Episode description

On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong share two popular episodes of Bruno Aziza’s YouTube series Data Journeys.

First up, Bruno talks with Aaron Biller of Postmates about their triangle of complex data that includes customer, courier, and merchant. He details their data storage and analytics structure, describing it as a reverse pyramid of tons of data with few engineers to manage and analyze it. To handle this, Postmates takes a stay-out-of-the-way approach by providing good data and letting the analysts do what they do best without micromanaging. Aaron talks about this data architecture, including the use of BigQuery as data lakes to keep data storage simple, and how Google collaboration tools streamline access and authorization tasks. Communication and flexibility are important, Aaron tells us, and he offers other advice for companies designing data systems. Feedback loops, dedicated training, and an open environment with no silos also help foster a productive, healthy data workplace.

Matteo of Delivery Hero speaks to Bruno next. With the goal of increasing their global reach and offerings, it’s important that Delivery Hero has a smooth data system. Matteo outlines the new data structure they’ve built to ease onboarding of new companies and territories and describes different use cases for their data. From determining the number of delivery people necessary in each area to offering personalized customer recommendations, Delivery Hero uses Google offerings like Google Analytics and BigQuery to interpret collected data. Matteo details how they tailor data infrastructures for each use case and offers tips to help companies think through their data infrastructure design. Don’t work in a bubble, Matteo stresses, and focus on thorough onboarding of team members and clear communication with colleagues and customers.

Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. He specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, he worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led a big turnarounds in the business analytics industry. Bruno also had the opportunity to help launch startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco). Sisense and AtScale and helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. He has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany and has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics.

Aaron is the Manager of Data Engineering at Postmates.

Matteo is Senior Director of Global Data Products and Analytics at Delivery Hero.

• Celebrating National Muffin Day with machine learning blog
• Managed Istio-based service mesh on our managed GKE clusters: Anthos Service Mesh comes to GKE Autopilot blog

• Data Journeys videos
• Episode 12: How Postmates delivers on data needs with just six data engineers video
• Episode 5: How Delivery Hero uses data to deliver meals video
• BigQuery site
• Google Workspace site
• Dataproc site
• Pub/Sub site
• Google Analytics site
• Looker site
• Tableau site
• Data Studio site
• GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 281: Google Cloud Next Data, Analytics, and AI Launches with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza podcast

Steph is working on the next Ask Google Cloud event and she wants your Kubernetes questions!

Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong