Alter Everything Podcast

AlteryxMatt

In this episode of Alter Everything, host Matt Rotundo talks with Alex Abi-Najm, a top contributor and ACE in the Alteryx community. Alex shares his journey from working in the restaurant industry to becoming an Alteryx expert. They discuss his passion for enabling others through the Alteryx Community, his experiences with the Alteryx Grand Prix, and his tips for achieving Expert Certification. Additionally, Alex shares his favorite use cases with Alteryx, his strategies for contributing to the community, and his goals for 2025, which include exploring Designer Cloud and traveling to new countries!

Panelists

Alex Abi-Najm, Alteryx ACE and Solutions & Enablement Lead @ Aimpoint Digital, @alexnajm, LinkedIn

Matt Rotundo, Associate Engagement Engineer @ Alteryx - @AlteryxMatt, LinkedIn

Topics

Ep 177 (YT thumb).png

Transcript

Episode Transcription

Ep 177 Final Mixdown

[00:00:00]

Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am passing the mic to my colleague Matt Rotundo, who you may know as Alteryx Matt on our community. In this episode, Matt Chats with Alex Abbi Naam, a community top contributor in Alteryx, ACE.

They talk about how Alex got his start with analytics, his passion for enabling others with Alteryx VR community, his experience with the Alteryx Grand Prix, tips for the expert certification and more. Let's get started.

Hi Alex. Thanks for joining us today. Why don't you start us off by giving us a little introduction about yourself.

Thanks, Matt, Alex, Evan. I've been an Alteryx user for almost seven years now. I currently work as a solutions and enablement lead at AimPoint digital teaching companies how to use the Alteryx software, [00:01:00] but also recently became an Alteryx, ace and Alteryx expert this year. So really love the platform itself and really excited to be with you today.

Awesome. Thank you. So just to start from the very beginning, for you, looking at your career journey as a whole, what's it been like up to where you are right now at your current role? Yeah, I feel like I have a very interesting journey because while I've always liked numbers growing up, I was always a math person.

I actually grew up in the restaurant business. I grew up. Waiting tables, busing tables, doing anything at my PMs restaurant in the DC area and coming outta school, I always assumed I would go back and work there, but there was an opportunity to work at Marriott International, at their headquarters here in the DC area for a little bit.

That's where I first got introduced to the Alteryx platform. There was actually a consultancy that said, Hey, you should learn this platform. And here we are seven years later having done a [00:02:00] lot of work at Marriott at the time in Alteryx, and then having come to AimPoint Digital to now train on it full-time.

I. So while I've always liked numbers and felt like I had a sense of analytics as a whole, I would've never guessed that my journey would bring me even to this moment today. That's very, uh, admirable that you took those steps to think, Hey, I can do this, so maybe I should try. I think a lot of people, it stops them being like, oh, I'm comfortable where I'm at.

So maybe not, but it sounds like you knew what you wanted, knew what you liked. You had that affinity for numbers and math, so I think that's a really great way to use that in your everyday life and take that extra step, take that leap of faith and go for something bigger. Absolutely. For me, coming out of school, I, yes, did some analytics classes, but never really liked coding either that much.

It was more from a business perspective. I liked working with numbers, but my [00:03:00] worst class in school was accounting and finance, so I also knew that I didn't want to go down that path either. So analytics seemed like a natural way to mix together working with data, but also being able to put a more business lens on it.

Coming out of school, a lot of the opportunities that I was looking at were in that field of analytics, but really in school we learn about RapidMiner Excel, a little bit of Tableau. So coming into the new role at Marriott and they said, Hey, learn this new platform that has no coding and allows you to work with data in a very visual way was really enticing to me.

It was this project that I was working with to do all this reporting for Marriott twice a week for a whole year, and it ended up being the springboard to the rest of the career. I feel like that's a barrier for a lot of people is like the coding is very daunting and it is a difficult thing to pick up after not knowing anything about it, but [00:04:00] like in your case, knowing about.

The different products that Alteryx works with, Tableau and Excel, and it can really take that and transform it is, I'm sure that was just like a slam dunk for what you were looking for, so I'm happy to hear that. Absolutely. From my perspective as well, the sheer volume of data that we were getting for this project just wasn't.

Any way of handling it in the Excel platform. So for us, it was a matter of need to an extent, but once you got down to it and was able to see the entire pipeline grow from end to end. Then be able to just hit run and have it do everything. It got me really excited. So that initial project ended and I said, look, I want to continue using this platform in the rest of my role for other reports that I can see being a lot more valuable to automate.

