Data & Analytics is one of the fastest-growing fields worldwide. This, of course, isn’t a surprise because everyone is saying that Data is the New Oil. It is true because oil as data doesn’t bring value itself. It needs to be properly transformed and processed in order to create meaningful information. Based on that, we can share some insights & recommendations.

This is exactly what the Business Intelligence team is doing in TSG. They empower decision-makers through best-in-class tools & solutions that give them access to the most important data that help them to improve the experience of our players 

and help them to make better decisions. We can compare this to sitting on the crow’s nest of a ship and relaying the most important insights & recommendations to the captain and crew.

“Based on the World Economic Forum and their report about the future of jobs in 2020 top 3 growing fields in the world are Data & Analytics positions, and that’s why in TSG, we are investing here a lot in order to have a competitive position in the industry.” Michał Szczudlak, Head of BI, tells us.

Working Smart

How does the BI team approach their work?

“We are operating as a Center of Excellence, meaning that we are sitting together as one team. Still, we are spread across the company, working together with marketing & product teams.” Michał explains  “On a daily basis, people are embedded in these teams to work as closely as possible. In order to provide meaningful insights & recommendations, you have to understand exactly what the teams that you are supporting are doing and why. Every game that we have in our portfolio has dedicated analytical specialists and, for some bigger titles, even bigger teams.”

To do this, the Business Intelligence team has to use a variety of tools to help them process the data, visualize, model, and explain it.

“When it comes to processing data, the most important is understanding SQL, which is the language that helps you take the data from the database and manipulate it. When it comes to further manipulating and modeling, we are using Tableau, which is one of the best business intelligence tools that allows you to build interactive dashboards with all of the data. Depending on the case, we are also leveraging the power of open source, and we are using Python language to build more sophisticated models.” Michał adds.

The Harder Part

With this much data and models going around, come certain challenges that need to be resolved. One of the biggest ones that BI is facing is translating bare data into understandable, actionable insights which answer the business needs of the stakeholders.

“The ability to conclude based on pure, database-derived information is the most crucial yet the most challenging part of the work as an analyst. This road, leading from the data gathering to forming the conclusion, is paved with the deep need to understand what is hidden behind the numbers and the ability to translate it into recommendations and analysis. “ Michał says.

All of this also means taking different approaches to different products. We also asked the BI team how they integrate with the products they analyze.

“As I said already, people are embedded in the product teams. They are not reporting to product managers in order to have a different and more objective voice, but they are a part of the teams. This thinking goes even further because once we have bigger teams, we have specialization within the teams. The best example is the work with LiveOps teams, responsible for building this fantastic engagement through the whole events machine. From the player’s perspective in Fishing Clash, those are all challenges, championships, and all other events that we are launching on a daily basis. We are analyzing the performance of our users in each event, in each threshold, in order to keep the engagement & monetization statistics on a high level. As product analytics, we are providing insights & recommendations for these teams in order to build better-optimized events, so we are aiming to have a better iteration every time.” Michał answers.

This means that cooperation with the product team has real, visible results, allowing the BI team to see the effects of their work firsthand.

“With our analysis, not only can we help with daily tasks, but also when it comes to building new features by developers. We can find out what our players like about the game and introduce it to the new elements of the game. The most important thing for us is our player’s good user experience.”  – Monika Marczewska, Junior Product Analyst, adds.

Impact and Independence

To finish off, we asked the folks what they think makes the BI team unique. Here’s what they answered:

“What is unique about working in TSG’s BI team is that despite working for different games and different products, we all share similar goals, and we can count on our teammates to help us with our challenges. We have a positive impact on what is happening in our games, and each day brings brand new challenges.” – Monika says.

“Working in the BI team gives you an opportunity to find challenging questions and answers to them. Each of us needs to have the ability to examine a problem, find a method to fix it and apply this solution in order to make our business decisions more precise and safer. That comes with a large dose of responsibility and ownership, but also gives a lot of independence and valuable experience, which I find very satisfying.” Jan Zieliński, Lead Data Analyst summarizes.