How to accelerate your analytics team with analytics engineering

Are you ready to take your analytics team to the next level? Harness the power of analytics engineering to accelerate performance and drive success. In this talk we’ll demystify the hype around analytics engineering. Based on the experience of two analytics engineers who introduced the craft of analytics engineering to the logistic services analytics team at bol.com, we show how analytics engineers play an integral role in ensuring that an analytics team can work effectively and innovatively, providing high-quality data to analysts to create actionable insights to generate business value.

As analytics engineers, we would like to share our experience of successfully introducing the craft of analytics engineering at bol.com, outlining the path towards accelerated decision-making and improved business outcomes. The talk is trying to answer the following three questions:
- What is analytics engineering?
- Why do you need analytics engineers in your team?
- How can you best benefit from analytics engineering?
The questions are answered from both outside-in (from external consultant) and inside-out (from bol.com veteran) perspective.

First we define the role and responsibility of analytics engineers, and explain why they are different from data analysts and data engineers. We will shed light on the day-to-day work of analytics engineers, and showcase some initiatives that we took to introduce software best practice and maintain the data foundation of the team. Examples include how to best set up a dbt project following best practices, how to ensure code and data quality with CI/CD, and how to enforce data modeling framework and conventions to improve collaboration.

With a blend of theoretical and practical knowledge drawn from real-world experience, this session aims to inspire and guide other organizations on their journey to accelerated, data-driven success. By sharing the success story of the Logistic Services Analytics team at bol.com, we seek to emphasize the transformative potential of analytics engineering and how it can fuel the growth of analytics teams in various industries.

This conference proposal is a testament to our belief that analytics engineering is not just an optional skill, but an essential craft that can significantly elevate the performance of analytics teams in today's data-centric business environment.