And we ended up by the end of the process and going through all the reports that we would do on a. Daily, weekly basis, I would probably estimate that we saved [00:05:00] about 75% of the total time to that it took to build those reports to just automate them and make it easy to click on a run of a button, and it was able to handle more volume for that matter as well.

On the topic of beginnings and firsts, I want to ask you of your first use case using the Alteryx platform. You said that you had to use it for some automation, so I would love to hear about your first use case with the platform. I. Absolutely. So the first instance I had with Alteryx was being able to produce biweekly reporting, meaning twice a week reporting on all the integrations between Marriott and Starwood because Marriott had bought a.

This hotel chain of Sheratons, Westins and so on, and all of the systems had to come online, had to be matching together, had to train up all the employees, had to make sure that they had all the Marriott trainings down. All of this data [00:06:00] for each individual who worked at a Starwood property or a Marriott property, and all the courses they had to take was millions of records.

It just wasn't feasible to do in any. Excel platform, which is what a lot of reporting was done, and so. The reports were being able to send out to different global leads and different hotels of saying how ready you were to do this merger, essentially. And it was a lot of really exciting time because again, this is my first foray into Alteryx.

It was really cool to see how the reports transformed over time, how the workflow transformed over time, all the different little exceptions that we did. By the end of it, we were able to hit that run button, get all the data together and let it ride. And not only did that save a lot of people time that had to produce these 'cause it was very time sensitive, but it did it in a very structured, [00:07:00] rehearsed I.

Auditable manner. That made it really easy for us to say, okay, if we need to make a change, how do we go about doing that? But I'll take a second stab at this, and instead of the first use case, I'll tell you what also my favorite use case was. My favorite use case was being able to map all of the Marriot properties worldwide based on latitude, longitude.

In our system. We had that value, but we didn't have any way to geocode that very easily. This is my first foray into the spatial tools as well. We were able to use that latitude, longitude value to produce a full map of all the properties. At that time, there were about 7,000. Now they're up to about 9,000 worldwide and be able to not only.

Correct some of those values because they were showing up in incorrect locations, but also for the reporting side. We were getting a lot of the metrics in a standard UTC time, but we needed to offset those to local time because for hotels, the [00:08:00] time of local time check-in matters. Are they checking in at 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM We needed to know that rather than this time that was standardized.

We had to map the individual hotel property points with these time zone polygons to be able to do that offsetting measure and therefore be able to give more accurate reporting about who was checking in at what time. So really cool secondary use case, again, probably my favorite use case that I've done even to date.

Wow. Yeah. Looking at millions of data entries and then having them all be combined at the push of a button is No, I. Easy task. So props to you for looking at that and being like, oh yeah, I can definitely handle this. I was definitely very nervous. I'll tell you that. For me, it was exciting though because at by the end of it, we were hitting that run button.

It did take a lot of time. It took probably a few hours each run because of how much volume of data there was [00:09:00] across all these different systems. All the data systems, of course being different in some way. So we had to make sure to reconcile them, to make them consistent, but. By the end of it, it was very much hit that run button, let it ride, check a couple things if we need to, and it all was in one fell swoop.

So really exciting to have that be a part of it. And then that kind of took from there onwards into the rest of the work that I did at Marriott and now to what I do at AM point as well. Awesome. Hopefully that serves as a a story for people to maybe look at their own data a little differently. With all the time that you're saving with automation, you've definitely been very active on the Alteryx community.

I authored the top contributor blogs and of the last 11. You were in nine of them for the year of 2024. So I wanted to bring that up because I wanted to ask you what your strategy and approach for answering discussion posts is. Do [00:10:00] you look for certain things or what's your approach to the different discussion posts on the Alteryx community?

For me, having the community as a place to answer these questions ties back into what I like to do with Alteryx today, which is enabling people. And when people ask questions on the community, it's really important to me that people know there's someone out there who can answer those questions, get them going in the right direction.

And I try to keep up to date with all the things that are being asked so that we can go in and also help promote ideas that are going in the field. Into the Alteryx Designer pipeline, being able to go in and enable more and more people so that the community grows further and further. So for me, there's the strategy is really just to be a lifeline for people who want to know more about the Alteryx platform, or maybe better yet said, just a teacher to help grow their knowledge in the platform itself.

Yeah, I think it's [00:11:00] very noble of you to be. That person. For other people, it's a very empowering thing. Like you said, a lot of your time is spent enabling other people, so I think your time on community definitely reflects that about you. A lot of people talk about the Alteryx community and how much it's helped them and their learning journey.

