Project Overview
This is an exercise is to showcase my analysis approach and capabilities working in an agile software delivery environment.
Scenario
“The Client’s” marketing team has entered into a contract with a new third-party partner to help manage acquisition campaigns across a number of media channels including social media and digital advertising. A close partnership will see the marketing team utilize the third-party platform to set up various campaigns to target specific audiences.
Problem Statement
“The Client” wishes to optimize spend by channeling budget towards the most effective channels. That is, those which drive most new sign-ups to the “The Client” platform at the best possible cost-per-acquisition. To do this, we require data on campaign lifecycle and spend to be made available for internal analyses. Analytics teams will factor the data into their marketing attribution models.
You are asked to be the Product Owner on the data engineering project to bring in data from the third-party’s source platform into “The Client’s” data lake / warehouse. The goal is to make it available for internal reporting and dashboards.
Exercise
As the PO on the project, please describe how you would plan your analysis approach including:
- How you would you approach executing the project?
- How you would establish who you need to work with?
- How you would go about populating a team’s backlog, and;
- How you would help to drive to a solution?
In the next section, I will showcase how I would approach the project.
How would you approach the project?
For the example, I would prepare the following items in order to communicate the objectives to stakeholders.
1. Understand Business Objectives
First I would want to confirm the business objectives, definition of success.
- What are the business objectives?
- What is the success criteria?
- What is our timeline for the project?
- What are any Assumptions/Constraints?
- Are there any Risks?
- Conduct an initial assessment of tools/tech
- What resources do we need/are available for the project?
2. Discover and Define Data
Next, I would want to understand the data sources, transformations, and target source for the data.
- What are the data sets/sources?
- What are the fields and formats?
- What transformations need to be applied to the data?
- What is the frequency?
- What is the target source?
3. Map Data
Once the items are defined, we’ll need to describe the data and create mappings from the source to target.
- Describe data
- Diagrams for mapping the source fields to the target fields
4. Transform Data
Next we will need to apply any transformation and prepare the data for testing.
- Define and apply transformations (conversions, rules, formulas)
5. Testing
Next we will define a test system and sample data from sources and run the transfers to see how it all works and make adjustments as necessary.
- Define testing system.
- Define sample data used for testing.
- Run transfers.
- Make adjustments as necessary.
6. Deploy
Once we determine the data transformations are working as planned, schedule a migration or integration go-live event.
7. Document
Finalize documentation to help ease ongoing support and new data integrations.
Tools & Execution
Once the items are defined, I would create a board and schedule meetings to ensure the execution of the project to meet the success criteria in the agreed upon timeline.
View Data Project Example board in Trello
