Music Journalist
I was recruited to this team from my data science internship with Acorns. At this point in my career, I was just beginning to understand big data and how to run analytic queries on large data sets. I had some experience working with large data sets at Intel and Intuit but the access that I was promised here was the largest amount of data I had ever worked with. Facebook as a company is divided into working product groups so there are groups focusing on WhatsApp and Instagram or platform vs mobile. All of those working groups have product managers and software engineers who are building technologies specific to that platform.
I worked on the developer relations team. Facebook as a platform has open-source tools and gives developers access to some of the data on the platform. If you are familiar with the Facebook login button that is available on some platforms like Spotify, then you have a general idea of the way that other companies might use Facebook data. Because it is a social media platform, other platforms who are building social relationships might want to have some sort of social component that shares information about relationships. If you have 100 friends on the Facebook platform instead of just sharing information on the website, you can also integrate the user experience of the connected platform by pulling in data from Facebook like the names of friends and their geographic location and inviting them to join the connected platform. That is a very common experience of a developer looking to use the Facebook API.
Initially I was tasked with understanding how to support the developer circle online communities and the program managers on the Facebook side. At this point in the company’s history there were 119 developer circles spread across the globe. The purpose of the online circles or Facebook groups was to support developers in online spaces who wanted to use the Facebook API and improve their technical skills. Across the globe developers were coming together in person to discuss technical topics and share their projects. A part of my job as an incoming analyst was to understand the health of these groups and assess the engagement in the groups. The groups were split into regions of the world:
Each of these regions had its own program manager who oversaw the developer circles in the region. The program manager oversaw sponsoring in person events in the region and supporting events in person as often as possible. Program managers also communicated frequently with their Dev-C leads who were community members in the online groups who would find resources on the ground like venues and food for the events.
As an analyst on this team I found data-sets which were relevant to the developer circles community. The Facebook platform data was divided into many sections and data warehouses. Some of the data I needed was in the platform warehouse and I had to request access to that warehouse because I was not a data engineer on that team. Facebook as a company has its own tools and infrastructure which manages the data, and every data engineer goes through datacamp (an internal training program for all data workers) to learn how to access and query the data using the internal tools. I spent a lot of time talking with data engineers from other warehouse groups and figuring out which tables contained the data I needed. Once I had an appropriate dataset that contained data related to active monthly users, total member in the group higher level statistics that were relevant to the program function I produced bi-weekly data visualizations using Tableau and shared these with the program managers. I created a visualization for each region so that it was clear what they were looking at and produced a written report explaining that data.
Understanding Events
We had five program managers who would manage the developer circles in each region. This included tracking and helping to plan offline events. Traveling to different cities to support the events in person and constructing weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly reports on current events in region and circle. On a very high level after briefly speaking with the program managers it was clear that each program manager had a different way of handling events in each region, but there was no aggregate data on offline events. It seems the events would happen but there was no attendance data or way to measure the success or failure of an event. In an attempt to understand the problem more in-depth I created a survey that has a series of questions related to offline events. I wanted to understand the entire process from when there was an idea for an event to during and after the event took place. The survey consisted of questions like:
After reviewing the responses from this survey, I spoke with each program manager individually for a 1-hour conversation about how we could create more efficient processes to handle event management. I took thorough notes from these conversations and wrote reports on my findings after each step of the process and shared these notes with the global management team. After reviewing all of the responses to the phone conversations it was clear that the current event creation technology tool we proposed the developer circle leads use, was very hard to use, and the developer circle leads needed training on how to use the tools. It was also very clear that because the current program managers were not technical they were struggling with finding content for the offline events. The developer circle leads were in charge of creating content for these events, but frequently they had no idea where to start in creating material for the events. The developers were looking for training to help them get better jobs or their first development jobs and they needed reference material for the tutorial they wished to present on.
As the analyst for the entire program, I produced reports for LATAM, EMEA, APAC, and North America so I worked with the program managers from these regions.
This was my first experience working with social media data and I didn’t really understand what data was being collected. I figured I would be analyzing profiles and understanding who was friends with whom, but I didn’t realize how important social connection among online groups was and is now and how to measure engagement in online groups.
What technology or tools did I use?
Internal tools from Facebook to schedule data engineering jobs
The program managers were non-technical but their managers were asking for reports which would measure the health of the online community. As a technical person who was scrubbing and cleaning the data I needed to explain to the program managers what was going on in their online groups. I needed to do it in a way that made sense, so I would have to communicate with non-technical program managers and explain technical concepts.
I produced bi-weekly reports for each of the programs (regions) which included a written explanation about what the data in the visualization meant.
Datacamp (internal training course)