superhog_personal_notes/log.md

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:

• https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-technology/data-team/

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:

• Global KPIs : https://guardhog-my.sharepoint.com/❌/g/personal/ben_cotte_superhog_com/EU9p7oaSBGRFoYGlJkfsMqwBt6sCRfF-jd0_3zkUYJxV2Q?e=k7ad02
• Data used in Sales and Account management : https://guardhog.sharepoint.com/❌/s/Guardhoggroup/EZXCzc8ftM5JrOm43UpCh5QBrB05Rrq6MDJ7-j-B8pjHJQ?e=4o4JnG
• Data used in Finance : https://guardhog-my.sharepoint.com/❌/g/personal/ben_cotte_superhog_com/ERZWA02zJlxAi8akJmzVz40BQ3sjwARt1EYUnP6Y4-sbZg?e=maj0dU
• Data used in Product : https://guardhog-my.sharepoint.com/❌/g/personal/ben_cotte_superhog_com/Ed1Wt4-T-9FIodoJEkmYUzMB3VzalxzPTsiYcrQOm1ik1g?e=qZhW9Z
• Invoicing Process : https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMirYfDg=/

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)

Now

Onboarding and Data Kickstart

• Get access to Confluence

• Get access to Azure Devops

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

• Get access to staging environment for backoffice app

• Get access to staging environment for KYG platform

• Set up profile and other thingies in Sage HR

• Learn what employee benefits do we have

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

• Equipment

  • Second screen
  • Keyboard
  • USB-C hub with several USB A + HDMI
  • Second RAM card -> https://www.neobyte.es/memoria-crucial-16gb-ddr4-sodimm-3200-ct16g4sfra3a-8487.html, https://www.pccomponentes.com/corsair-vengeance-so-dimm-ddr4-3200mhz-pc4-25600-32gb-2x16gb-cl22

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

• How to book rooms?

• Get a locker

• Get access to these maps

• Time with the rest of the IT crew?

• Book some time with Alex Anderson (Business Systems)

• Book some time with Lianne Foster (Business Systems)

• Luisa Legal (has contact with Trust Keys)

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

• Get access to the Data Meeting excel from Ben Cotte

• Review the data exploration efforts made by Cotte

• Get access to Data Map from Trust Keith

• Start writing up the Data space in Notion/Confluence?

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)

Systems:

• Hubspot
• Dashboard? KYG?

Meeting with Nicky

• Sage HR
  • Holiday requests get managed there
  • Bank holidays
  • Holidays can roll over until March
  • Birthday off
  • Weekly Timesheet
• Equipment
  • Through 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
  • Main communication channels
  • Who to go to for what
• Architecture overview
  • Explainer
  • Focus on databases
  • Documentation
  • VPN? Will you give me keys for cloud account?
  • Who can I reach out to for infra requests?
  • Your opinon: technical debt
  • Current engineering culture
• Accesses
  • Azure Devops
  • 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?
• Productivity tools
  • Slack vs Teams
  • Confluence vs Notion
  • Devops vs Product Board

dbt course

• I have to continue with getting the CSVs into the postgres. The CSV are sitting in my home folder in Ubuntu.

Data Page

• Landing
  • What's this team
  • Who is in it
  • What we do and what we don't
  • How to get in touch
• Data Index
  • What exists, who owns it, where to learn more