A snapshot of the Data Platform team

Data Intelligence · Jul 19, 2018

Working on the Data Platform team at TELUS Digital is a unique experience. You're at the intersection of where business meets tech and hence you're surrounded by some of the most passionate business minds who work alongside top technical talent in order to do one thing - make our customers lives easier

It doesn't matter whether you're an existing customer trying to make a change to your data plan or you're a prospective customer conducting research into the best phones. We aim to make it as easy as possible for you to get what you need from us in a timely manner, and the way we do this is through data. 

Our data platform is the backbone of a lot, if not all, the decisions we make here at TELUS Digital. In order to ensure that we are meeting our deliverables, our teams make bets and measure them through metrics. 

"Bets are hypothesis-driven investments that we believe will help us achieve our goals, measured by a set of outcomes that drive value to both our business and our customers." - Thomas Briones, Senior Program Manager for Digital Operations

Our analysts are crucial to this process and are embedded in outcome teams, which allows them to focus on specific bets and analyze how we’re doing.

The toolkit of a data engineer

As a data engineer, my work constantly keeps me on my feet. Data engineers mainly focus on transforming data into formats that can be easily analyzed. We develop, maintain, and test infrastructure for data generation.

Snapshot data platform team

We ensure that our analysts get the data they need to make sure teams are meeting the bets they set out to accomplish. We’re never stuck on one path and the data helps to inform us of whether we need to alter the trajectory. I’m lucky because a lot of the tools we use make it pretty easy to design, update, and maintain our data pipeline, from Ensighten to dynamic tag manager, and Adobe Launch

The data is also used to create better experiences for our customers. We do this through a merger with our offline data before feeding that into our personalization, email, and marketing platforms. Our offline data comes from our data lake, a Hadoop cluster of tables that ingest a variety of databases such as activations information, chat data, and other records. 

The full stack looks like the following:

Full stack analytics

Recently the team has been moving towards collecting a lot of our data asynchronously in order to improve the performance of our websites, in response to the changes of the Google search engine. This has led us to rethink the way we measure our customers’ usage of our website from all devices. 

Does this post leave you with more questions? Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we dive deep into data streams and chat about how we make use of the Dynamic Tag Manager, Ensighten, and Adobe Launch. 

Interested in joining this data-driven team? Click here to see all of our openings on the team

Authored by:
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Ajay Ajaal
Tech Lead
I collect data to answer business questions and drive action