Data-driven decisions are the irrefutable holy grail for any company, especially one like Eventbrite, whose mission is to connect the world through live experiences.

I joined the Briteland to lead the Data Org, merging data-platform engineering, analytics engineering, product analytics, strategic insights and data science under one umbrella with a North Star of leveraging our scale and driving actionable insights from data.

When I first met fellow Britelings earlier this year, what immediately won me over was their infectious enthusiasm about the company’s mission, potential for impact — and, importantly, that data is a critical strategic asset to realizing Eventbrite’s vision.

Challenges and Opportunities

The Data Nerd in me couldn’t wait to uncover insights from this rich trove of data: social dynamics and the evolution of live experiences during and post the pandemic, regional microtrends, correlation to vaccinations rates, and so much more. 

However, to first get grounded in reality, I’ve had to play a couple of different roles. As a Data Lobbyist, I’ve been encouraging everyone, from our leaders to our engineers, to seek out data to guide their decisions. As a Data Therapist, I listen and learn from Britelings across all functions about the obstacles they encounter in gaining insights from data. Britelings’ current pain points broadly fall into three buckets: people, process, and technology.

People

Britelings are not aware of what data exists where, and how to start self-serving, especially when they may not have access to get started. As a result, “quick answers” aren’t quick enough, and thorough answers are even more time-consuming, especially when an analyst needs to spare cycles on techniques, tooling, or data semantics.

In addition, development teams are currently dependent on the data engineering team to aggregate and provide data for use in products. This does not align with our technical vision to have each development team own their solution end-to-end, including design, code, quality, deployment, monitoring, data, and infrastructure.

Focus areas: build data culture, remove knowledge silos

Process

There are multiple sources of truth (internal systems, data marts, etc.) that do not always reconcile. There are also several holes between data consumers and data producers in which context gets lost, and there’s a lack of standardized processes to define and update metrics.

Added to this, various manual processes are used for business-critical reporting due to legacy pipelines, data gaps, and incomplete context, causing transformation logic to be siloed with key employees rather than codified systematically with disciplined documentation.

Quick wins: align stakeholders, build end-to-end runbooks, alert proactively

Technology

Dated data infrastructure and stale models have been challenging to maintain and use. With insufficient isolation between production, development, and testing, some production pipelines have emerged as bottlenecks hindering quick iteration.

In addition, in the absence of consistent tooling and guidelines for getting data instrumented in products and integrated into existing pipelines, there are gaps in data coverage and quality that need to be addressed.

Slow down to speed up: modernize infrastructure, implement SDLC for data

These challenges are certainly not unique to Eventbrite; it’s an operational reality for businesses in the modern world. As a Data Leader, it’s heartening to know that Britelings are eager to lift barriers and invest in opportunities that deliver tangible value to our customers!

Goals

With a better understanding of where the gaps are across people, process, and technology, we set the following five goals:

1. Provide a single source of truth with high-quality data for operational and financial reporting needs.  
2. Provide tooling, training, and automation for Britelings to make informed decisions autonomously. 
3. Provide reliable, resilient, scalable, and cost-effective data infrastructure.
4. Make data more actionable to internal stakeholders, enabling a 360-degree perspective for strategic decisions.
5. Make data actionable, insightful, and valuable to customers in-product — help creators grow their audience, help attendees find relevant events, and make the product more self-service. 

Tenets

To achieve these goals, we converged on tenets that would guide our execution, especially when confronted with tradeoffs.

• Democratization over gatekeeping: We favor making data accessible to people (Britelings and Customers) and easier to create/collect more broadly to maximize creativity and value from data — but only within the boundaries of maintaining security and compliance.
• Self-service over full-service: We will provide tools and consultation for people to better self-serve on data and not rely solely on a centralized team for insights.
• Agility over uniformity: We believe in not blocking teams from their deliverables if they have a “good enough” option to run with sooner, and iteratively improve based on feedback. We will aim for developer autonomy.
• Connect and enrich over clone and customize: We prefer to create and enrich modular datasets with additional context, annotations, information for consistent interpretation and use instead of making multiple copies that may eventually diverge and cause inaccuracies or confusion.
• Comprehensive accuracy over partial freshness: We will prioritize having correct and complete information as of a (recent) point in time over up-to-date information that has not been vetted or reconciled, unless there is a use-case that demands otherwise.

Vision

With goals and ground rules established, we realize that the data team’s mission is to enable Creators, Attendees, and Britelings to self-serve on high-quality data at scale to derive actionable insights that drive business impact. 

It is our vision that: 

• Creators obtain actionable insights to build their audience, increase ticket purchases, manage their events, and build loyalty amongst their attendees.
• Attendees find interesting and relevant events from creators they trust. 
• Britelings have accurate, timely, and actionable insights for operating the business, building better products, and delighting our creators and attendees.

In upcoming posts, we will talk about the Data Strategy and our plans to deliver on this vision.