A Real Story From My Past

Once upon a time, I had to convince a really important customer to sign a partnership contract with us. We’d been talking and doing trial runs for a year, but the customer still wasn’t sure.

Both our companies could see the potential in the data we were offering, but we struggled to show its real value because the data was so complicated. I can’t give specifics, but imagine a huge data source made by combining two massive databases with lots of tangled information using a tricky method.

We decided to go the extra mile to convince this customer. Literally we went the extra mile by crossing the ocean to visit their headquarters. It was our last chance last dance.

Before the big meeting, I spent months working with this data, setting up a data system and looking at the data in different ways. I found and fixed many mistakes in my process and the raw data. It was tough, but also kind of fun!

But thanks to this hard work, I realised something critical: the data was just too hard for most people to understand. That was the main problem we had to solve, and as someone who works with the data every day, I was the best person to untangle it and find the important bits. This project didn’t depend on our Product Manager nor the Business Expert. It was all about making the data friendly.

Me: “Hey, I will not share any slides, I will share with XX my Apache Zeppelin notebook and we’ll query the data online during my presentation”

My Manager (after taking a deep breath): “Make sure your connection works!”

Dramatisation of the events

So there I was in a room full of people way above my pay-grade, explaining how they could perform SQL queries interactively through this webpage that I prepared for them, and they were not shy at all…

We started exploring together some results answering their questions. It was not all shiny and happy though… it took some eternal few minutes to start the Spark cluster, and I faced some awkward moments where I got blank and couldn’t find the proper SQL syntax for their questions but… it was a success! This was the outcome of this meeting:

1. The customer was eager to dive into the data on their own, and thanks to the transparency and our ability to finally address some of their lingering questions, they signed the contract right then and there.

2. They asked me to help them to install Zeppelin on their cluster.

3. To top it off, they even jokingly tried to hire me in front of my manager.

Now, here’s the fun part: there are 2 truths and 1 lie… I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which!