Hello, RJMetrics

I am incredibly excited to share that the next step in my career is working as the first Strategic Account Manager for RJMetrics!

RJMetrics is a Philadelphia-based start-up that provides business analytics to aid companies in making data-driven decisions.

That’s a little corporate-speaky, so they break it down for you in video:

And, if you’re not in the mood for a show, here’s my version:

Businesses – especially in eCommerce – collect a lot of data about their customers. They’re almost in the data business as much as they’re in the business business. They know data is important, but when it comes to querying, analyzing, and reporting on that data it become a big time-suck that I know too well. People get lost in the weeds of data requests, Excel crosstabs, and creating glossy charts for their presentations. The process becomes their whole job, and if it turns out they didn’t quite get the right data the first time around, all that work gets scrapped and repeated.

RJMetrics makes the relatively un-bold proposal that your time could be better spent, and they do that by presenting an easy-to-use, web-based software that connects to your data and presents all of those metrics in a dashboard that anyone (and everyone!) in your organization can dig into. You can change sources on the fly, perform cohort analysis, and output data and charts with just a few clicks. I learned how to use it in less than an hour.

It’s intelligent, it’s elegant, and it’s the kind of obvious product that ought to be ubiquitous across all businesses that live and die by understanding the trends emerging from their customers. And, as an Account Manager there it will be my job to help make it ubiquitous – and to ensure clients are getting the most out of the product!

As with many amazing developments in my life, my new position is owed almost entirely to social media interactions.

I recently attended a “Working for Start-Ups” seminar with @Marina_Rakhlin through Girl Develop It – an incredible global org that helps women (and men) lifelong learners acquire the skills they need to develop software. E sometimes teaches with GDI, and I mostly took the course so that I could better understand the start-up world that she occupies at Monetate.

Just a few weeks later, one of my local Twitter musician friends, @BenGarvey, mentioned he was starting his new job at RJMetrics. Ben had recently told me about his new adventures in software at a chance encounter at BarCamp Philly, so I was intrigued to see where he landed. And then I learned all of the above, and saw that RJMetrics had a Strategic Account Manager position available.

Having just taken such an amazing seminar on working for start-ups, I took a shot at it! I went through the most awesome and entertaining interview process, which you can read about in RJMetrics’s post “Data Driven Hiring.” (Their “Getting Startup Jobs If You Aren’t a Programmer” post is also great.) After meeting the RJ team and their CEO Robert Moore – and a very difficult deliberation with my own council of advisors – I decided that after 10 years in health care it was time to try something new and different.

What won’t be different is that I’ll be working for a brand with a product I believe in and with people who I am already excited to collaborate with. It means so much to me to be able to advocate for my brand to my friends in person and on social media, and I’m excited to do that as I learn and grow with RJMetrics!

And that’s the end of this week’s big news! Now, off to a weekend of belated birthday celebrations with E and recording final vocals with Gina. Nothing could be better!