Scaling Success: Transitioning from Start-Up to Global Impact in Business Analytics
Five years ago, I started my Workday journey when our then start-up, Stories.bi, was acquired. I’m now Senior Manager of Software Development Engineering for Workday in Prague, where we’re working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to build invaluable tools for our customers to make work days brighter for all. Since the acquisition, the team in Prague has consistently grown, and we’re currently an office of 90+ people who get to look over the panoramic views of Prague from our beautiful city-center office.
Going from a startup to part of a global tech company like Workday has been exciting! I was used to our small, 10-person team working from a small apartment, and suddenly, we were among more than 17,800 Workmates around the world. It was a major transition to suddenly have a huge network for support. I initially felt like I was sailing through a vast ocean, but I never felt lost — our new colleagues worked very hard to make sure we had everything we needed to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible.
And that’s what I love about Workday: the approachability and attitude of everyone here, including the leadership team from the very top. I love that “employees” is one of our company values. And as our values state, ‘We’re good people kicking ass, growing to last’. I wasn’t sure what to expect when Workday acquired us, but the environment and culture we walked into was great from the beginning.
Blending People, Ideas and Tech
Right away, we had to switch from the mindset of developing a product for a specific customer to developing an enterprise-scalable solution that can work for every type of customer, regardless of industry, size and data maturity. The fact that Workday is more or less standardised helped a lot, but it was — and still can be — quite challenging navigating this in every feature we develop. Nevertheless, it just motivates us to push the quality of our products we develop even further.
My main focus currently is our augmented analytics applications, which is more commonly referred to as Workday People Analytics. People Analytics analyzes employee data that Workday has collected across our customer-base to bring automatic, valuable insights to our customers. This can be about anything from the biggest drivers of employee attrition to the potential to increase diversity in the workforce. It enables the end-users to make data-driven decisions that improve both their employee experience and their business success.
My role is to lead my team while working with Product Management on strategy and planning to ensure the product we’re supporting is invaluable to customers and delivering on their needs, and making sure our engineering team delivers the output from this in software that is resilient, solid and scalable. I love all aspects of my role. This is a place where my work days are brighter; people, ideas and technology blend together and I enjoy thinking about how to make sure all these components work together in a productive and supportive way.
How We’re Building our People Analytics App
Workday People Analytics scans through millions of possible insights hidden within the data of a business and detects which are impactful or of interest. In order to do this automatically and at scale for each customer, we rely on a blend of deterministic and statistical machine learning models. In other words, we combine our domain knowledge of Workday employee data and its processes together with our custom ML models.
I really enjoy working with our internal ML platform. It allows us to use common frameworks such as AWS SageMaker, DataBricks or HuggingFace within the ecosystem of Workday rich data. We also have ML DevOps capabilities providing hosting and availability of our models within customer environments. I personally really like the HuggingFace framework. I like their focus on the ML community as a whole, and what they’re doing to democratise this rapidly-evolving technology.
Different business, same vision
The great thing about my ‘startup to Workday’ experience is that my mission as an engineer has never changed. Our vision at Stories.bi was to change the world of business analytics and alleviate the heavy burden of manual repeated tasks from analysts, and that’s still true here at Workday. The culture match between the companies was very close. The difference now is that we get to do it with the support of a global enterprise and a team of brilliant Workmates who like to do things with integrity and have fun doing so. By connecting Workday’s enterprise applications to a unified data model, we’ve been able to deliver consistent security across applications and continue with our vision on a much larger scale. I can’t wait to start offering our solution to hundreds of companies in the near future.
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