Chicory Successfully Launches with New Business Intelligence Tool
A few months ago at an All-Hands meeting, I remember our CEO Yuni saying that he’s seen so many of our competitors come and go. Chicory stands today at seven years old, which is no small feat for a startup in NYC. I have to believe that by this point, many startups would have failed.
It doesn’t take a long list of points to understand why Chicory has kept its doors open this long. One thing we do well here is reflect. We’re encouraged to reflect on our practices and processes, how to fortify them and how to streamline them. We take time to brainstorm. We don’t just work hard, we work smart too.
If you aren’t totally familiar with what we do, we work with leading CPG brands and grocery retailers to serve contextual ads in the list-building and grocery shopping moment: recipes. We work closely with our clients to provide custom-tailored campaign tactics with proven success. This means a lot of data. For a few years, we had a Business Intelligence (BI) tool used team-wide to access said data. Every department used it to pull an array of reports, from campaign performance to traffic trends. But during busy times, we’d encounter system overloads and query crashes.
About a year ago, we took a step back: How are we reporting? Is this meeting every department’s needs? What are we missing? If there were no limitations, what would we want? The average time spent by Chicory team members was 10.75 hours per week doing reporting, according to our Product Manager John Abrusci. Needless to say, we started to reconsider this tool. In May 2019, our engineering and product teams took on the huge project of researching, testing and replacing our BI tool with a new one. Two weeks ago, on January 28th, we officially made the complete migration over to our new tool, Apache Superset!!
I sat down with Eric Chamberlain, our Engineering Manager to talk about the transition of our cloud migration and BI tool change. It was a massive, intimidating project that took months of planning and execution. When it came time to “flip the switch,” our engineers buckled down for one of our more significant releases to date. And it went off without a hitch!
Our team worked on this for eight months, but Eric explained exactly how much contributed to the easy cutover. “It comes down to a few things: the collaboration of smart people, including our Product department, who helped us work successfully through pain points, building momentum and carrying it through the completion of the project.”
He explained that with the help of the Product department, the migration was truly a collaboration with every department. “Having Product work with us really helped us understand everyone’s needs,” he elaborated. Because the engineering team built the new product in parallel with our old one, checking in all along the way, it ensured a seamless cutover.
“Because so much work went into the cloud migration project, the cutover was simply flipping a switch and monitoring for issues. So, the actual cutover was realistically anticlimactic,” Eric chuckled at our company-wide meeting, “Friday Wins” that week.
Obviously, a smooth transition and completing such a big project called for celebration! We got lunch catered at the office this past Thursday to commemorate the occasion! This resulted in our biggest Lunch Club to date, with 27 employees (not all pictured) gathering to break bread together.
One thing I couldn’t help but notice was that every single team member made it to this lunch to celebrate our engineering team. No matter how busy, everyone showed up, even if only to pop in for a sincere congratulations and a bite to go, or a thank you and a brownie.
So here’s to the team that made it possible: Joey, John, Ryan, Eli, Asaf and Eric!
