Katharine Rovinsky

Working with Postclick, a startup focused on digital conversion and optimizing landing pages, I developed metric definitions, data pipelines, data models, and a Looker dashboard that allowed marketing leadership to report on the complete B2B leads funnel from the campaign touchpoint to closed opportunity. This dashboard served not only to help optimize marketing strategy but also to demonstrate to board members the value of investments in marketing.

I began the process by understanding the leadership team's vision and gathering definitions and dashboard requirements. I advised on data flows, pushing existing lead tagging from the marketing CRM tool to the sales CRM and ultimately to a central database, where I built a data model for the dashboard. After further refinement and stakeholder discussions, I created flexible code to accommodate new lead tagging fields planned for upcoming quarters.

At Dell Technologies, I worked as a customer database analyst, and writing SQL queries was a part of my daily work. My colleagues and I would regularly share code and queries and refresh specific core tables. I took it on as a project to design and develop user-facing datasets to be deployed in Tableau for the marketing and sales department. Using SQL, I built out two core reporting datasets, one at a customer transaction level and another at a population/customer cohort level. These two datasets alone solved over 90% of the business questions and reporting needed for customer behavior, allowing myself and other analysts to use the bulk of our time discussing the implications of findings with stakeholders and working on more complex projects rather than writing queries. The longer-term impacts of these datasets could be seen in hiring trends for the team, where there was a potential to hire from a broader range of candidates and industries since heavy SQL skills were no longer necessary.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, marketing and sales leadership at Dell Technologies had questions about the likely impacts to client industries and product preferences across global markets. As a CRM analytics lead, I coordinated the delivery of a global analysis project while fully producing the insights for the European region. The project findings gave country-level guidance on industry vertical focus, consumer demand, shifting product focus, and learnings from previous market events, such as the recession in 2008.

This project leveraged both customer database and third-party market insights. The most challenging aspect was pulling together insights from many regional analysts in a timely way so that recommendations could inform some significant strategic decisions. Ultimately, the recommendations did reflect in the strategy set by marketing and sales leadership, contributing to successful pivots in resources and focus.

Working with Estee Lauder, I partnered with another Toptal Developer to migrate existing web reports for Sales and Marketing, built with Java, into Looker, a more standardized web platform. This involved building out data structures and reporting logic in LookML code (SQL-based) to replicate reports, designing and incorporating feedback on report look and feel, and advising on back-end set up and code review processes.

The report migration allowed for cost savings, with the maintenance of the custom-built versions sunsetted and the opportunity for more responsive development of new reports, features, and edits through the implementation of Looker and LookML data models.