Data & Product at PAXO Health & Beauty

March 2020 was when I resigned from my teaching position at Dannis to go fully into tech. As luck would have it, COVID-19 started at the end of the same month. In May, I started data science with Stutern, an action I applauded as it happened remotely. All through COVID-19 I was running data science and taking my previous class (basic 6) in online classes.

A lot happened in between and in April 2021, Easter Tuesday, I resumed at PAXO primarily as a data analyst.

In the Beginning

Coming into PAXO Health & Beauty as a data analyst, the bulk of my job during my first few weeks involved doing growth research and tools needed for web analytics on the new platform. And then, I had to be the one testing new features on the platform we were building.

As a data analyst, I also needed to add the necessary components to ensure data is collected and ready for analysis. I integrated analytics using Google Analytics. There was Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity for heatmaps and visual capture of the customer’s journey. Most of these third-party integrations (including facebook and google conversion pixels) were done using Google tag manager (GTM). This GTM setup allowed me to start/pause any srvice I don’t need anymore.

I delved deeper into web analytics and then product analytics. You know, setting up all these platforms, creating dataLayer variables and struggling to ensure the developer adds them correctly; which was unfortunately not possible for them.

The Present

Now the new site is live and I have settled in as the data analyst and the product manager.

As a data analyst in a small company, my priority when sourcing for tools is to seek for those that are either very affordable or that are opensource. I prefer being productive and profitable to looking fancy but burning cash pretty fast. Also, this helps me try out different things until I find out what exactly it is I want to achieve then, what software can help me get that done.

My Data Tool Stack

• Google analytics
• Hotjar/MS Clarity
• Metabase
• Excel
• Python
• Datawrapper

On here, I use WordPress a lot to either whip up quick landing pages or just to test out something we need. I also use Google sites for landing pages. I recently ditched MailChimp for Zoho emails (still taking a look at Sendy/AmazonSES) as our email tool for the sake of flexibility in sending emails to different group of people at an affordable rate; at any time.

Managing Products

My journey into product mnagement started here at PAXO. While building the new site I turned out to be the go-to person when it comes to testing features. I stepped further into having to create dataLayers for the site (as the analyst), and then putting other [data and product-related] things in place.

Soon, I moved in very close to having to test features and suggest new features. Then managing developers. This was when I stepped up a bit to trying out Basecamp and Jira, although I had to go for Google sheet since all parties involved are very much familiar with it.

The Present Present 😂

I started this post few weeks to my departure and I completed it after I had already left. What I learnt working at PAXO was that, your job role is often a determinant of what next you do with your life. It can be a disastrous thing and it can be the best thing that ever happened to you in terms of helping you re-define your career path.

I am happy with the work I did at the company. It made me learn couple of things I never saw myself learning. It allowed me experiment and explore wildly.