After leaving QS, I wanted to take a step back in terms of responsibility and instead focus more on developing my analytical skills and expertise, as most (though not all) of my previous experience involved managing data scientists and analysts, rather than getting stuck in myself.

At Invent, I spent most of my time writing and testing long and complex (though not necessarily complicated) SQL scripts and writing Excel/VBA tools for a Big 4 UK retail bank. Figuring out elegant solutions to complex problems was fun. Testing, reviewing, and fixing less-than-elegant solutions (which often were necessary) was, well, less fun, but also rewarding, in its own way.

My last 4 months at Invent (which overlapped with the covid-19 lockdown) were probably the most interesting and rewarding. I was basically the ‘data guy’ on an exciting multi-disciplinary/cross-functional team building a new customer loyalty scheme for a global retailer. I was working closely with my manager to rapidly test the assumptions in the original business case, mesh my quantitative insights with qualitative research, and present our findings in weekly sessions with the global leadership and regional market teams. Aside from the insights work, we also worked together to model the global rollout’s financial case under different scenarios.

I was QuantSpark’s first employee and in my two years at the firm I helped grow the business to a team of 25+.

I started off as an analyst, but quickly had to learn how to wear many other hats and take up a lot more responsibility, from ordering kit for our first office and setting up our recruitment process, to managing key projects and presenting our cutting-edge work to client CEOs.

I wasn’t a data scientist or developer, like the rest of the team, but I wasn’t a pure-play project manager either. Sometime halfway through, the CEO and I realised that there was a title for the (non-ops) assortment of work I was doing: Product Manager.

I was the PM for 3 products we shipped: A location intelligence POC, a churn prediction model, and the flagship product, a retail analytics platform for a Big 4 UK grocery retailer.

I also helped or led delivery of non-product deliverables that were more on the conventional side of consulting, like recommendations for optimising call centre operations for an insurer owned by a PE firm, and lots of ad hoc projects with the same Big 4 retailer that we built the flagship product for.