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superhog_personal_notes/log.md
Pablo Martin 0eb20d720d Thingies
2023-12-04 14:20:34 +01:00

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2023-11-26

Tomorrow is my first day. Yay!

My challenge in Superhog is going to come with a lot more freedom and lot more responsibility than the previous positions I've held. The crown is heavy, and so it's both my time to shine and to not fuck up.

One of the habits that I value a lot, have almost never seen successfully applied in companies, and have seen successfully applied to some degree in Mercad~ao (thanks João) is writing things down. A lot. Everywhere. All the time. Organized repositories of text all over the place. Basically, every time you are about to open your mouth to say something, you should instead or also write it down.

I'll start on the eve of my arrival by writing down some thoughts on stuff I need to do.

  • Social wise
    • Make contacts: I need to have a couple of coffees with a lot of people:
      • Andrew and Humphrey
      • Ben Cotte
      • Ben Robinson
      • Nicky
      • Finance?
        • whoever any of the previous points at as a relevant person
  • Business wise
    • Get someone to sell Superhog to me as if was a property owner
    • Experience Superhog like guests do
    • Spend a day with the customer service team
    • Spend a day with whoever sells Superhog to property owners
    • Understand better our business model, revenue and cost structure
    • Get up to date with what are our yearly/long-term goals
  • IT wise
    • VPN/Helpdesk
    • Get someone to guide me through existing solutions
    • Understand what is our productivity stack
      • Teams?
      • Office?
      • Internal docs/wikis?
  • Data-team wise
    • Take control
      • Set an agenda with Humphrey and Andrew so that they see I'm on top of things
      • Clarify first goals
        • Get to know the business
        • Understand our IT situation
        • Understand what is already built, data wise
        • Set first goals
        • Size human needs, IT needs, discuss budget for both
        • Present long-term things that are important-but-not-urgent
  • Personal wise
    • Benefits? Health insurance?
    • Office parking?

Good habits that hopefully can be implemented:

  • Weekly/monthly data team newsletter
  • Data-literacy company training
  • Greenflag culture
  • Office hours
  • Funny data facts/trivias/bets
  • Technical blog

Mistakes from Lola that I want to avoid:

  • Repetitive, stupid ceremonies that everyone dislikes
  • Siloing and this-is-my-corner feelings. E2E ownership of stories
  • Distance with engineering team
  • Lack of involvement of product team
  • Lack of planned training for data staff

Some good inspiration for data team handbooks:

2023-11-27

People I've met today

  • Clay Boldt (Product Manager). Is he a relative to Andrew?
  • Mike Hayward(IT, what does he do? Lol, he's job title is "IT guy")

Things I've learned today:

  • We have six different legal entities
  • We have a customer support team in the Philippines
  • We have some devs in Egypt
  • We are soon opening offices in Australia and US, mainly for commercial purposes
  • There's a civil war on whether to use Teams or Slack for internal comms
  • Wednesday is the strong office day. Monday and Friday people are usually working remote.
  • Our money cows

Meeting with Ben

Products:

  • Risk management with two pillars

    • KYG (reduce risk)
      • With multiple levels of verification
      • Check with black lists
      • Check reality of
    • Damage Waivers/Protection (protect you from unavoidable risk)
      • Several options depending on who pays, how much it protects, etc.
      • If all goes wrong: resolution

  • Dashboard

    • Panel for both Superhog employees and hosts
    • Hosts can manage everything there (minority)
    • Also integrates with PMS (majority)
      • Some PMS have plugins that automatically integrate with Superhub
      • Guesty, Hospitable, Hostaway
      • Modular presence in booking lifecycle
      • Veriff for identity check
      • Payment partner up until now Acquired. Recently started out with Stripe to check if UX improves and less people drop out of the funnel
      • Product is not happy with current dashboard UX. New platform will be called KYG.
      • Triple funnel:
        • Guest experience funnel
        • Host commercial funnel
        • Resolution funnel
      • Wilbur is the name of the admin panel
      • Athena is a screening as a service to allow PMS like Athena

  • Business

    • Waiver is the top product: 52% of revenue
    • Revenue guest fee (user pays for screening) : 5% of revenue
    • SaaS fees (Host pays for screening): 34% of revenue

Ben's opinion on most critical stuff:

  • Improve the invoicing/finance reconciliation so that the Finance team works efficiently.

  • Scrum vs Deadlines. Culture clash? What's Ben Robinson take on it?

Some of the files Ben guided me through:

And that's it for the first day.

