How to Create a Holistic Customer View to Drive Performance and Revenue

Preface

Welcome to our discussion on the pioneering project ‘Graphite’ at Condé Nast. Today, we delve deep into the creation of this innovative and comprehensive data product, designed to drive performance and revenue.

Our session begins with a brief introduction to our speaker. We will cover his career path, personal experiences in this field, and the driving goals that motivate him.

This will be followed by revealing the operations of Condé Nast as a leader with the mission to create unique content across various digital properties. Condé Nast has widely adopted data-driven decision-making and has advocated for it on multiple fronts.

The highlight for today would be a comprehensive report about the work that Condé Nast has been carrying out over the past few years, which led to the beginning of the Graphite project. Over the past 2½ years, the team at Condé Nast has actively worked on the development of Graphite, mainly a data-driven product.

Graphite provides a unified platform for business users, allowing them to query and visualize content lifecycle data. It offers deep insights into various sources of revenue, including affiliates. A riveting discussion follows about the thought process and the steps involved in creating this transformative data product.

Now, let’s embark together on this enlightening journey to explore the creation and application of Graphite.

Foundations and Architecture

With businesses continuing to see the importance of value creation from data and AI, focus is being drawn to the innovative data product, Graphite. Let’s explore what lies behind the basics and architecture.

Coexistence of Organizational and Individual Growth

The session emphasized the deep collaboration with Databricks and the infrastructure team. This strong partnership greatly contributed to generating comprehensive analytics and offering innovative services, reaching beyond individual areas of expertise.

Role of the Data Engineering team

While it's not surprising that the primary task of the data engineering team is building data pipelines, their responsibility doesn't stop there. It includes supporting the content creation process and affiliate sales. This shows how data and AI are used in business, which includes not only collecting and analyzing data but also directly providing value to the business.

Data engineering involves fluctuating aspects that may not always yield immediate results. Yet, they are backed by partnerships, teamwork, and continuous efforts in problem-solving. This allows even complex and diverse data analyses to provide deeper insights by using the innovative data product Graphite.

Essential components of a data product

A data product is fundamentally data-driven and aims to fulfill specific purposes, solve problems, and offer value to end-users and internal customers. It is not an abstract concept built in isolation.

Also, a data product is not the data itself. It's the structured, processed, and analyzed data that provides insights, making it a beneficial tool for businesses. A successful data product must cover essential elements such as ease of use and provision of actionable insights.

User-centric data product

Beyond the technical aspects of data engineering and data science, data products need to focus on user-centric attributes. This includes all elements responding to end-user needs, such as UI/UX design, data visualization, and backend processing. The purpose of a data product is not just to consume data but to unveil problems, make solutions readily available, and generate value for customers.

Data product and Customer Service

Conceptually, the provision of data products aligns with principles of customer service. Viewing end users and internal customers from a customer service perspective signifies efforts to enhance user experience and provide readily accessible information that increases product value.

Generating actionable insights through data products

Data products should function not just as repositories for numbers or figures, but also reflect real-world scenarios and act as a catalyst for making appropriate business judgments.

The process of building, maintaining, and evolving data products indeed comes with its own set of challenges. However, focusing on solving problems, customer service, and generating actionable insights, a data product can deliver significant value to businesses.

Summarizing, a data product is a comprehensive solution that starts from data collection, through data processing and data analysis, and ultimately provides products that solve problems, answer questions, and trigger actions. As a perfect blend of technology and strategy, data products play a vital role in driving business success.

Modular Design and Real-time capabilities of Graphite

Data-backed decisions are crucial in the world of business. Further, tools that allow users to easily interact with the data and access information without writing complex queries have proven immensely helpful. One such tool is Graphite, which marks a step towards a complete data product. Let's delve deeper into its characteristics.

Graphite Characteristics

Graphite greatly aids your decision-making process by presenting data not merely as datasets, but as packages of information including visual representations and data quality metrics. This enables users to effectively exploit data for their benefit, gaining insights without much effort.

In simple terms, Graphite is an application that allows users to access the value of data without complicated processes or deep SQL knowledge. Thanks to Graphite's modular design and real-time capabilities, end users can freely fetch data without encountering roadblocks.

Graphite not only provides raw data but promotes more effective and efficient business operations through visual insights generated from the data.

In the following section, we will delve deeper into the usefulness of Graphite, elaborate on specific features, and demonstrate its value through examples. For individuals and organizations aiming to operate businesses driven by data, Graphite is a tool of significant value that should not be missed.

Remember, our aim is to deliver something easy to use for end users. We don’t expect people to write complicated queries or be proficient in SQL to get value from our data. What we aim for is to provide a relatively smooth experience for those who want to interact with the data we ingest, transform, and make accessible. Essentially, this gives the full picture of what a data product is. It's a single deliverable that includes dominantly datasets, visualizations layered on datasets, data quality metrics, and ultimately to the end user - all simplified and made accessible.

Future Directions and AI Integration of Graphite: The Vision

Today, we've deeply explored the details of the data product Graphite, expected to bring new possibilities to businesses.

Importance of data filtering

A key highlight to emphasize is the discussion on the importance of filtering before ingesting the tons of data we collect every day from Snowplow and Copilot into Graphite. As a result, there's been a substantial performance improvement in Graphite’s pipeline. By applying these filters, the data processing time was dramatically reduced from 2-3 hours to just 2-3 minutes.

Benefits and utilization of dbt

dbt plays a central role in our solutions. It's user-friendly, especially to analysts or organizations familiar with SQL, and makes implementing incremental models easy.

Transition to a Serverless environment

They stressed that the decision to fully transition into a serverless environment was philosophically right for them. They feel they must focus more on providing high-quality content to customers, rather than maintaining infrastructure.

The ongoing usage and development of Graphite aim to extract the maximum benefit from data, exploring possibilities that might be linked to business outcomes. A part of this relentless effort is the integration of AI. This seeks to further improve performance and achieve efficiency in conjunction with the ongoing effort.

I highly recommend keeping an eye on Graphite's exploration of valuable data utilization for next-generation businesses. We look forward to the potential your business holds for the future.

Conclusion

Through understanding the importance of data filtering, benefits and applications of DBT, and strategies like transitioning to a serverless environment, Graphite provides a fresh perspective on data usage in businesses. Together with AI integration, it aims to explore future possibilities. In the vast landscape of data utilization, Graphite continues to explore new possibilities and strive for even greater success in our business. Please pay attention to the new perspectives on data utilization for next-generation businesses that Graphite offers.

About the special site during DAIS

This year, we have prepared a special site to report on the session contents and the situation from the DAIS site! We plan to update the blog every day during DAIS, so please take a look.

www.ap-com.co.jp