Director of Data & BI

Job Description

Whereabouts: Within CET +/- 9 hours and have some restrictions on hiring engineering

Interviews: Around 4 hours over a few weeks, including some practical work

Salary: Starting at £90,000 | $150,000 for USA-based candidates

*Note: We have no “caps” on our salary, and you can read our full compensation philosophy here. If our advertised salary doesn’t suit your current expectations, just let us know and we’re very open to discussing further.

Reporting to: Dave Thomson, VP Product

Ask us anything: careers@whereby.com 

“BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can make the right decisions” – Nic Smith

Please note: If you are not seeing this role advertised on https://jobs.lever.co/whereby the role is likely closed for new applications. Unfortunately, we are not always in control of where our roles are posted as many websites post our roles without our express consent. For this reason, you may be reading out-of-date information - we are so sorry about that. Our careers team is always on hand to answer questions, drop us a line at careers@whereby.com

Your mission at Whereby*

You will shape strategies, set targets, monitor results, and suggest actions for our teams to achieve their marketing, product development, planning, and growth goals. You will partner with executives and teams across the business on three main priorities: building a culture that uses data as a decision-making tool, owning the data and marketing tech-stack, and protecting customer’s privacy. 

*This is the mission that moves you and your team through our strategic roadmap and should be your focus for up to a year or two.

What is Whereby all about

Freedom to work from anywhere: our mission with Whereby is to give people the freedom to live and work where they thrive.

📍 Our global HQ is in Oslo, Norway, but our users (and team) are worldwide - having been used in nearly every country in the world by millions of folk. 🌏

By making it possible to collaborate as well over video as you can in real life, we want to give you the choice to work from where your life happens. To allow you to be in a place where you can think and focus, but also allow a seamless and instant connection with others when you need to.

For our 100 team members spread across 20 countries, and also for our customers, we know that the ability to decouple locations from work can be life-changing. They can afford the house they want, can spend less time commuting, be closer to nature, and their children get to grow up seeing their grandparents every day. Everyone on our team enjoys the enormous benefits that a flexible work policy brings, and we truly believe the future of work will gravitate towards our vision of the future.

Data at Whereby

We strongly believe in the superpowers of data and analytics across our business; from growth to user experience. We are a customer-centric business that hopes to scale our users sustainably through building user-centric products, and with high-quality and impactful growth marketing. Our current team works hard to take an ethical approach to our users and data and appreciates innovative approaches to new technologies in the market.

We try to ensure both that we're building the right thing and building the thing right. Our current Data team is a small team, which is looking for a strong leader who can develop a culture of data literacy across our business to better inform our marketing, product, hiring, and commercial decisions. This role will be a member of our senior leadership team and will lead cross-functionally while working closely with our CMO.

🔍 What we're looking for in our Director of Data & BI

We're looking for someone who has experience building and leading a successful data and analytics team with a strong data-literate, and privacy-first, ethical culture. We don't mind if you've managed a team of 5 or 50, as long as the data infrastructure you've been building is scalable to millions of users, has enabled demonstrable growth in another B2C/B2B or customer-centric software business, and where your leadership style is well-respected and authentic.

🌎 We believe in everyone

We fundamentally believe talent is distributed to all of us in equal measure. We open our doors (physical or url) to everyone and we see our differences as a strength; it’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission.

This means we see your unique history as having a value money cannot buy; we believe in the strength of every intersection of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity.

⚒️ The nuts and bolts of the role*

* Please do not see everything in this job ad as "must have", but rather a guiding list of what we're looking for. We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've mentioned in this posting, so don't be afraid to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not "spot on"

Your attributes

• 🎨 Cross-cultural communicator
• 💛 An admired people leader and influencer
• 📈 Commercial, with a product mindset
• 🥅 Operational
• 📊 Ethically ambitious

Your previous experience

• We are prioritising attitude, aptitude, and the kinds of teams you've built in favour of years' experience. With that said, you may be a good fit if you...
• Are a current VP, Head of, or Director of Data and Analytics or Business Intelligence
• Have experience building and owning data roadmaps which impact marketing, product, and commercial decisions
• In depth understanding and experience of Excel and BI reporting, moving data between systems for reporting purposes using an ETL architecture, database management and SQL/Snowflake a must
• Have experience architecting, implementing and managing a techstack from scratch, and mapping data across platforms (experience using tools like Segment, Eloqua/Marketo/Iterable/HubSpot/etc, Attribution Software, and BI tools is a big advantage)
• Have examples in your experience of using data to drive impact high-growth
• Enjoy working in distributed teams
• Have experience in a SaaS, B2B and/or freemium products is very highly valuable, but not required
• Working on a scaling product with high numbers of daily active users
• Experience building a data-literate culture across a cross-functional team, and
• Are a really nice person with loads of ambition

How we'll measure your success🌟

• At the end of the day, the success measure for this role is quite simple: revenue and growth
• Uptime and reliability of our marketing and data infrastructure
• Recruiting quality and successful hires (working with our VP People and the team to encourage a diverse approach to what it means to belong at Whereby)
• Data roadmap completion (working with CMO/CPO/VP Product on how we deliver what our customers don't even know they need)

Strategic responsibilities

• Set an overall vision & roadmap for how data is used at Whereby to support decision making, powers our marketing & data infrastructure and technology, and protects our customer’s privacy
• Oversee how data and analytics shapes business performance and decision making
• Support decision makers from Product to Marketing in order to shape how their work contributes to the overall company strategy and direction
• Developing a consultative approach, giving advice to be actioned across all teams
• Foster a data-driven decision making culture throughout the company (performance measurement, org structure, tools & training, etc)
• Develop and own our data & marketing tech infrastructure, building a single customer view that underpins our campaigns and product development
• Manage the budgets, vendor procurement & management for marketing infrastructure, data infrastructure, and analytics tools
• Own data governance & compliance as data privacy and ethics is a large part of the Whereby values, we need someone who can understand how to balance the ethical position we take while ensuring we make highly commercial decisions

Tactical responsibilities

• Ensure fundamental reliability, scalability and performance of our data architecture as we scale
• Lead team of analysts and data scientists and engineers (hiring, personal development, objectives, etc)
• Work together with the product and marketing team on developing the product and marketing road maps, providing consultative input
• Embed a cultural focus on how data can impact growth, testing, and reaching our commercial objectives
• Retain and grow our key talent in the data and analytics team, allowing them to do their best work as we scale
• Make decisions on data architecture and processes that concern the product and engineering team as a whole. Set guidelines for what type of decisions can be made in the teams vs. management
• An active contributor in setting function and organization specific goals
• Working across departments with our team members to think through how to translate these goals into actionable items that move Whereby closer to achieving these objectives

Foundational responsibilities

• Ensure your team culture is inclusive and embodies a place where talented, kind people feel they can belong and feel psychologically safe
• Build operational processes to ensure 24/7 reliability
• Manage tech stack for Marketing Operations and Data
• Ensure all data is accurately being tracked, being accountable for reporting accuracy
• Also enable clear visibility into metrics so teams can be data-informed
• Manage, build and lead a high-performing team, coaching and mentoring the team as we believe in ownership and progression at Whereby
• Develop and maintain a data roadmap
• Data privacy law knowledge and compliance
• Leadership responsibilities within the senior leadership team, including challenging other roadmaps, and providing coaching and cross-functional advice or scrutiny

Your progression

• You'll be leading your function from the top, working with the Exec team and CEO to build the kind of culture you want to scale into the stratosphere
• We like to keep a lean team, and although our team will absolutely grow in the near future, we don't think it's a good fit for someone who believes headcount is a metric for success