My Summer at Promo

Ron Barzilay

The Things That Happened

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Overall

• Arrived and got acquainted with the company, meeting with people from many teams and learning what goes on at Promo
• Learned some of the classic company tools:
• The editor
• Mixpanel
• Looker
• Google Colab (new-ish for the company?)
• Embarked on the multi-week “Others” Project
• Attempt of manual and NLP classification of ~44k users who labeled themselves as “Other” during the onboarding process
• Finished off with the “External Verticals” Project
• Research and comparison of our industry-by-industry output vs. external data

First Days

• Showed up to the office and greeted by instant kindness
• Got onboarded with a fancy new computer and made my intro video
• Sat with the D&A team, as well us User Acquisition, Retention, Creative, Product, Customer Success, and Content
• Many many many great lessons learned
• Learned Mixpanel and Looker with some practice analyses
• Nothing major materialized, but I learned a lot in the process

Me on my first day! (Look at that smile and clean shaven face)

“Others” Project

• Started with two huge datasets of user captions and search terms
• Merged and filtered to just “Others”
• Broke it down into users with subtypes, users with very little data, and users that we could do ~machine learning~ on
• NLP was the most difficult part, turning every user’s text into a vector and clustering
• Extracted 5 interesting verticals, classified about 20k out of the original 44k
• (many had absolutely nonsensical data)

The “Others” (which I referred to as “White Walkers”)

External Verticals Project

• Dove in the deep end looking for external data sources stratified by industry so we could compare our own output
• Spent a few days clicking around in frustration thinking “why is the free data world like this?”
• Annoying formats, difficult-to-use sites, etc.
• Looked through the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics mostly
• Eventually found the right dataset, then spent a while fine-tuning visualizations and extracting insights

External Data

Promo

And along the way…

• Met so many nice people
• Got to have plenty of conversations, exchange thoughts about Israeli-American life/differences, plenty of jokes and laughs
• Fell in love with the Tel Aviv office life (and sometimes working from home)
• Israeli culture, Hebrew, office vibes, meetings, happy hour, etc.
• Went on a crazy fun company trip!
• Something I’ll never forget, felt super spoiled
• Ate. A lot.

The Things I Learned

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About the Company

• Within a day: truly great product, I was surprised at how well my intro video came out
• Through the “Others” Project:
• A lot of people who don’t use your product the way you want them to
• One-time users who don’t want to label themselves, might not be businesses at all
• It’s extremely important to know your customers and what they’re seeking
• Can be a make-or-break for converting them
• A few verticals that we’re not appealing to
• Some can be added easily, some are tricky, conflict with b2b mindset
• Through the “External Verticals” Project:
• It can pay dividends for Promo to break out of our data bubble
• Treating every business type as its own can also be helpful, each one has its own knowledge and trends to know

Knowledge/Skills I’m Taking Away

• The tools: Mixpanel & Looker
• Much improved Python, pandas, visualization skill
• Basics for some Natural Language Processing
• Knowing that in the real world, data is messy
• Weird user data all over the place
• Especially compared to school assignments
• A lot of instincts for data analysis
• “Chicken and the egg” moments
• Always thinking about the full context
• Many little day-to-day high tech office skills
• Communication with Slack and email, knowing when to sync with supervisors, making presentations, scheduling, etc.

Thank you! I will miss you all!

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