Why We Started Snowpack

Data is hard!

If we've learned anything working in the data and analytics space for the past decade, it's that data is hard. Between the ever changing landscape of technology and vendors, and the increasing breadth of data required to answer questions we've found that the problem has only become more challening as the industry has moved towards big data.

The second thing that we've learned is that everyone is suffering from the same problem. Increasingly we find ourselves encountering the same challenges as our colleagues, industry peers, and even anonymous professionals spattering their complaints into the void of the internet. Given these challenges we determined to seek out the root problem and solve it at the source.

Data orgs grow out of necessity

And therein lies the problem. No companies are set up for success. Most modern tech companies begin to search for their first analytics hire around employee 20. Some more data-savvy companies may opt for that earlier, but more often than not, a hapless young analyst begins building dashboards and writing bespoke sql queries that the business deems mission critical, and immediately becomes invaluable. Before they know it the company is scaling to hundreds of employees, and this analyst becomes indespensible, soon dozens of his teammates are churning out bespokes reports and metrics for the c-suite with no single foundational layer, oftentimes queried directly against the production database. The problem is that this isn't scalable, it's inherently inaccurate, and it doesn't set the foundation for a high-utility analytics team, but by this point there's no turning back.

Build scalable foundations early

Our goal is to change this. As consultants we aim to create a foundation for success, and provide a playbook for how to scale. We specialize in building a robust and scalable foundation for your analytics org so that your first data hire can deliver hire leverage work on day one, the same as your twentieth hire. We aim to apply our expertise in understanding the insane world of technology and vendors to deliver well structured data ingestion, a repeatable base layer, and documented plan for entity modeling that ensures when the data team inevitably needs to scale, they're delivering results to the business instead of paying down technical debt. We've done this for the businesses we've worked full time with, but as consultants we aim to lessen the burden, achieving this work on a project basis. Without the need to hire a full-time experienced data engineer, and analyst, our clients can achieve higher leverage when they begin scaling their analytics orgs with full time hires.