There are a few necessary, but unsexy, topics discussed in teams working in analytics in industry. The topics of data warehouses and reporting are rarely talked about in favour of sexier topics like machine learning or neural networks. However, this is something that is common in our industry, and should be discussed and shared. The last 3 months I've been focused on a new challenge: building a team from spreadsheet-hell to functioning data team producing advanced analytics for the company. These challenges are common challenges that a new employee might face: how to build a data warehouse, what are the problems a business is trying to solve, what is a good workflow for analytics, and how to integrate analytical techniques into the company. All this will be in the context of Human Resource analytics, which has its own complications around privacy of data.

In this talk, I'll discuss how we built a data warehouse and some of the techniques we used, how to approach a new domain that has been traditionally data-uninformed, and some novel advanced analytics techniques coming out of academics that we are applying the Human Resources analytics at Shopify.