I'm vice president of Analytics at Overstock.Com, been at Overstock.Com for about 10 years. I graduated from the University of Utah in finance and management back in 2001. Then shortly after I worked for Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City for a couple of years and then I worked for a medication consulting company, Charles River Associates for two more years in California. At that point in time, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go back to a business school or law school, but I chose to stay in business so I pursued my MBA, which I ended up receiving from UC, Berkeley in 2008. During my MBA, I actually thought I knew what I wanted to do going in into the program but during the program, as many people may know, there's a lot of opportunities that come up with a lot of different kinds of companies, different kinds of jobs. Though I actually did my internship in real estate development in between my two years. I graduated in 2008 as many may know the real estate development market was not in a great place at that point so obviously that wasn't a viable option also wasn't really an industry I actually found that interesting. So I chose to come back to Salt Lake City and then I found a new opportunity at Overstock.Com, basically, as a strategic pricing analyst, it was definitely not what I thought I would be doing coming out of business school but I saw it as a good opportunity for me to get in with a local company and get in maybe at a level I thought I'd like coming to a job after my business degree at a higher level but I just chose to accept the job. I knew that if I prove myself, I would rise in the organization and that's basically what's happened. So from the time I started to where I am today, I've gone through many different responsibilities, many of which have been within the analytics organization. I think in all those cases I've just tried to prove or show that I want to add value to the organization and over the course of all my roles, I had to take on many different managerial responsibilities so from the time I started, I was mostly doing the doing and now I am doing more of the leading and directing and delegating and so it's kind of been 10 years but it doesn't really feel like it's been that long. With every experience I've had, I guess I've tried to learn something from that, learn what it is I like and what it is that I don't so just to kind of go back to the business school experience where I had an internship in real estate development, I clearly did not have a passion for that. So while that internship didn't amount to anything regarding a career opportunity. It did at least taught me that it was an industry and an area that I wasn't about interested in and I think maybe luckily or by cheap I think I fell into a place or a company that I do thrive in and like in analytics and in an organization that is constantly changing, constantly questioned, constantly trying to get better so clearly I think maybe I was fortunate in that as I landed where I did because I'm someone that seems to get bored with doing a lot of the same things and here at Overstock.Com clearly, we're always very fast-paced and changing, so there's never a boring day.

So as a Vice President of Analytics at Overstock, I have 8 people who directly report to me and then another about 75 indirect reports so those are the people that report to my direct report. So my responsibilities have expanded recently, whereby just last year my responsibilities were over the analytics and reporting and ETL teams for just the sourcing and operations department but just in the last couple months, my responsibilities have expanded to cover what we call the Channel Analytics team and the marketing, reporting ETL teams. So basically what that means is we have analytics groups that are dedicated to certain businesses, though within the sourcing department we have a category analyst group, those are analysts that support the different product categories. So one analyst that supports the rugs business, one analyst, that supports the furniture business. There are about six category analysts, and then we have analysts that support the supply chain business, we have an analyst to that support the transportation team that's the analyzing the costs of the shipping of our products and then we have an analyst that supports the reverse logistics that's the returns processes. Then on the marketing side, we have a group of analysts that supports the different marketing channels, and so think of it as there are many different places or channels, as we call it, where the traffic comes from that comes to our website so one of the big ones is email, we drive a lot of our business and a lot of our traffic through email so we have dedicated analysts that support the email team, we have dedicated analysts that support the Google advertising team, we have dedicated analysts that support the social media team so those were kind of the teams that I'm responsible for and I also mentioned reporting an ETL and those are the functions that are about the same size as our analytics teams, but they're the ones who are responsible for creating the dashboards, the reports that all the business is used to make decisions and then ETL is basically exchange transferred load. It's basically the transferring of data from one source to another and getting it into a database such that we can use it to do analytics. So it's not very maybe glamorous or very top of mind role, it's actually a very critical role in organizations like ours and those folks, they're very important as well, but they're just in charge of getting the data where we needed to make decisions. In terms of hours, typically, I'm here by about eight, I leave by around six but every day is a little bit different, but that's a pretty standard day. What's really great about Overstock is we instituted a 9/80 schedule, so that means we work nine hours, we're supposed to work nine hours Monday to Thursday and then eight hours every other Friday and then every other Friday we get off on. So basically every other week we have a three day weekend and so that's been really well received, and we don't have to take a vacation, we can do three-day trips every other week if we want, we can use that Friday for doctor's appointments or catching up at home or things like that so that's been great and that's just new in the last couple of years. Then traveling for me is somewhat minimal. Most of our products come from suppliers, we call them partners. So I think of it as like there's very large, like furniture businesses that sell their products on our website and there's four main we call that markets every year. Two of them are in Las Vegas in the summer and the winter and then two of them are in High Point, North Carolina. So those air four trips that I always attend, where we go out to those markets to meet those large suppliers and then depending on the year there are lots of other conferences about marketing technology and Google Cloud conferences, adobe conferences things like that. I have not attended many of those, so my travel is pretty minimal at least four times a year, but not more than six.

The job titles that work within my organization are analytics job titles like senior analyst, principal analysts, data scientists, machine learning analyst so those are inside my organization. We know we have a kind of career pathing, you start as an analyst usually like category management analyst or channel analyst and then as you progress, you become like a senior analyst, and then we call it a staff analyst and then a senior staff analyst and then a principal analyst and those are roles that are really dedicated to businesses. We also have a group of data scientists, they work on more like project-based work, not directly tied to those different businesses. We also have machine learning scientists as well, that are applying like machine learning and AI to different aspects of our business. So those are the folks within my organization. Then outside my organization, a lot of the roles are related to category management are category director, so that would be someone that is over a certain product category and then on the channel side, we have like a director of the email or a director of social media advertising or director of Google Advertising so those were kind of the folks that my crew support or typically director-level people that are focused on managing a categories business or a channels business or a supply chain business. In terms of approaches that I find useful working with them, I think of all the individuals on my team are like we are up to some extent a service organization like we support those businesses, we help those businesses understand their performances understand and find opportunities so the way I see it is, I look at them as my customers to some extent on and treat them as such in terms of teaching my team to be very responsive, listening well, but at the same time, they also have to bring an objective view to the equation and make sure that those businesses are aware and are honest in terms of how they report their performance and understand their businesses and honest with what opportunities we have and what challenges we face. So I think being an open communicator, being someone that listens to problems, that don't ignore problems. In cases where we do have, like, personnel issues or businesses may not be happy with their analyst's performance, we always try to take the approach of, Well, let's first understand from both sides of the equation, like what's not working and try to work through that before we ever like jump to making a decision about someone's employment.