2023-11-28

  • Get access to slack

  • Get access to miro

  • Get access to Notion

  • Get access to productboard

  • Get access to Sage HR

  • Get access to Keeper Security

  • Set up profile pic

  • Send a hello email

  • Book time with Ben Robinson

  • Book with HR (Nicky)

  • Book time with Matt (Operations VP)

  • Lourdes, Louise, Clay

  • Elaine (Finance)

  • Leo (Sales)

  • Set up profile and other thingies in Sage HR

  • Learn what employee benefits do we have -> None

  • Get access to Confluence

  • Ask Nicky (and Ben Robinson?) about IT equipment policy

  • Get hold of company themed office templates

  • Time with the rest of the IT crew? -> Gus

  • Get access to Norskken house -> Should have news by 30/11

Meeting with Matt

  • What falls under your domain?

  • What's your story here?

  • What's in your agenda right now? What are you working on?

  • What would you ask of me? Letter to Santa

  • My vision on the data team

    • Help owners of data help themselves
    • Help build those things that go across systems and departments
    • Expect soon: Data Catalog, more discussions to include you in a backlog

  • What systems are your teams relying on the most

  • What data would you say you own

  • Joined in September 2023

  • Before: COO Largest property management company in the UK

  • Manage:

    • RevOps
    • Marketing
    • Sales
      • Account Executives
      • BDR
    • Customer Services
      • Account Management
      • Resolutions
      • Guest services
    • Business Systems
      • Systems across his own teams
      • Learning and Development to deliver onboarding and training for all teams

  • Doesn't look after

    • Tech
    • Product
    • Finance
    • Legal
    • HR

  • Challenges:

    • Lack of data management
    • Too many systems, too many databases
    • Lack of data to get his work done

Who to meet:

  • Alex (Business systems)
  • Lianne (Business systems)
  • Leo
  • Beth (Marketing lead)

img.png

Systems:

  • Hubspot
  • Dashboard? KYG?

Meeting with Nicky

  • Sage HR
    • Holiday requests get managed there
    • Bank holidays
    • Holidays can roll over until March of the next year
    • Birthday off
    • Weekly Timesheet must be filled
  • Additional IT equipment
    • Ask Nicky
  • Benefits?
    • Nothing at the moment
  • Where to check payslips?
    • Comes through email, sent by the company that takes care of payroll
  • Bonus: same yearly cycle for everyone, individual based, how does that work?
    • February/March it gets defined
    • April it gets paid

Meeting with Ben Robinson

  • About the teams

    • Structure of the engineering team
      • Going from one large team to squads
      • Got 1 squad up and running (PMS - Karim)
      • Dashboard squad
      • Ray (APIs)
      • Goal is to have 5 squads with 5 team leads
      • Infra? Each team
    • Main communication channels
    • Who to go to for what
      • Ben or Gus

  • Accesses

    • Azure Devops
    • Git
    • Confluence
    • VPN?
    • User for staging environments for "Dashboard" and "KYG"

  • IT support

    • All through Teams?
    • Difference between quick ticket and regular one?
    • IT equipment requests?
      • Nicky or Kayla
      • Perhaps

  • Productivity tools

    • Slack vs Teams
    • Confluence vs Notion
    • Devops vs Product Board
      • Originally it was only Teams and Devops
      • Shadow IT
    • Hope

  • Architecture overview

    • Explainer
      • Multiple applications, APIs and databases
      • Databases
        • 1 Main SQL database -> Core
        • 3 NoSQL cosmos databases
          • resolutions
          • athena
          • claims
      • Hubspot
        • CRM
        • Email campaigns
        • Discussions on single source of truth against
    • Accounting tool
      • Current tool is Zero
      • Ben is with me, not too many things on that tool
    • PowerBI
      • There are some dashboards with data models
      • There's a few SQL models
      • Mostly owned by Alex Anderson
    • Documentation
      • Ben sends my way
    • VPN? Will you give me keys for cloud account? Infrastructure? Who can I reach out to for infra requests?
      • All azure
      • Ben and Gus are taking care of infra across all squads
      • Devops on the head hunting list
    • Your opinion: technical debt
    • Current engineering culture
    • Your point of view
    • Ways of working
      • scrum, 2 weeks

  • Accesses

    • Devops
    • Confluence
    • DMZ
    • PowerBI

  • Docs

  • Set up some time with Ben and Gus

2023-11-29

  • Get access to Azure Devops

Meeting with Elaine

  • Who's who
    • Who to contact when in need
  • Main processes
  • Which systems
  • The terrible invoicing processes

