Wrapped 2022 — Our year as a growing data team

You love to see your Spotify Wrapped. So I thought I’d go down that road for 2022 as a data team here at Virgin Media O2. As it’s music related, it’d be wrong not to carry this theme through, so you’ll notice I’m a lyrical-master wannabe. Some songs you’ll know, others you’ll have to Google. You’ll see many references to songs — my taste in music will make you question which decade I was born in. So whilst this is me sharing an insight into us, and how we do things around here, it’s a little music quiz for you too.

This post is going to look at the last 12 months, what we’ve achieved and how we got here — there might be some things you can take back into your team. If you’ve got your own examples or ideas, please share them.

Let’s dance 💃🏻

It wouldn’t be “wrapped” if it didn’t have some stats right? I mean, there’s no beautiful animations or background music here, but it gives a short summary of some of our achievements…

So there’s just some of our year in numbers, but all of that doesn’t just happen. It’s only possible because of our amazing team, and teams don’t just ‘work’, you need to create the environment and culture for teams to thrive. You’ll learn more about how we do what we do and what we think is important.

Looking back, over my shoulder 🎵

12 months, 365 days, 52 weeks, 525,600 minutes — how do you measure, measure a year? In some contexts a year is a long time, and in others it’s no time at all. Here’s some big things that have happened over time, some in a year, some over longer periods of time:

• SpaceX’s Falcon 9 had 48 launches in 2022. Some teams still can’t achieve releases once a month. This is pretty incredible.
• Dyson had 5,127 failed prototypes before their first vacuum model was successful. The journey took 15 years.
• Jennifer Anniston gained 1 million followers on Instagram in 5 hrs 16 minutes.
• It took Spotify 10 years of losing money before they returned a profit in 2019.
• ChatGPT had 1 millions users in 5 days — viral.

Time won’t give me time… in 12 months, we’ve achieved so much, it’s hard to see that when you’re in the thick of it. I can’t imagine what Wrapped 2023 will look like, but I know it’ll be a super story.

Hey, I heard you were a wild one ☝️

This year for us, the data team at Virgin Media O2 has been another wild one. From the stats you saw above, it’s impressive right? What you don’t see here, are the daily efforts across our team. Individuals and team members coming together doing whatever it takes. This is a legacy company, a very complex system, even more so since joining forces of the Virgin Media the fixed network company, and O2 the mobile company. Not only are we having to consider how we navigate the current, but how do we make sure we’re focusing on things that play into our future state, and what trade-offs should we make now, versus none negotiable things? It’s tough because you come up against people that just want it now, exactly how they ‘solutionised’ it.

Alongside the work, we do a lot around our people, and we’ll certainly keep that up in 2023 as it’s mega important to be kind to our minds, otherwise we’ll burn out and that’s no good for anyone. Our people make our story, so they come first.

Re-rewind, when the crowd say Bo’ Selecta ⏪

We’ve been building many things this year: friends, trust, products, platform capability, processes, data models, documentation areas, teams, customers of our products & platforms, and our trophy cabinet.

Whilst a lot of our time is in building things, whether that be writing code, dashboards, APIs, product requirements, or our knowledge, it’s really important to us to keep the team alive and kicking 🎵

We’re a team that’s spread across the UK, from London to Reading to Bristol to Birmingham to Manchester to Leeds, and even up into Scotland. Our cross-functional teams we work in are made up of people in different locations, so the investments we make in tooling and time to encourage collaboration remote and in real life is invaluable. Work from home is our norm, and the likes of Slack, Lucid, Jira, Confluence etc, have enabled us to work effectively together from anywhere in the country. The tools we’ve chosen to do the job, to make our data factory run are industry leading, and if something isn’t working, we change it. We’ve gone from this team never existing to becoming some of the biggest users of many companies tooling in the tech industry like dbt, Google Cloud’s apps. Some of our team were spreadsheet wizards in their teams around the company and since giving them the space, tooling, training and data, they’re crushing it building things for the company that are changing how people work and saving millions. It’s a phenomenal story.

