Building a World Class Data Team
We implemented a modern data stack (Snowplow, Redshift, Looker), built the initial set of dashboards that allowed the teams to self-serve, analysed customer retention behaviour, and handed everything over to a team we helped hire.
Overview
Kaia is a companion app for people suffering from chronic back pain treatment. Patients can supplement their existing treatments with personalised exercises and get advice from professional coaches directly within the app. Their business model is subscription-based and part B2C (patients downloading and subscribing directly), part B2B2C (patients acquiring a subscription via their health insurance provider). Success is measured by the number of daily workouts patients complete, and the reduction in their self-reported pain levels. Both are particularly important for the B2B2C side of the business as the insurers want to see that Kaia can help reduce the number of visits to the therapist.
Industry
HealthcareCompany Size
50-100Location
Munich & New YorkEstablished
2016Value
>200M USDThe Challenge
The team was suffering from major BI bottlenecks with outdated BI tool & silo-specific reporting (Apple App Store installs & subscriptions in one report, Google Analytics in another, Backend Report data for financial transactions, etc). We needed to find a way to solve that quickly and efficiently. There were also extra complications because of necessary compliance: Kaia is a healthcare product operating in the United States, and therefore needs to follow much tighter regulation than a 'normal' consumer app. That meant that they could not work with typical managed services (e.g. the Snowplow one), and had special requirements working with providers like Looker.
Objectives
- Understand the acquisition of new customers — this is crucially important as one of the company targets was to increase the % of B2C customers significantly.
- Hire, structure, and train a team to own and build on the data platform we set up.
- The investors from the A Round (raised Q4 2018) were very keen on Kaia starting a data strategy with the end goal of informing and improving marketing spend efficacy.
The Approach
Data tracking & ingestion with Snowplow
Data Visualisation
Deep Insight
We delivered a set of iPython Notebooks with two goals:
- Simple insight delivered straight away (new conversion drivers were identified that the product team were not aware of, leading them to change their onboarding flow accordingly; user segments were defined that allowed product to better understand why some groups of customers behave differently)
- But also to be used as templates for future internal Kaia data science work (as we owned the structure and modelling of all the data, this was a crucial part of the deliverables).
Building the team
The Result
- We built the infrastructure to collect, clean, transform and model client interactions in the mobile app and on the website (Single Source of Truth).
- We built a reporting suite in Looker covering all major business metrics (giving parity to legacy reporting systems first, and then extending from there) and offered curated self-service to product managers.
- We worked with product to build a data strategy where data informs product design; and product is built with data collecting in mind.
- We helped Kaia hire an internal Head of Data, who can take over the strategy side of the project.
- We helped Kaia understand additional data team profiles, following industry best practice.
- We delivered templates for deep insight work: conversion drivers, churn drivers, customer segmentation and applied them to the available data for immediate product direction.