Everything is manual Data is terrible Invoicing

Invoicing

  • 1st day of the month excel reports from Ben

  • PMS are charged for their services

    • listing fee and booking fee, Ben pulls it from Dashboard
    • pricing structure isn't great: structure in the dashboard doesn't work well for billing and accounting
    • Then calculate waivers
    • credit note
    • Pay the hosts
    • Can't trust dashboard or powerbi, need to reconcicle with financial statements
    • Lots of manual payments through Stripe because payments fail
    • Several VATs, depends on customer country
    • Several currencies

  • Jamie Dison

  • Rely on master spreadsheets

  • Pull data from

    • PowerBI
    • Zero

  • Dashboard

  • Data is not correct

  • Lack of currency conversion

  • Also pulls data from Hubspot

  • Why does PowerBI not match financial reports?

Accounting alternatives:

  • Oracle Netsuite
  • Sage Intact
  • Iplicit

Actions

  • Book some time after new years eve to go through the accounting process
  • Go through Ben Cotte's documentation
  • Say hi to Jamie
  • Request any other docs that I should check
  • Put it on my list to judge iplicit as an accounting solution with my data lenses on

Meeting with Andrew

  • General direction. 2024 company goals. What's the philosophy? Growth? Quality?
    • 3 main goal lines
      • Make current operations work properly now that we have resources (backfill). Andrew's opinion is they were understaffed for long and that explains why things are not working out smoothly.
      • Grow
        • Through direct selling (business as usual)
        • Integration with PMSs to white-label the solution and turn them into sales funnels
      • Crazy R&D ideas, mostly around Guest-centric services
  • How do you envision my team, who do I report to?
    • Data is not a squad, it's cross functions
    • Serves both Ben C and Matt, but with different styles
    • We rely a lot on engineering and Ben R, so we need to tag along nicely and they need to keep us in mind.

Elaine leaves mid february. Amanda joining and taking care of the financial processes and bookkeeping until a finance director joins in.

End of march is end of financial year. Next year books will be on Iplicity.

Actions

  • Andrew is very concerned about the invoicing process and the choice of accounting tool and now I understand why. If any of those two, are not worked out properly, they will lead to a very nasty situation. I need to judge my role in those fast and get evereyone aligned.

Stuff we couldn't go through, let's discuss next meeting:

  • Is the P&L somehow decentralized?
  • How do you and Humphrey split responsibilities?
  • Things I've liked so far
    • Good attitudes, good spirit
    • Product is clear
    • Lots of room for improvement
    • If the product is making money with the current simplicity, we can surely do better
    • Engineering culture seems great
    • Data is in a bad shape, I don't have data
  • Things that concern me
    • "Quick", "all out" attitude. Are we gonna spend too much time in the red part of the rev
      • Threat 1: Scaling
      • Threat 2: Add complexities through new products
    • Systems are growing uncontrolled, this will bite us in the ass soon and will hurt people's work
    • The huge proportion of new joiners is going to be a cultural challenge
    • Data is in a bad shape, I don't have data
  • What do you think about my plan?
    • Couple of weeks listening in
    • Ceremony to kickstart the team
      • Team proposal
      • Backlog
      • Building out our infrastructure as well as working on hot things. Balance between immediate stuff and building for the future
  • Is there something that concerns you? Anything you are scared of? Any issue that keeps you up at night?
  • I'll be eager to grab a lunch or to hear more about both you and Humphrey. I care about the plans at the top, it's one of the main reasons I'm here and not at a big corp

Meeting with Clay

Onboarding and PMSs

  • Every host gets manual onboarding. This is a pain point
  • Goals:
    • Hopefully we get it fully automated. 100%.
  • Clay fully takes care of PMS integrations. The most relevant bit of this happens to be managing onboardings, since there isn't much trouble once the integration is done for each PMC.

Around 27 integrations currently Most importants: Guesty, Rentals United, Hostfully, Lodgify, Hostaway PMCs

Tradeoff between building on PMS that have a lot of clients, and PMSs that have a lot of clients with Superhog

Functions of a PMS:

  • Shared calendar for listings across all channels
  • Integrated revenue
  • Integrated communications between customer service and clients

Payment step: screening, waiver, damage protection plan

ALL BOOKINGS GET A SCREENING, NO MATTER WHAT SERVICES THE PMC HAS HIRED WITH US

Who's your tech lead? Kareem, Egypt team. Good vibes. How do you feel about your engineering team? All good, no complaints.

