongoing connection
with readers
ACTIVE
Elevate conversations and interactions
in the story
How Wattpad works
for today’s readers

30. Desktop
Android
Wattpad continues to experience
exponential growth
Monthly Time Spent

31. Wattpad pushed the boundaries of
social and mobile entertainment
with over 1 billion chapter reads
and 6 million comments

33. Effective Data
Driven
Organizations

34. But Jordan,
Aren’t all modern
Organizations data driven?

35. Sort of….

36. Some Qualities of Data
Driven Organizations

37. But we can do better

38. Effective Data
Driven
Organizations

39. Okay Jordan,
How do we build an Effective
Data Driven Organization?

40. Simple!
Focus on these THREE things

41. 1. Culture
2. Models
3. Science

42. Data Culture

43. Every Effective Data Driven
Org has a strong Data Driven
Culture

44. Everyone shares
in culture

45. Start …

46. Start with Coffee

47. Start with Coffee
Daily Coffee Email

48. At Wattpad, everyone gets
an email in their Inbox (or on
Slack) with the Daily
Numbers

49. Arrives in time for Coffee
(before 8am)

50. Not an overload
Top Line
Up or Down

51. Aside: Find your North Star

53. One Metric
that Matters
(OMTM)

54. MAU
Monthly
Active
Users

56. Quarterly
Subscribers

58. Starts discussions
Why is iOS up so much
today?
Why is France slower than
last week?

59. Most Importantly

60. Most Importantly
Public
Transparent

61. Next simple thing after Coffee
Emails…

62. Dashboards

63. * Not Real

64. Why do Dashboards matter?
Public
Transparent
AND….

65. Self-Serve

66. Your Data team, if you have one,
is small

67. You likely have more asks than
you can possibly ever answer

68. Self-Serve is the only effective
answer here
Push queries to the edges of the
org

70. Aside: Where is your data?

71. Aside: Where is your data?
Many organizations start not
owning their data
Then they start collecting it

72. Now they have
two problems

74. As your organization grows, you
will outgrow hosted tools
They will get expensive, and their
capabilities will be limiting

75. Plan ahead - you’ll need to build
your own ‘Data Lake’.

76. But Jordan, How do people know
how to self serve?

77. Office Hours

78. To make Self-Serve work, people
need to know how to do it
Borrowed from Kickstarter

79. One Hour, Once a Week
Drop In, ask questions, get
trained
Anyone

80. Get’s full? Take a number, come
back next week
But it’s always there

81. Data Models

83. Analytics sometimes feels
like being a Weather person

84. People ask you about
something (The Weather),
and you tell them (It’s Cold*)

85. Ultimately, that isn’t that
helpful.

86. Weather people need to tell
you what the Weather will be
like tomorrow.

87. Or Why is it going to be Cold
tomorrow?

88. Or what can they do to
change The Weather?*
* May be limited to Super Villains

89. We’ve been
predicting the
Weather* for
centuries

90. How do we do it?

91. Models

92. But Jordan, Why do I
need these
complicated models?

93. First, I didn’t say they
had to be complicated

95. Second, so we know
where we are going

96. Targets

97. Effective Data Driven
Organizations use
Models to set their
Targets

98. 1. Quarterly Goals
2. Yearly Goals
3. Multi-Year Goals
Targets

99. Without Models,
Targets have another
name

100. Guesses!

101. Aside on Targets:
You’ll get them wrong
and you’ll miss them
(or exceed them)*

102. Learning how to
model your business
and set targets takes
time

103. But get started, track
variance and be Open
and Transparent
about them

104. Maybe put them in the
Coffee Email,
everyday, so people
know how they are
doing

105. Targets are in some
way aspirational.
They are where you
WANT to be.

106. If we want to know
where we think we’ll
be, we need…

107. Forecasts

108. Just like the Weather,
shorter term these
are, the more accurate

109. Daily - Did it rain
yesterday? It’ll
probably rain
tomorrow!

110. Weekly - Did it rain
yesterday? Who knows
what next week is like

111. Short Term barometer
Is this week above or
below the Forecast?
Best indication of short
term performance.

112. Proxies

113. Data Science lives here
Finding Short Term
correlations for Longer
Term metrics

114. Example: MAU is SLOW
30 Day Moving average,
would take about twice
that long to see any real
change

115. How do we know if MAU
is going to get better or
worse?
We need a Proxy.

116. At Wattpad, we looked at
what our users were
doing and found
something magical…

117. People who Read More,
Stay Longer

118. Reading Time
vs Retention

119. If we increase Reading
Time, we increase
Retention, and that
leads to more MAU

120. These Proxies do two
things for us:
1. They let us see results
quickly
2. They point us towards
things we can effect

121. Finding Proxies is great, but how
do you change things, and how
do you know you’ve made things
better?

122. “Do” Science

123. You’ve probably
seen this book.
Random Walk
experiments

124. Experts can’t tell
the difference
between
randomness and
causation

125. Looking at Charts
(in, say, GA) is the
same thing

126. Human’s have this
natural need to find
order in noise

127. It has served us well
for thousands of
years, how do we
change?

128. A/B Test

129. Used to be hard,
how we have great
tools.

130. Sometimes you
need to go deeper.
You might need to
build this, or there
are other toolkits to
leverage

131. We built this at
Wattpad, most
larger orgs do as it
needs to be very
close to your data.

132. Wattpad is about
120 staff, but we’re
running > 20
experiments at any
time

133. Causation

134. Learn what you can
change, and why it
works, or why it
doesn’t.

135. At Wattpad, we were
changing our on boarding
experience.

136. Nothing Happened.

137. Tried again.

138. Nothing Happened.

139. Turned it off all
together

140. Nothing Happened?! WTF?

141. Turns out our On
Boarding didn’t do
anything since it
didn’t change the
experience

142. Connected to the
experience, we
increased our
retention by 10%

143. Council

144. Experiments are
hard. You need a
council.

146. Borrowed from a
Google White Paper
on how they run
their process

147. Provide
Governance, Best
Practices, and share
results

148. Learnings

149. Best part of Science

150. You Learn!

151. You learn what your
users want, what
they don’t, what
makes them happy,
what makes them
sad

152. And you can tell the
rest of your
company. Science is
a process by which
you learn and
improve your
business

153. Ultimately, that’s why we
are here - to use Data to
improve our businesses

154. And you’re
done!

155. In Summary

156. 1. Culture
2. Models
3. Science

157. 1. Email
2. Dashboard
3. Self Serve
4. Office Hours
Culture

158. 1. Targets
2. Forecasts
3. Proxies
Models

159. 1. A/B Test
2. Causation
3. Council
4. Learnings
Science

160. * Still Continuing on our Journey at Wattpad
Working every day to make Data more of our day-
to-day decision process

161. Thank You
jc@wattpad.com
@thebigjc