Leading from the Back: Making Data Science Work at a UX-driven Business

MailChimp sends 10 billion email newsletters for over 6 million customers each month (a lot of that goes to Hotmail), and from those sends comes a mountain of clicks, opens, purchases, and other transactional data. But MailChimp’s success as a start-up wasn’t built on data. It was built on a user experience that placed an intuitive and friendly interface on email marketing and removed much of the busy work. So how does a company whose business is not data, use its massive data set? John Foreman, author of the Excel-based data science book Data Smart and Chief Scientist for MailChimp, will discuss what it means to “lead from the back” in data science, even if that sometimes means breaking out a spreadsheet in favor of Hadoop from time to time.

Speaker Details

John W. Foreman is Chief Data Scientist for MailChimp.com, where he leads a data science product development effort called the Email Genome Project. As an analytics consultant, John has created data science solutions for The Coca-Cola Company, Royal Caribbean International, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Dell, the Department of Defense, the IRS, and the FBI. John’s book Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight, is now out from Wiley and is possibly the most legal fun you can have with spreadsheets.

Date:
Speakers:
John Foreman
Affiliation:
MailChimp.com
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