CEO Insights India

Asailor sails a ship through rough waters so does a competent leader who understands the market very well. By comprehending the minuet aspects of business, such leaders can evolve companies into unicorns. Speaking of understanding a market (its uncertainties and opportunities), the role of data and analytics is far and wide. It is at the heart of the digital revolution, and it is imperative for every business to start leveraging data and analytics to drive success. Though being a structured and hypothesis-driven process, analytics is pretty descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive in nature that needs a competent Chief Analytics Officer who can act as a catalyst to derive knowledge from data and formulate a winning strategy supported by insights.

Swapnasarit Sahu, the CAO of Zeotap is one such veteran in the analytics niche who is well-equipped to leverage the digital gold (big data) and extract meaningful business insights. With 17 years of market experience in Data Science and Machine Learning, Swapnasarit Sahu uses the potential of data to the maximum to scale Zeotap while helping its clients with unconventional analytics solutions. The following excerpt is an exclusive conversation between Swapnasarit Sahu and CEO Insights that briefs his journey, leadership role, and more.

Brief us on your educational and professional background before Zeotap.
My professional journey began in 2004 as analytics professional building statis tical models. Intrigued with the potential of Machine Learning, I started to self-

learn the booming ML technology. My core educational specialization is in Complex Adaptive Systems from Chalmers University, Sweden. The reason to pursue coursework was to learn more about ML and specialize in Optimization and Machine learning. I also got introduced to the vibrant startup ecosystem on the campus and started working for them part time(mostly writing codes to build ML and optimization algorithms).These were the days when deep learning was not even invented. After coming back to India, I worked with startups such as [24]7.ai, Komli Media, Air- push, etc. I was a founding member of the ML team in most of these startups. In Airpush Inc, which was the 2nd largest mobile ad network USA, I initiated and grew the Data Science and Analytics Practice with 40+ team members. The last 10 years were largely spent in Adtech and Martech ecosystem.

What different roles & responsibilities have you been undertaking at Zeotap?
Broadly, my responsibilities can be categorized into taking care of Internal and External Analytics. With regards to internal analytics, my focus is on using the In-house data or our organizational data to help Zeotap make better strategic decisions. I handle the vision and development of the overall data management and strategy framework of the company. In terms of external analytics, the focus is on building products for our clients. To be more specific, Zeotap is a Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP)/Customer Data Platform (CDP)that helps companies better understand their customers and predict behaviours by discovering patterns in data. The equal part of my job role is to ensure quality service is available to clients as

well.

How is your professional experience helping you at Zeotap? How do you develop your product strategy to ensure that it meets the vision and goals of the company?
Being an initial team member of multiple startups helped me go through the process of starting Data Practices from the scratch (right from data gathering, to governance, vision & design of products, and scaling up team). This experience is making me help companies rapidly scale and stay abreast with the market trends.

To answer the second part, every product should be data driven rather than just being vision driven. It should involve larger initiative around every decision. The market provides quite a bit of feedback for this. To be able to listen to the market carefully, you should monitor your product uses and customer feedbacks, understand your customer problems, pain points and see if you can bring Intelli gence to solve it efficiently, and also make competitor analysis time-to-time to build your goals and orient your products.

How do you connect new ideas to your business strategy? Also, how do you measure the success of a new launch?
I am a firm believer in Data Driven Decision Making. In my opinion, Business Strategy emerges through the decisions made with the help of data driven insights.

We measure success in three ways. How much does a new product excite the customer base? How many customers are ready to move to new offerings (upsell)? What revenue potential it holds? The actual revenue follows if the above three aspects are right in place.

Swapnasarit Sahu, CAO, Zeotap
With 17 years of market experience in Data Science and Machine Learning, Swapnasarit uses the potential of data to the maximum to scale Zeotap while helping its clients with unconventional analytics solutions.