November 19, 2019
Employee Spotlight: Martin Carrillo
Who is behind the key product features that go into every product release? Today, we introduce you to Peter Dolan, a Product Manager at AtScale.
What is your role at AtScale?
A: I am on the AtScale product team. I primarily focus on launching new feature sets and working through the accompanying business implications. This means that I also spend a lot of time with sales and marketing, in addition to working closely with our product and engineering teams.
How long have you been at the company?
A: I have been with AtScale for a little less than two and a half years.
What does a typical “day in the life” look like for you?
A: No two days are the same, and that’s what makes it interesting. On any given day, I could be researching and working on requirement documents for features that won’t be in our product for 6+ months, participating in engineering sprint reviews for our next release, or working on messaging around our current set of capabilities.
You’re credited as an author in our “State of Reports” series. Can you speak to any interesting findings from the reports thus far?
A: The “State of Reports” series are a hugely collaborative effort by several team members across the company. Dianne Wood, our data modeling guru, integrates the different data sets using the AtScale Design Center and provides analysis-ready data. Our BI team members, specifically Stella Valcheva and Gerri Illieva, explore the data using tools like Tableau and Excel and craft the visualizations that drive the insights. These reports are snapshots of a constantly evolving story and unlike a static report published by a consulting company or research firm, consumers can connect their BI tools directly to the data model behind the reports and continue to follow the reported trends and insights over time.
In our most recent State of COVID-19: Impact on Retail report, we were able to quantify the accelerating growth of e-commerce at the expense of many types of brick and mortar sectors. I don’t think anyone would find that surprising, but it will be exciting to continue to monitor that trend over time. If the scale of the shift away from in-person retail is a permanent shift in consumer behavior, the second-order effects will be pretty massive in areas like employment and commercial real estate.
What makes AtScale and our solution unique?
A: The people and the culture is what will continue to set the company apart. While everyone here respects and recognizes the ingenuity and hard work that has built the product and customer relationships that we have today, we recognize the work isn’t done, and the market is always evolving. People here continuously reevaluate the previous assumptions and relentlessly seek out ways to improve our products, services, and processes.
We continuously hear from our customers that AtScale is the only solution in the market where they don’t have to pick between the flexibility of adapting to evolving business requirements and the speed and performance to deliver timely insights. From the business user’s perspective, AtScale abstracts away the complexity of the data stack, accelerating data-driven decision making. This abstraction empowers data engineers to take advantage of the latest innovations in the market without disrupting the business, which is why it’s even more important as a product team that we “skate to where the puck is going” and continue to serve our customers’ evolving needs.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
A: Each project or problem is unique and requires completely different skill sets or even modes of thinking. But that is what makes it interesting! Constantly needing to learn different things, and continuing to build upon my own professional skill sets and competencies.
The most rewarding?
A: The expectation that if you have an idea, you are encouraged and supported when you try and solve it. Whether that’s a completely different way of looking at how we see our market, or how we price or package, it’s really rewarding to get that kind of encouragement and support to go out and try to solve problems and own the success of your ideas.
Describe AtScale in three words.
A: Innovative, Collaborative, Unstoppable.
When you’re not working, where are people most likely to find you?
A: I like to stay active, whether that’s going for runs and hikes. When we’re not in a pandemic, I like to play basketball as much as possible.
Thank you, Peter! Interested in meeting the rest of our team? Check out our past interviews:
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