Business Intelligence Analyist

To pull, manage, and analyze all data available on Amazon Vendor Central for our brands, to create various visually intuitive reports and dashboards to communicate my findings, and to manage our brand’s digital merchandising on Amazon.

My work analyzing data and optimizing digital merchandising led to increased opportunities, sales, conversions and brand awareness for our brands and their products

I had mastered the skills required for this job and could also see that the lifecycles of some of our large accounts were nearing an end  – which is when they build an in-house team to manage their Amazon business (often underestimating the knowledge base and experience necessary to manage a brand effectively and profitably on Amazon). It seemed like a good time to expand, and Amazon Brand Management was the opportunity and natural progression.

Skarberg Sales & Marketing is a locally owned, independent manufacturer sales representative agency specializing in the representation of consumer electronic brands, including Sony, GE, PNY, Marshall Speakers, with various wholesale accounts in the Pacific Northwest, such as Amazon, Costco, and Fred Meyer.

In the years preceding my tenure at Skarberg Sales & Marketing (SS&M),Amazon transformed from a largely insignificant part of our brand’s business to the largest account and primary focus of every major brand we represented.

To accomplish this, I spearheaded the creation, execution, and management of several cross-departmental processes. These included the development of a New Item Request process and the implementation of the SAP Framework Agreement process.

Amazon, being the first online retailer of that scale in our region (or anywhere, for that matter), was the agency’s entrée into comprehensive brand management for large online marketplaces. It quickly became apparent that properly managing a brand’s business on Amazon was a much more data-driven endeavor than the traditional relationship-driven model for brick-and-mortar business.

In response to this realization, I was hired on as their Business Intelligence Analyst, with the primary objectives of managing the ETL process and warehousing the sizable amount of raw data provided by Amazon through Amazon Vendor Central on our local server, analyzing this data to determine the various markers that allows us to accurately assess the status, health, and position of each of our brand’s business on Amazon, to further analyze this data to discover patterns and trends in the data that we can translate into business opportunities, and to produce various concise and visually intuitive reports and dashboard to convey these findings to the various stakeholders in the business.

This position was extremely attractive to me because it satisfied my need to grow beyond data management and into data analysis, as well as the fact that it was a trailblazing role where I was encouraged and required to get as creative as possible in order to achieve my objectives.

Utilizing the data management skills I had acquired and refined at my last job, I dug right in and quickly became proficient at extracting, organizing, normalizing, and analyzing all available data and revealing the requisite information and insights from this dataset. From there, I would share my findings with the Brand Mangers, who offered business context and, together, we honed the understandings, narratives, and strategies for our brands and their products. At this point, we would outline the deliverables required from me to easily and accurately convey this information.

I absolutely loved this job.  It was fun, it afforded me the opportunity to quickly progress my professional skills in data management and analysis, I was able to collaborate with my brand managers which allowed me to gain a greater understanding of the nuances of the business, and, unexpectedly, it allowed me an outlet for my creative talents in the forms of visual communication – specifically digital merchandising and data visualization.

Having launched my career in data management, I had all but relegated my creative needs to  personal projects. However, my team quickly realized my aptitude for digital merchandising, and soon after I was managing our client’s Amazon digital shelf less  –consisting primarily of each brand’s Amazon Brand Store, their product’s PDP A+ Content, and various digital assets used for Amazon Advertising. Through this work, I became dexterous again in Adobe Photoshop, and competent in using Amazon’s A/B testing capabilities to hone my instincts about what works and why.

While I enjoyed the work of digital merchandising, I fell head-over-heels in love with the art of creating visualization – which required flexing both my creative and logical capacities.  I spend a consider amount of time and effort teaching myself the art of distilling complex information into concise and compelling visual narratives – an art that marries my love of the cleanliness and structure of well-maintained data and the emotional connection of well-crafted content.

For my reporting, I primarily used Excel (as it is a ubiquitous tool across all industries) and reveled in employing new skills and techniques into the handful of reports I created – some of which are still in use today.  Towards the end I was able to explore Tableau to created data visualizations based on TKTK.

It was somewhere around the first year, where I was deeply intrenched in the scope and flow of my work, that what I now call my Ikigai dawned on me -  the triad of normalizing and mapping systems, analyzing these systems for insights and actionable information, and distilling and conveying this information in concise, visually intuitive ways. This is the work I’m drawn to, and the trajectory of my career is doing this work in systems of greater size and complexity.