From managing data collection, enabling data-driven decision making, to influencing product strategy, the responsibilities of a Product Analyst seem pretty interesting! Read on to find out how Marven Ho, our Senior Product Analyst spends his day as a Product Analyst and what he loves most about his role!
What do you do as a Product Analyst?
As Product Analysts, we are the data specialists for our respective Product team. We enable data-driven decision-making by fostering a self-serve analytics ecosystem through dashboards, lead the charge to design and evaluate A/B experiments, and define success with our Product squads through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
We also contribute to the Product roadmap through our exploratory data analyses that help identify opportunities to improve our app and web experiences.
Our event with Tomowork
What’s your favourite part about being a Product Analyst at foodpanda?
My favourite part is having the opportunity to discover insights in customer behaviour during my exploratory data analyses that challenges our current paradigm.
Tell us about how the Product Analyst teams are structured at foodpanda.
The Product Team is structured into Product Lines, each of which focuses on one business area and is a collection of squads.
A squad is a team of specialists that works on improving the app and web experiences according to its Product Line’s goals. Product Analyst is one of the specialists in a squad, alongside Product Managers, Product Designers, Software Developers and more.
How has foodpanda helped you grow?
As mentioned earlier, Product Analytics in foodpanda focuses on more than just studying data.
We are responsible for defining what data gets collected from the app and web and for working with the software engineers to build them into the codebase. We also design and manage the data pipeline that cleans and transforms the raw data into a more useful format. These responsibilities expand our technical skill set.
Since we also are responsible for shaping product roadmaps, we also acquire soft skills that help us convey our insights and findings to other product stakeholders, without being unnecessarily technical.
All these have helped me build a more rounded and solid foundation for my career within the field of Product Analytics.
Lastly, bring us through a day in your life as a Product Analyst!
Sure! Here goes…
9:00 A.M. Start work with a cup of coffee on my desk. Go through Slack and emails for any urgent issues with the data pipeline, ongoing experimentations or any urgent data requests from my coworkers based in Istanbul or Berlin (who are in different time zones). Usually, it’s rather quiet in the morning and the requests, if any, are not very urgent.
9:15 A.M. Check on my ongoing experiments on Eppo, which is a SaaS platform we use to monitor and evaluate A/B experiments on our app and web. Look through JIRA, a product management tool, for any outstanding tickets that are pending my actions.
9:45 A.M. Go through my to-do list from the previous working day. Add new list items and check off any items that are done. Relook at the priorities of each item to make sure the high-urgency items will be attended to first.
10:00 A.M. Usually this block of time will be meeting-free on most days, and so, I like to start a new task or resume work on an ongoing task during this time. In this time, I’ll either be working on building a new data pipeline, building a new view in our dashboard, or planning new experiments.
11:00 A.M. On Mondays and Thursday, Q-commerce Product Analysts will have a 40-min sync at this time to discuss our ongoing tasks. This helps us prevent any overlapping tasks, gather advice on how to proceed on a task, and allows for collaborations.
12:30 P.M. Lunch! If I’m working from home, I’ll head to the nearest food center. If I’m working from the office, then I’ll head out with my coworkers who are also in the office.
Fave lunch spot near office – Omnivore!
1:30 P.M. Back from lunch. I’ll be on my second coffee at this point. This is when the bulk of meetings of the day start.
2:30 P.M. On most days, this block of time would be used for either a sync with Q-commerce Product Managers, Product Designers and Engineering Managers.
3:30 P.M. This is 9:30 A.M. in Berlin and 10.30A.M. in Istanbul. Since some of our stakeholders are from outside of the Q-commerce product line, and a good portion of them are based in Berlin and Istanbul, this means any meeting with them would be set from this time onwards. We seek to be respectful of each other’s working hours.
5:30 P.M. This is when the meetings start to wind down, so this is another perfect window of opportunity to catch up on ongoing tasks again.
6:30 P.M. Note any tasks I didn’t get to finish today and add them to my to-do list for tomorrow.
About Marven Ho
Marven is a Senior Product Analyst at foodpanda, responsible for the Quick Commerce product line. He’s passionate about uncovering hidden gems in datasets, and turning those into valuable insights. Beyond work, you’ll find him unleashing his gaming prowess in virtual realms and exploring the city’s best cafes in search of the ultimate brew.