Why does Taboola need a Product Analytics guild?
About 3.5 years ago, before the guild existed, the job market was especially turbulent. We were struggling to retain people, and there was little emphasis on professional development. We ran an engagement survey to check what we were sensing, and the results confirmed it: people didn't feel connected to the organization. It helped us see where we stood and how people were feeling. We knew we had to make a change and build something inside the company that would help people grow and connect with each other. Something that would make people feel good at Taboola. That insight is where the guild came from.
How was the guild created?
The Product Analytics guild sits under the product group, which is split into 4 groups: advertiser products, publisher products, programmatic products and Taboola News products. Each group is run by a Head of Product, with teams of analysts, UI/UX people and product people beneath them. Each head of an analyst group is a director (4 directors in total), and together they make up the board of the Product Analytics guild.
We had 2 motivations for starting the guild. The first was retaining people and raising the satisfaction of the analysts on our teams. The second was that we felt like a kind of service provider, and we didn't like that. Today we're part of the product. We work closely with the product managers to move our products forward. When we launched the guild, we set up the managing board so we'd work together. We realized that if we as managers didn't work together, our teams wouldn't either.
The leadership team went on an offsite with the VP Product to map out all the difficulties and needs of the analyst role. We pinned down the problems, found the bottlenecks, figured out what could be improved, and marked the areas to focus on. One of the most important decisions we made was that the top priority was learning to work together as a management team, along with choosing which goals we wanted to push forward.
What is the Product Analytics guild and how does it work?
The guild has a management team made up of the actual team managers, plus a Guild Master who leads the guild day to day. The Guild Master is one of the analysts on the team, and 30% of her position is dedicated to the guild: creating content, talking to people, mapping what guild members need, and building guild days, hackathons and fun days. She owns the entire professional experience in the guild. She also has her own goals and an annual plan, which she builds with the board, brings for approval and then carries out. It's not an easy role to fill. It takes a lot of "soft" skills, like making things happen, moving projects forward and gathering feedback from the field. At the same time, it's a hugely influential and meaningful role, both in the guild and in the company.
Here are some of the things we do on a regular basis:
- Once a month we hold a guild meeting to catch up. Each manager shares what their team has been working on, and there's a use case or some outside enrichment. As part of that learning, we've done all kinds of enrichment workshops, such as a visualization workshop, a statistics course and A/B testing.
- We have learning groups. 4 guild members take a course together (on Udemy, say), then pass the knowledge on to their teams.
- At least twice a year we run a hackathon: a full guild day with a clear agenda and a deliverable we want to walk away with at the end of the day. One of the deliverables from our latest hackathon was a Data Spec, a checklist for the product analyst right before a new feature ships. Before that, everyone had their own way of working and things slipped through the cracks. The hackathon helped us align and standardize our work processes.
- Onboarding for new employees. Along the way, we realized we needed a shared source of knowledge: one organized place for everything we'd built up over the years, for the new people joining the company and the guild. So we created an onboarding program with content, recorded talks and 1:1 sessions.
- The guild is also involved in hiring. The take-home assignment we give candidates was written by the guild. When we hire someone new, we hire for the guild, and if there's a professional fit, we match the candidate to the team that needs them most and fits best at that point in time.
When did you know the guild was working?
Once a year we run an engagement survey for our employees. 2 years after we started the guild, we saw improvements of tens of percent across every engagement metric. Some of the metrics that improved: how good employees feel, how engaged they are with their workplace, how engaged they are with the domain they work on, and a sense that their own professionalism, and their managers' professionalism, had improved.
Beyond that, we measure success on an ongoing basis. We keep an OKR file made up of objectives (the big things we want to focus on) and key results (clear, measurable targets). Every key result has an owner who reports in the monthly meeting on how we're progressing toward the goal, whether they need help, and so on. We see a positive trend on most of the OKRs we set for ourselves.
Cracking the win-win: how do you make sure both the community and the organization get value?
The win for employees
Professional value and personal growth, a sense of meaning and enjoyment at work, and room for career development. Guild members feel like an integral part of building the product.
The win for the organization
Better ways of working across the whole organization, work done to a consistent high standard, employee retention, better working relationships between groups, and a stronger Taboola brand both internally and externally.
What challenges did you face?
- A major challenge early on was working together as parallel team leads, because we come from different groups, with different products and different priorities. At first every meeting was chaos. We quickly realized that if we didn't make compromises and align with each other, we'd never build the guild we were aiming for. Through the weekly meetings and our ongoing work together, we got to know each other and learned to communicate better and work as one. That shared work has done a lot to strengthen and unite the guild.
- Positioning the Guild Master role. The Guild Master's role is complex and full of challenges. On one hand, she's one of the analysts and very much on their level. On the other, she has to lead without managerial authority, which can be challenging at times. On top of that, the role is about driving projects and people and getting things done. Whoever takes it on needs to know the challenges and be able to handle them, but their impact on the guild and on the whole organization is very significant.
- Improving how we work with other teams. At first we were treated a bit like service staff, so we thought about how to raise the standing of analytics people in the eyes of R&D, for example. One of the things we did was build an external and internal branding program.
External: we shared value on social media, ran activities and gave back to the community. When we gave value outward, we got very positive feedback, and that raised our standing internally too.
Internal: over time the guild grew, and our influence in the organization grew significantly. Lately we've been thinking about how to push forward changes that will have an impact at the organizational level.
Tips for community success
- If you want to build a guild and have it succeed, you have to put real work into it and not do it on the side. Give it your full focus, free up 20% to 30% of your time, and spend that time on the guild alone. There's a huge amount of ongoing work: rallying the people around you and bringing in management and everyone else who's involved. The more value you give, the more things will fall into place and the more meaningful they'll become.
- Get support from the organization. Our guild has a lot of support. We get resources, backing, time and guidance. I don't think this could have succeeded or lasted without management's support. Guild members feel that support too, and they feel how important it is to free up time for everything the guild does.