I first heard Elena speak on another podcast and was shocked to hear an analyst talk about one of the biggest companies to emerge during the pandemic: Peloton. Someone from the inside, as it were, is talking about topics that Peloton would likely want to keep confidential. Due to PR and the restrictions that come with an NDA, Elena couldn't come on the podcast to talk about the data projects she was working last year. A few months ago, Elena became a principal data scientist at Superhuman, and is now able to share a little more about her experience at Peloton. As an avid user of Peloton's bike and app, I was extremely excited to dig into the types of projects Elena was working on that shaped Peloton's product roadmap. We get dive into the world of product analytics at Elena's former employer and at her current gig at Superhuman. Joining Peloton as the first product analyst in 2018 Hard to believe, but Peloton was just a bike company when Elena first joined the company. Peloton was working on the Tread product at the time but it hadn't been released. The product team wanted to make more data-driven decisions to help inform what product features to build next. There was an existing business intelligence team who was building reports around sales and marketing campaigns, but no product analysts were there to help guide the product roadmap. Elena was hired in 2018 to help build a practice around product analytics. Source: Buzzfeed Surprisingly, Elena didn't really have direct product analytics experience. In her previous roles, she was more of a product owner and did things more akin to a product manager. It was an opportunity for Elena to define the purpose of the product analytics team and how they interacted with the rest of the business. Answering data questions from the business As one might imagine, the product team at Peloton is asking what features might increase repeat engagement on the app. It was Elena's job to answer these type of questions. Like many organizations, the analytics function will get inundated with questions and Elena found herself with a backlog of important questions to answer. There are so many great quotes and gifs from Peloton to include in this post. As Peloton grew, so did the number of questions. Elena started hiring a team and was leading the process for how questions get asked, who gets to ask these questions, and how the product analytics team engages with internal stakeholders. Elena eventually grew the product analytics team to 14. As the analytics team grew, Elena had to maintain a ratio of product managers and analysts as the product analytics manager. Elena mentioned a few resources that helped her with learning about product analytics, engagement, and user activation: * Sequoia Capital's "Building Data-Informed Products" Medium posts - Learn about growth accounting, stickiness metrics, and how to build a data team* Amplitude's Blog - Amplitude also happens to be the main product analytics vendor at Peloton* Reforge's Product Management courses - Paid course used by a lot of Silicon Valley product managers Establishing cross-functional KPIs and metrics definitions In addition to getting asked data questions, Elena's team was in charge of building dashboards showing stats about product usage and metrics. This series of events might also sound familiar to many of you who spend your days...