Currently I am a Digital Analytics Consultant at Adobe. My responsibilities are: (i) Consulting: I spend 80-90% of my time with Adobe customers doing consultative engagements; consulting them on best practices for how to use Adobe analytics. That includes: Click stream data and/or merging click stream data with their current business data sets (CRM data, Point of Sale data and others). Enrich and merge those datasets together to make sense and get a 360 degree view of their business. (ii) Customer Intelligence: Most of my data work is focused on, instead of click stream data, our customer intelligence. Business intelligence is in talks since a lot of years. And Adobe is much focused these days on customer intelligence. That implies not only getting an understanding of how customers behave online but how they behave offline and emerge between the two. For instance when a customer in retail might shop online for a little while; come into a store, check things out and then go back to buy online or be inverse. Same thing is in financial services where they behave a certain way with their online choice and then they behave a certain way when they branch. Key is thus to understand how those things work together and how customers behave in brick and mortar and then online with their mobile phones and tablets. Spending 80-90% of my time with customers helping them use Adobe tools, I help understand the customer journey and get customer intelligence. (iii) Customer Networking: Having proved that our technology is a win every time, I don't have to sell the deal but I still have to prove that our technology is a perfect fit/ match for the customer and that it's the best technology for the job to be done. When I'm on site, my job with customers is to reinforce that message. For the same I also travel a lot (average 10 days a month). I have be as much in front of customers as the technology to build relationships and network with them. Existing customers really care that they have expert partners who understand their business, are in touch, can speak to other people in the company and help them evangelize what they're doing. Fidelity for example, being a very large organization has to sell the message across the organization. This is the hardest job with analytics/ data/ telling a data story; ensuring that people understand and with a high pitch, ‘this is what the data means and this is what we intend to do based on the data.’ It’s not about the calculations or analysis, it’s usually changing hearts and mind! (iv)Translation: I translate business/ customer requirements and cases into solutions and workflows featuring functionality. The major job in this is to pivot traditional brick and mortar business (We are not going away from brick and mortar. That’s a crucial part of what we do at Macy's). We strive to overlay the technology into customer experience to optimize the customer’s path to conversion. This does not imply driving customers to the web and closing the stores. No! Strategy is to drive people into the stores and to the right apps on their phones to find the product they need and get an experience. We aim to use the technology to make the customer experience seamless; that when they go into the store, buy something online, interact with the mobile app, get the confirmation that it is shipped and then the text message that it’s arrived at the doorstep! It implies understanding the challenges and translating them into feature function/ capabilities that Adobe has available to deliver on the mission to create that seamless experience. My focus is thus on: Our analytics tool to get enough information around the process and make good decisions Our solutions like Campaign (our email solution), Target (our customized web experience solution) and our Optimization solution, etc. Work Details (Clients): I work with the biggest customers in the world. I work with Apple, Microsoft and Fidelity. From different verticals: I have Apple, Microsoft from the technology vertical. In financial services I worked with Fidelity in December, with Goldman Sachs in November. I worked with Macy's... Macy’s is closing stores and laying off 10k employees because of ‘brick and mortar’. We thought brick and mortar was going to die in 2000. Now it is 2017 and brick and mortar is really struggling because people don't shop, they amazon! But the 150- 130 year old companies are not just going to die, so pivoting is the solution. Adobe is one of their major partners in the same. It is a great opportunity for me to work with Macy's. I also worked with Caballos from retail industry. There have been many other retail clients. I have worked with healthcare customers like Kaiser Permanente, California. In media entertainment I worked with H. B. O. In travel hospitality Mary delta and Carl Cruise line. The largest customers in the world are the customers that I talk to on a regular basis about their digital strategy, using our Adobe tools and getting value out of them.

Adobe analytics has been around for awhile. It started in 1978 and that means that it’s a pretty stable animal. What that also means is that the information about the product is dispersed over 10 years. The people who knew the secrets about how that widget worked, what it meant and how the customer used it, they might have left the company 5 years ago and that information is lost unless it’s documented. And everything is not documented! Thus one major challenge is to get that information, capture it and keep it in your mind but to get to that information initially is super difficult. For that you have to have a great network inside the company.So when I came to Adobe my boss gave me a travel expense card ‘American Express Corporate card’ and he said, ‘You are empowered to go learn anything there is to learn about the product you're responsible for and that will include making friends. Sometimes to make friends you need to take take them out to lunch and you can put that lunch on your Adobe card. You are not going to pay that one yourself, I'm going to expense it. That’s part of your game plan and that's what you get paid to do, is learn this stuff.’ So the first thing I did is I took everyone to lunch and I met all the product people, the customer experience people, a couple of key consultants who know things about our product. Second challenge is accessing the information.I get questions from customers all the time that I don't have the answer to right away because that aspect of the product might not be touched often. For the same I strive to reach out to that network again, but it is dispersed. They are disparate in terms of their placement in the organization and thus the information is not in one place even with great documentation. Third major challenge is a lot of travel and maintaining work life balance. I wake up and go to the gym everyday at 8:30 AM. I don't look at the clock and just go. In case I get working- wake up at 7, answer emails, have breakfast, get back to answering emails, get my calls and before I know it’s 4, I haven't been to the gym, no real meal and I'm not even dressed yet! That is a recipe for burnout. So I have to manage my schedule in a way that allows me to have work life balance.Another major challenge is that are battling burn out all the time. I work for more than 40 hours a week because of the high demand. Travel, workload and demand for a job like mine with the technical expertise in the customer facing and demonstrations skills are very high. Demonstration is a key part of my function, value and story at Adobe.

My interview process at Adobe included a screening with the technical recruiter. That screening is super important. You have to have your story dialed and mostly around your expertise. I made it past that to the hiring manager. Hiring manager and three other people on my team interviewed me individually. That made 4 interviews. After the 4 individual interviews they had me present over the phone to a team. I presented to 5 people over the phone and that interview number 5. Then I presented again in person and that interview number 6. I presented again because somebody missed it. So I presented to the last person and that was interview number 7. My boss then called me and said that it was one of the top 5 interviews of all time. Strategies that helped were that I had ensured that I interviewed them as much as they interviewed me, learned from every single interview and adapted as I went along. I used verbatim sometimes. I would say, ‘so and so told me that this was the problem that they encountered in this job and this is how I intend to respond.’ Or ‘this is an experience I have had that’s a lot like this and these were the results.’ I would incorporate them into my presentations which were mostly story form and limbic. I used to start with something a bit off topic but relatable and limbic, try to loosen them up and then get in the topic. So learning from every single person story and using limbic opener that matches those people, that was crucial to me winning the position. Practicing with the placement office. They really helped a lot. And having my Linkedin account, I ensured not just having my profile dialed in the story I wanted to tell about myself but that it matched my resume, skills set and what I wanted to do, the companies I was following; all those things are crucial. When the recruiters cast the net, you manage to be inside it because of the companies you follow, the skills you have listed, the connections you have and the relationship you have with your network that are legitimate on LinkedIn. So those things are super important.