Yeah. So I actually, at the very beginning, I started in market research rather than in analytics. Um and that's because in 1993 when I started working, uh, analytics was not really a thing yet in marketing, But but research WAAS. So I actually started as a student surveying other students about features that the university was going to have that led to working at Procter and Gamble, working on some food products and on oral care. And I eventually worked on the launch of Crest White strips and a lot of the approaches we use. There are the same kinds of approaches that people use now for user experience work. So asking people how they want to interact with a product or an interface. So that led to some startup work and technology work. And so, over my career, I've been, ah, marketer, consultant Ah, leader of software developers on that's led me thio place in analytics where effectively, I listen to what clients are trying to do, help them solve problems using data and math and software, and then help our software teams develop features and interfaces for the software that help clients do that. So at MPD. We work with primarily in what we think of general merchandise as opposed to consumer package goods. So think of things like computer cell phones, handbags, but where we also do some work in food service vacuums, coffee makers, stuff like that.

sure. So my responsibilities are primarily organized around supporting clients and our teams that support clients. Eso The first thing is trying to make sure that we have the right products to solve their problems. So our team recently launched a improved version of pricing and promotions simulation. So, uh, let's say laptop manufacturer could look at how did their promotions perform last year at holiday and then simulate Well, what if they have done more promotions or fewer promotions or deeper discounts things like that and see what the alternative results would be so that they can change their promotion plan going into this holiday? And I also engaged with clients who are trying to figure out how to integrate third party analytics like we do it NPD into their internal analytics and integrate our data with their data. Uh, s, oh, my priorities air really around revenue growth, profit growth and client satisfaction. I also take care thio to make sure that our team is satisfied and my typical week is really organized around, um, plant meetings, internal meetings, budget planning, like agile scrum meetings for our software processes on. I probably work realistically between 45 55 hours a week, currently all from home because of the pandemic. But before that it was a mix of in the office and traveling.

Yeah. So the major challenges one good example. Well, so it's always challenging Thio. Understand what clients will want in the future, right? So you have to listen to clients and understand what they think they want right now. But if you really want to be a strong partner to your client, you have to be able to listen to everything they're saying and integrate that with economic trends, industry trends, trends and software and user experience. And think, Well, if I'm working on a piece of software that might take six months or nine months to develop what our clients gonna wanted 6 to 9 months. So a lot of that you can learn hypothesis, development and problem structuring approaches. Really good book called The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto sort of goes into a framework that's based on a rubric. S C. Q. A. Situation complications, central question and answer. It's a great consulting framework and problem solving framework. Uh, you know, we do a lot of client discovery where we'll watch people try to use our software on, Then ask them questions about what they were trying to do. We'll do, um, process mapping where we instead of thinking about how promotion planner or someone who sets pricing for products. So they're just thinking about how they use our software will think about like, Well, what's the day in the life for their job? So we try Thio, you know, even though we're effectively a business to business organization, we treat the individual people in the businesses as consumers of our of our product. They have their own needs. They have their own motivators on. By understanding those deeply and across, you know, a reasonable number of people, we can often come up with things that they that they want or that they need, that they kind of know they need, or they for sure recognize it when they see it, but they might not be able to ask for it directly. So that's that's the big thing is to be able to anticipate the needs, uh, that that clients might have. So, for example, in our pricing simulator, you know, clients would say, Well, I want to be able to simulate the impact of, ah, 10% price promotion, But if you if you talk to nothing, then you'll realize that actually what they want is to be able to simulate the combination of sometimes being on promotion and sometimes being off promotion like they need a calendar. And so we realized before anyone was asking for it, we were able to see talking to people who planned promotions that our clients, that the logical consequence of a simulator is we want to be able to simulate whole plans, multiple events, multiple brands over time and then eventually what they're gonna want is constrained optimization. So they want to be able to say, Okay, my budget for promotions is X uh, you know, I won't get a retailer to pass on a promotion unless it's at least why. So what's the best combination of depth of discount? A number of weeks and which weeks they will give me the highest profit or the highest return on that promotion budget. So, like our software team, even before they release the calendar, they're already working on constrained organization because we know from experience and from just patterns across lots of projects that eventually that's what they're going to want. So we start developing it even before they ask for it.