Building a data platform and team from scratch at Smartfrog

The challenge

Smartfrog (which had just acquired Canary) had no central data infrastructure. Important decisions were made on gut feel because there was no reliable data to lean on, and nobody yet owned the problem.

What I did

I joined as the first data employee and built the whole thing end to end: data architecture, ETL, a warehouse, and BI and analytics tooling, plus ERP integration for financial and operational reporting. I hired and led a six-person data team and worked closely with top management to grow their confidence in data-driven decisions.

Outcomes

• Stood up a scalable data platform that supported company-wide analytics.
• Gave the business real-time, reliable reporting in place of ad-hoc extracts.
• Connected the ERP so finance and operations shared one source of truth.
• Built a data team and a data culture where there had been neither.