Riverboat Consulting partnered with a Series C consumer subscription startup. This company experienced turnover on its data team and hired a new data analyst to maintain a data platform reflective of a much larger team. This new analyst was quite strong on the commercial side but hadn’t worked with the startup’s data stack of Snowflake, dbt, and Looker.
If you already know SQL, learning dbt (an open-source library that helps you transform data with SQL) should feel natural. However, it can still be very intimidating going into a new environment as a team of one where the stakeholders are already reliant on dbt model outputs your predecessors developed and maintained.
Our goal for this project was to help the new hire ramp up to be able to manage the company’s data platform fully on their own.
What We Did
The first thing we did was help the new hire set up their development environment. This included walking them through package installations, configuring their virtual environment, cloning the project repository, and confirming that dbt was setup and able to connect to Snowflake.
The second thing we did was enhance the documentation the previous team left behind. Like with a lot of fast-moving startups, the documentation existed but wasn’t steadily maintained. We examined the dbt project and key Looker dashboards to identify the most crucial areas and caveats the new hire should understand, then tried our best to fill in the gaps.
Finally, we were on call for the client. When a new bug arose and the new hire needed to troubleshoot, we would huddle or investigate independently. This balanced resolving issues as quick as possible for the business while the new hire still gained familiarity with the system.
Outcomes
The goal of a project like this is to no longer be needed. After a few months, the new hire settled into a groove and felt confident in their ability to manage the data platform more independently.
Having worked as a team lead and mentor to more junior team members before, we always enjoy the opportunity to help develop talent into senior- and staff-level contributors for their companies. Think we can help? Get in touch.