Season 3, Episode 3: How to run an analytics team (with Russell Ovans)

My guest in this week's episode of the podcast is Russell Ovans, who recently published a book, Game Analytics: Retention and Monetization in Free-to-Play Mobile Games. Russell has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and began his career in academia before transitioning to industry and starting one of the first Western social free-to-play gaming studios.

The topic of my conversation with Russell is the structure and management of successful analytics teams at consumer technology companies. Among other things, we discuss:

• What purpose an analytics team should serve, and what value it should add;
• The optimal way to structure an analytics team;
• The difference between analytics and data science;
• How analytics teams fail;
• and Who should "own" the LTV metric in a consumer tech company.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

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