How This VP of Data Science Balances Short-Term Urgencies with Long-Term Vision

Sure, um, there, you know, that's a, a trade-off that often occurs in my current line of work. There's, there's always the, the urgent, um, questions that arise, um, but I, I also have to trade that off with kind of what I refer to as the longer term big rocks that we're accruing towards. And so, you know, whenever we take on these shorter term asks, um, that's pulling capacity from our Our longer term plans that we had, um, so that's, yeah, that's a, a frequent. Um, scenario that arises.

Sure, um, one of the areas that we analyze, uh, that we engage on is our customer support experience and so. Uh, for example, at the moment, we're going through our planning for the coming fiscal year and so there's an ass that came in to, to leverage, um, the, the models and analysis that we've, um, we've compiled to help provide estimates for the coming funding, um, funding year and so. Um, I'm, you know, that, that takes away capacity from our, our longer lead deliverables in this space, so I, the way I've approached that is, you know, trying to find a way to, to both achieve the current, um, the current ask but actually develop it in a way that still, um, is heading towards the direction of our, our longer term objectives.

Yeah, so we've developed a, um, a model to help prioritize our support tickets that are in the customer support team's queue, and it's, you know, we've leveraged it in a few parts of the business, um, for example, for our, our small and medium business customers, um, as well as our field customers, and one of the parts of the business we're extending it to is our, our partner space as well as, um, additional cloud products beyond Azure and so. That broader adoption, um, that, that broader scale that we've been working towards, we had to put on, on hold, you know, for a few weeks in order to tackle this narrow term task.

Yeah, there I'm leveraging the. Some of the product development techniques around considering the, you know, the press release, um, that we're ultimately going to be able to tell from one project opportunity versus another and. Um, there, the business impact is a key, um, driving factor in our line of work because, you know, that, and, you know, I suppose more broadly as well, but, you know, at the end of the day we wanna be able to describe what is the business impact that we had from each project, um, and so being able to reflect on, you know, at the, at the results of each of these, what are we going to be able to, to accomplish, declare, um, ends up being a guiding factor. And apologies. Thanks for clarifying that earlier question around that. So I can, I can give an example of that if you'd like as well. Well, I,

Great. Um, so, Yeah, for this, um, so I'll continue on in the support space we're describing here and so, uh, one of the, the business impacts, um, is that we've been able to reduce the number of dissatisfied cases by 90%. Um, and so that would be an example of an overall business impact that we can state which, you know, helped also drive our, our overall customer satisfaction numbers, um, which wasn't able to share for confidentiality, but, um,

Yes,

Yeah, so they have a rating scale from 1 to 5, um, so I'm considering anything, um, 3 and below as a set.

Um, um, through surveys from there, um, yeah, from there, after their support case completes, then they get a survey to, to rate their satisfaction. And so an example of like a, a trade-off there would be, you know, another. Projects that would come in would be um You know, uh, perhaps a curiosity question, um, You know Let's see, um, You know, what was the The variability of the satisfaction this month versus last, and then, you know, then I would kind of probe on, OK, well, what are we gonna do as a result of that information, um, what's the action that's going to drive a decision that would occur. Um, versus this other project where, you know, we're able to develop a model to predict those dissatisfied cases, um, prioritize the cues, and then drive that end result where we could actually eliminate the dissatisfaction by prioritizing them more quickly.

Um, Let's see. Um, to be honest, I'm I'm more of the decision owner in that case, so it's not something that I actually do approve in

way,

Yeah, to be honest, I actually get the feedback a little bit more in a general way as opposed to in the moment. In the moment, it always feels like, you know, the there's a hot request from the stakeholder, and so I think people have a natural disposition of wanting to help, but then we kind of reflect on the longer term and that becomes a can become a frustration, right, if folks feel like they're always getting randomized and not being able to achieve the longer term objectives. That's why I try to Um, you know, it's more of an internal. Decision that I need to make in those moments to see, you know, given the long-term objectives we have on striking our larger goals, how do we, um, stay on point? There is this trade-off, um, worthwhile in this case, um, because, you know, it's, it's not something that we would always say yes to. OK.