Building a Product-Analytics Team (at a startup)

How do you walk in to a mid-sized startup and start building a Product-Analytics team? What is the role of the Analytics team and how close is the team to filling that need? Which gaps (tools, resources, expectations, support) take priority? How do you build a roadmap and get partner/leadership/team buy-in? How do you recruit people to join your team and what skills do you look for? Which processes are important for establishing the right guardrails for delivering fast without slowing the team down? How do you deliver quickly, celebrate wins, and push your team to success?
 

Pubudu Wariyapola is an analytics leader with over 15 years of software, product, and analytics experience. He has a highly technical education background with degrees in Physics (F&M) and Ocean Engineering (MIT) complemented with an entrepreneur-focused MBA (UCLA). He spent the early part of his career as a software engineer/architect at the Allstate Insurance Company, followed by roles in product management sandwiching his MBA degree. Pubudu moved to the Analytics field in 2009 and worked primarily in the B2C space (ProFlowers, One Kings Lane, Amazon) until taking on his current challenge building a Product Analytics team for Fivestars.