Those are a few of our favourite things 🧪

So we talked about the work and some of our achievements, but as I said, this is only possible because of our people and the environment we build. Here’s a bunch of things we consider super important. These are the things that have gotten us where we are today, and will support us in taking this data team from one to ten in our next phase of growth. We properly started out 18 months ago, going from zero to one, getting things going on the Google Cloud Platform. Now we’ve hit one, how do we go to ten, and take this team and company to the next level? We’re not exactly sure, but ones things for sure, we know where we’re going, and we’ll figure it out as we go. Here’s some of the stuff we do to make this team what it is…

Some of the things we do in this team

Let’s give em’ Something to Talk About 🎵

We’re always working to being more and more transparent. To build trust, get the right people on the journey with us from early on, and really, to get sh** done. We’ve got into a great rhythm of sharing our progress, whether that’s between our teams in data, through collaboration sessions, through to our monthly Show & Tells and outside in, monthly round-ups.

Our Show & Tells have grown to become one of the things a lot of us look forward to most in our diaries. These are team led, and the difference from January to December’s is real. These sessions are all about sharing anything you like, a lot of what we see are things people are making, thinking about etc. In the early sessions people were sharing more progressed/polished stuff than we’d hoped, and the crowd were a little on the quiet side. However, over time the trust has grown massively, and people are sharing all kinds of in progress work, not polished, not perfection, but progress. It’s a real vibe in there, we love to see it.

These sessions are MC’d by a team member, and how that MC is chosen is from the previous months show and tell. All of our sharers get voted for after the session by the team, we do this in Slack using an emoji for each person. It’s a brilliant little thing we do, and loads of people get involved. It also keeps it fresh for the next session, and that MC is then the one to make sure we fill the time — which is never an issue anymore! And they’re also the person to pick the theme. We’ve had, national umbrella day (yes I wore an umbrella hat), and many others, most recently a hiking theme, and the photos some of the team shared from their trips were awesome #chat-travel-advice

Beyond sharing inside our team, many of the product managers on my team run monthly roundups. These are team led again, and the invites lists grow and grow each time. We basically do a show & tell style for the wider company, with people from all corners of it. We could have customer service, digital, commercial, marketing, field operations — you name it, we probably have someone from that team. These sessions are awesome to see, many team members from our cross-functional teams share their work, and the questions are super. We even see lots of follow ups after where people suggest ideas, and for demos to their teams, and re-use what we’ve built for another purpose.

We are the champions, my friends, and we’ll keep on fighting till the end 🎤

There’s been ups and downs, as always, but more ups for sure! We’ve had a lot to celebrate, and we did a lot of that during our yearly Data Jam. That’s our annual team day, where we bring 150 people together onsite, for a ton of fun, learning and social time. If you were lucky to come this year, you may have won a jar of jam…

We won two awards from Google Cloud, which recognised our teams incredible efforts over the last 18 months working on the platform. Incredible achievement, let’s see what 2023 brings. Thanks Google, for being brilliant partners!

Wednesday shoutouts in Slack are always lovely to see flying in. In our team channel, we have a workflow setup to ask for team shoutouts. This brings to the surface a lot of amazing things happening across the team that we wouldn’t all know or see, through a lot of remote working. It’s simple but effective, and a thank you goes a long way!

We celebrate lots more like releases, but I think we could do more there. We do the classic post in Slack, like hey, we shipped a thing and it solved this problem. When we’re in person we grab team lunches and drinks etc together to celebrate also, but I feel we need a little inspiration here. Any ideas or things you do, please share!

Work hard, play hard… Keep partyin’ like it’s your job ⚽️

There’s a big social element to our team, despite being all over the UK and remote a lot of the time.

Coach Hemming probably can’t comment on this as she hasn’t done her competing run yet! But, we have things like the 5K challenge. We have your times logged and you have to beat your time, whoever makes the most improvement wins. We have all levels of runners in here, there’s me 🦥 and there’s people like Dan that are pretty much on par with Mo Farah.

