Overview
Throughout my time at Retail Insight, I contributed towards many tasks, often with the goals of improving the company's solution or providing desired analyses to Kroger.
I worked within a team where workflow was agile. At any point in time, Kroger might reach out with a new task, so I had to be sure to mind my time as I worked on tasks.
Stack and Other Skills
As this was my first full-time role as an analyst, I spent a lot of time refining my skills with the tools in the company's stack and learned how to work efficiently in an agile, corporate environment.
Here are the key tools in the stack as well as how they were used:
- Snowflake
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Housed most of the company's data platform. Most commonly, I'd be querying pertinent data from snowflake, then bringing that query into other tools like excel or power bi for use there.
In doing this, my SQL skills consistently improved. I feel very comfortable with SQL after holding this role.
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I picked up a few snowflake-specific SQL commands, like using 'ALL' in aggregation as well as the 'QUALIFY' command which is useful when using window functions like "ROW_NUMBER()".
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Assisted with semantic layer refinement for Snowflake Agents. An initiative for the company was to have agents to provide quick summaries for certain store/item behavior and why they happened.
My team's responsibility was to validate each agent's output and make edits to semantic/instructional layers to iteratively improve agent output. As demands were made to bring in more data sources for the agents to consider, I had to make changes in the layers to introduce these as well.
This also included preparing new versions of existing tables to better suit the agents' needs, and communicating with the data platform team to provide updated versions of semantic/instructional layers for deployment.
- MS SQL Server
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Was the legacy data platform for the company. While I was there, not all data sources had yet been moved to snowflake, so occasionally I would have to query from SQL Server. Essentially served the same purpose as Snowflake for me, but Snowflake was the more commonly used of the two.
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This served as an introduction into the T-SQL dialect for me.
- Excel
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Main tool used during analytical tasks. Used for data exploration and visualization.
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Heavy use of pivot tables and charts as a way of exploring and creating key visualizations for presentation in PowerPoint decks.
- Powerpoint
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Used to create presentations for conveying findings to both internal and external stakeholders.
- Power BI
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Used to create dashboards to give Kroger live feedback on performance or other inquiries.
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I developed two main dashboards. From end-to-end, these started as a rough inquiry which I had to take and return an insightful product from.
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Each involved the use of 5+ different source tables and required much deliberation to provide an output that was useful to Kroger, but also within our space constraints.
- Jira
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Used to submit tickets for enforcing changes to system configurations/data tables in both dev and production environments.
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When providing a ticket assignee with a SQL script, it was imperative that the script was clear and easy to follow so that they could recreate and complete the changes I had come up with.
- Azure Blob Storage
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Rarely used in my case, but was available to view data sources in their original form, as they came in a feed provided by Kroger.
- Slack, Teams, Outlook
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The role was hybrid, so my ability to write direct, to the point messages was important.
Takeaways
I've become much more confident as an analyst after completing my time with Retail Insight. While my previous volunteer role was key step for me, this role allowed me to make many strides forward.
I feel that I now have a much better understanding of the expectations for a data analyst, and more experience with many important tools that often come up in the industry. My communication skills have definitely improved, as it was key that I speak clearly and politely in really every section of the role, be it presenting or just brainstorming approaches to a query or task with my team.