Documentation or videos? Would be good for you https://www.notion.so/knowyourguest-superhog/Onboarding-Simple-Step-By-Step-4c128d32313e4d22aceb6bceedfdde20

2023-11-30

  • How to book rooms?
  • Get access to staging environment for backoffice app
  • Receive access to hubspot from Alex A.
  • Get access to these maps img.png
  • Book some time with Alex Anderson (Business Systems)
  • Book some time with Lianne Foster (Business Systems)

Meeting with Alex Anderson

  • Overview of your scope

    • He comes from marketing, is now in operations
    • Goal
      • Make processes as efficient and replicable as possible. Get things to scale
      • Sits a lot on product talk
      • Revops
        • Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Account Management

  • Alex vs Lianne

    • On the same level, they split on departments
    • Alex more on tech and systems, Lianne more on business teams

  • Current systems and processes being used

    • Could you get me access to check them out?

  • Reports/Spreadsheets/PBIs/?

    • In-hubspot dashboards
    • Exports into CSV and doing some wizardry and upload in PowerBI

  • Current pain points

    • No disaster incoming
    • Resolutions is extremely in the dark

  • Can you somehow give me access to Hubspot? No touchy touchy

  • Where do you organize documentations

    • Notion for the most part
    • Work in progress

Meeting with Lou Dowds

  • What is your kingdom?
    • Right now: Dashboard Squad, Guest Journey (will have a dedicated PM soon)
    • Everyone in Superhog is using the admin panel for different purposes
    • Also KYG-lite, which will eventually also lead to KYG-pro, but it still doesn't exist
  • Tell me about the business processes underlying your products
  • How does success look like for your products?
    • Confusing conversation
  • What systems are currently part of that?
    • she reads only hubspot reports, like NPS
    • Mostly dashboard
    • Mix Panel
  • What data are you using currently?
  • What metrics do you have currently vs what metrics would you like to have?
  • Is there anything you would hope from me/data team?
    • Have operational data in PowerBI to better understand product
  • Any fires we need to put out
    • Finance Invoicing
    • Manual payment re-tries through hubspot

Documentation:

  • Product Map
  • Mix Panel

% of resolutions over bookings? No clue

Things shared by Lou after the meeting:

Meeting with Ben C.

  • A few notes on what I've seen so far (see list in Andrew meeting notes)
  • My first impressions on what we should build
    • There is a need for:
      • Business as usual operational metrics
      • Analytical capabilities in exploratory endeavors within product
      • Business overview / Top management reporting
    • But, what should get priority?
  • My opinion on the invoicing nightmare
    • I'm worried about only having two cycles to play around + Elaine leaving. I dislike this being the first thing to jump to, but I think it will have to be so
    • I'm afraid untangling this doesn't look like only a data issue and it's going to be complex dancing altogether
      • Ben thinks there is indeed a high level of complexity, which is natural due to the way the bookings and money flows work and due to resolution process
      • The issues with payment problems and manual retries are also part of the issue. The current dual payment providers situation is part of the problem.
    • Ben has a very good acceptance of the fact that product changes in dashboard might be required to get this in good shape.
  • I see a general pattern of shadow IT and short-comings in Dashboard being tackled with system+organization patches everywhere. This will bite us back eventually (is kind of already)

My vision on first deliverables:

  • Plan on how to organize data team

  • A proposal on growing the team, people wise

  • Data Catalog and Systems map

  • A backlog with first projects

  • Receive from Ben videos on

  • Product weekly

  • Miercoles catchup de producto

  • Tech dailies

2023-12-01

Meeting with Ben R. and Ben C.

  • I propose

    • Notion for Data team homepage (not for heavy, internal technical docs)
    • New project in devops, one board, as many repos as needed in there

  • We go for space Notion

  • We go for space Confluence

I include myself in Superhog devops

  • try to follow naming convention for repos
  • I can create repos and boards freely within the project

Emergency PBI release call with Ben R. and Lawrence

  • Loads of tables
  • Views specific for reporting
    • Good idea with decoupling
    • Denormalized
    • Direct transactional server queries. Load doesn't seem to be a problem for now.
    • Not overwhelming

Server and database are parametrized in the workspaces and automatically picked up.

Are there any instructions to set up a local environment for the Superhog SQL database?