In the summer, we did a sports afternoon in a park local to one of our offices. It didn’t cost much, just some equipment off Amazon, but the impact it had was brilliant! Nothing like having fun as a team. I did invest in sacks, and make everyone do that. Probably a bad idea health and safety, maybe just stick to rounders. Tons of fun, highly recommend it, and we will reconvene for this in 2023!

At Virgin Media O2, we’re lucky to have Take 5. It’s an initiative to promote you take 5 days of volunteering throughout the year. This year is used 2 days, one to spend time with sixth formers on their career day, and another hiking 🥾 in the Peaks with my team in support of Girls Into Coding. Such fun, and brilliant for team time and helping local communities.

And I’m feeling good 🧘‍♀️

Is it just me, or do you struggle to leave your desk when working from home? This year we started, “Wellness Wednesday”. This was at the beginning of Q4, and was basically remote yoga, where one person picks a class, shares their screen and we all hop on at 11:30. This has been such a success, and I realised I’m stiff as a board!

This was one of our first sessions — the yoga crew has grown!

We got more and more people join us for this, and as usual, we always think how can we do better… we’ve now we’ve pivoted to it being all about wellbeing, and for 2023 we have a plan coming together for monthly challenges and topics to cover. There’s definitely some steps and water drinking challenges coming up, as well as encouraging us to talk about our minds, and being kind to them. Bringing real stories and issues to the table.

This year we kicked off our women in data collective. We meet once a month, and we cover topics from all aspects of being a woman in tech, our careers/championing others, imposter syndrome, and all the other things women go through in life like the menopause. We also have a Slack channel to share things, whether it’s funny or questionable things we’ve seen, experiences we’re going through or interesting podcasts/articles. In 2023, we’re going to look for others in the industry to share stories and experiences with. This data team is the most diverse I’ve worked in, how we think, where we’re from, languages we speak, perspectives we have, and whilst there’s a higher ratio of women in this tech team than I experienced earlier in my career, there’s more we can do to promote more women into this team, and importantly, girls into careers like ours.

Something else we do regularly with the cross-functional teams is check-ins. At first, it always seems weird to people when they’re asked, ‘so how are you? what’s going on with you, share as much or as little as you want to’. These sessions aren’t about the work, they’re about us. Us as individuals with lives outside of work. These sessions have helped the teams build trust and honesty amongst one another, and also look out for each other. When we know more about each others context and what’s going on, we can then adapt and work better together. We learn things we never would’ve known.

So this is Christmas, and what have you done, another year over 🎵

Well, that’s a wrap. Another year done, and tons to be proud of, and tons to keep doing in the following year. If you’ve supported us this year, thank you! And if you like the sound of what we’re doing, watch out for the opportunities across our team in product, analytics, data science, data modelling, engineering and delivery. Maybe you’ll be sharing your weekend in an emoji with us in 2023…

2022, you weren’t easy but you were worth every minute. Now Christmas break, let’s be having you. 2023, see you soon.

I told you it was a little quiz — answers below…

1. Let’s dance — David Bowie, Let’s Dance
2. Looking back, over my shoulder — Mike + the Mechanics, Over My Shoulder
3. 525,600 minutes — how do you measure, measure a year? — Rent, Seasons of Love (Sarah thank you for this!)
4. Hey, I heard you were a wild one — Flo Rida, Wild One
5. Re-rewind, when the crowd say bo’ selecta — Craig David, Re-Rewind
6. Alive and kicking — Simple Minds, Alive and Kicking
7. Those are a few of our favourite things — Big Brovas, Favourite Things
8. Let’s give em’ something to talk about — Bonnie Raitt, Something To Talk About (Step Brothers, if you know, you know)
9. We are the champions, my friend, and we’ll keep on fighting till the end — Queen, We Are The Champions
10. Work hard, play hard… keep partyin’ like it’s your job — David Guetta, Play Hard
11. And I’m feeling good — Nina Simone, Feeling Good
12. So this is Christmas, and what have you done, another year over — John Lennon, Happy Xmas (War Is Over)