  • Documentation on how to change and release PBI changes
  • Documentation on the reporting views
  • Documentation on setting up local environment of superhog SQL db

Meeting with Lourdes

  • What is your kingdom
    • Resolutions
      • Different for waiver and DPP
    • Scope begins when the host raises an issue
  • Teams and processes under your products
    • Resolution Center on Dashboard, visibile by hosts. But big PMCs that come through integrations use emails or forms. So no that useful.
    • Airtable used as backend to handle this, but everything is very manual
    • Planning on managing processes through Hubspot.
    • Elise is the manager, Chloe will step in when Elise leaves for maternity. About ~6 people in total.
  • Systems and data
    • Completely in the dark regarding metrics and analysing their processes.
    • Current tools:
      • Spreadsheets in Airtable
      • Forms
      • Dashboard Resolution Center
    • There is some PBI report hidden somewhere, feed with manual data.
  • Tech team
    • Adam
    • Tetiana
    • More people on the way
  • Santa Claus
  • Any fires?
    • Duct tape, but things are working.

She has BI background.

  • PBI
  • Analyst profile
  • SQL

She led Analytics Products in Aircall.

Keep me in the loop. Collaboration for Data Sources and Data Catalog. PBI report. Can I access Airtable?

2023-12-04

  • Start a Data Board in devops and stop using this for non-personal tasks
  • Start the Data space in Confluence

Meeting with Lianne

  • What is your kingdom

  • People, processes, systems, data

  • Any terrible painpoints atm?

  • How do you split responsibilities with Alex?

  • Lead customer service (Philippines)

  • Also did some Account Management

  • Matt poached her for Business Systems

  • "I love documenting things"

  • "Alex is more the leader"

  • Customer Service (Guest) + Account Management (Hosts) + Sales + Resolutions (eventually)

  • Working on chatbot for screening process

Now

Onboarding and Data Kickstart

  • Are there any shared folders in Keeper Security where I should be added?

  • Get access to staging environment for KYG platform

  • Accounting migration

    • Check iplicit content shared by Andrew
    • Check iplicit docs, potentially ask for more
    • Write up my small requirements

  • Read any docs shared by Alex A.

  • Get a locker

  • Get a lock for my locker 760

  • Prepare quiz for 15th Dec. Theme must be sent before December 8th

  • Sit down with an account manager to go through the Onboarding process

  • Get my hands on some docs on the resolution process

  • Luisa Legal (has contact with Trust Keys) to get data map

  • Big official "This is what we will do" Data meeting in 14th December

  • Get access to the Data Meeting excel from Ben Cotte

  • Review the data exploration efforts made by Cotte

Meeting with Leo

  • Your story
  • What is your kingdom
  • People, processes, systems, data
  • Santa Claus letter and any fires to put out?

Meeting with Ben R. and Gus

  • Hi Gus
  • Infra
  • Docs
    • Is the Development Space pretty much the only relevant corner in Confluence, or did I miss something?
    • Are there any more docs than the access details in Confluence?
    • Data models anywhere?
    • Any docs on the reporting layer in the core database?
    • Any docs on Dashboard architecture?
    • Any documentation on the PowerBI reports?
  • Invoicing nightmare
  • Current integration between power BI and databases
  • My view on PowerBI for 2024

14th Presentation

  • Diagnostics
    • General vibe
    • Operations issues
    • Product issues
    • Good tech culture
    • Lack of data infra
  • Plans
    • Hire
    • Take control of current things
      • Build Data Catalogue and culture around it
      • Take ownership of existing reports where possible/makes sense
      • Help out with the invoicing crisis
    • Start building
      • Top management report
      • Operational metrics (where possible)
      • Infrastructure to grow (DWH, integrations, adhoc analysis)
    • Rough estimates
    • Looking a bit further
      • Philosophy
      • Cool things in the future
      • Pitfalls

My proposal on first fronts, domain wise:

  • Product: dedicated analyst to dance together with the team running adhoc analysis on new product ideas

  • Stable reporting for operational teams and processes with the goal of helping Matt, Leo and their managers:

    • Sales
    • Account Management
    • CS Interactions
    • Resolutions

  • Finance

    • Solve invoicing nightmare, at least partially

  • Business Management

    • High level operational and financial measures. Revenue, user acquisition/churn/activation, # of bookings processed,

  • Pitfalls to avoid

    • Data as a shadow IT
    • Unrealistic prioritization. Not all questions deserve to be answered
    • Overly strict centralization in Data team: if someone owns the data, has the data, and knows what to do with the data, the Data team is there to review but doesn't need to act
    • Spaguetti architecture

My proposal on first fronts, deliverables wise:

  • Data catalog with the most important databases, ownership, docs, etc.
  • Take control of existing reporting

My proposal on first fronts, team wise:

  • Get another data engineer and two data analysts in place. Senior people that know what they are doing, not the right place and time to develop junior guys

dbt course

  • Just continue where I left.