I wanted to talk to you about how it's personally impacted you outside of just answering posts on the discussion forums. For me, when I initially started off with Alteryx in early 2018, there was a particular question that I had that couldn't figure out for the life of me at the time, and this is a very normal, I feel like for a lot of people who start off that, yes, we have all this experience, but early on you need to find out how to get those answers really quickly.

I did my first post on the community. It was a post about converting decimals into percentages. A very common question that I'm sure a lot of people have to the state. [00:12:00] And there was someone, Jamie in particular who answered that question. And from then on I was hooked. And even today we worked together, which is ironic 'cause it just comes as a full circle moment.

But for me to have that. Point to be able to ask that question. It really got me excited about Alteryx at an early stage, and now almost seven years later, I go in, like you mentioned, and answer these all the time because I want people to feel like they have someone that they can rely on to an extent, and the Alteryx community does a fantastic job of having all these.

ACEs experts and just general advanced users to answer these questions. So from my perspective, how it's personally impacted me is, yes, I've been one that's asked those questions, but also now it's led me to become an ace, which has been really exciting for my professional journey. Yeah, if you think about it, I mean, you've come full circle in that you had a question on the community, somebody was [00:13:00] there for you, and they answered your question.

Think about how many people you may have been that person for where they had a question and you were the person that answered the question and they were like, oh, huh, this is a great resource. Maybe I should follow in his footsteps like you did when you first started. So that's a neat parallel for you first starting out and coming full circle.

I hope so. Throughout the trainings and enablement that I've done, I've probably tutored. Over a thousand, maybe even 10,000 people and know of hundreds that have gotten their core certification, for example, or I've seen them later on the community answering questions. So to me, that makes me really excited and shows from a personal perspective how much I've hopefully impacted the community.

In a positive manner. Now, I'm not the only person who does it, of course, as a whole community out there who's answering these questions, I could probably point to these five or 10 users who are with me in that top contributors blog, but it's really [00:14:00] exciting to me and I plan to continue to do it into 2025 and beyond.

I'm glad to hear. I look forward to seeing you on the top contributor blogs for 2025 as well. Absolutely. So. Let's talk about Inspire. I want you to recount your experience with the Grand Prix. I know the Grand Prix is a big thing for a lot of people. There's a lot of hype around it. It's a big selling point for people getting excited about Inspire.

So I would love to hear about your experience personally with the Grand Prix. For me, it actually started back in my first inspire back in Nashville and I was up on near the stage watching the Grand Prix happen. It was my also now colleague Phil Maning, who won that Grand Prix and it got me hooked right from right there.

I mean, that inspire really, I. Set the tone for what I wanted to become an ace, an expert, and maybe to an extent I thought that I would wanna [00:15:00] be on the Grand Prix stage, although at a more realistic level, I was like, that is very scary. I don't know if I could ever do that. Hmm. Eddie, that is a year and a half into learning Alteryx.

So at that point I was like, okay, there's a long way to go. I'm sure. But fast forward now to inspire 2024. I had done all the advanced certifications. I was on the expert track. I have done all these trainings. I figured it'd be a great opportunity to try out those preliminaries and see how I could do, and turns out it was a lovely spatial problem.

I love spatial data. It's one of my favorite tool pallets in Alteryx, and was able to finish the prelims first, which was fantastic, and qualify as the fifth and final racer on the Grand Prix. And. Needless to say, once I figured out that I was going to be on stage, it was very nerve-wracking practice to know what it entailed.

All the people who were up on the stage for that inspire had been there and won it before. So I felt like I was a bit of an underdog [00:16:00] to an extent, but wanted to convey confidence and feel like I belong there in this case. And everyone was fantastic. It was a. Brilliant experience to be able to go up there, provide a little bit of energy, unfortunately, was not able to make it to that final round.

It was a tricky question that I couldn't get past for that spatial one. But I also heard later on that the problem itself was supposed to take even us about seven to 10 minutes maybe, just to extend the second round a bit further, and they solved it in. Two to four minutes. Wow. So it just showed the level of people that were in the Grand Prix and being able to solve these problems.

I am more than happy to be beaten by the best out there. Well, kudos to you for being up there in the first place. I know that going from sitting behind a desk to being up on a stage, performing all of this in front of people cheering and watching you is no easy task. So congratulations to you for even making it that far.

That's nothing to scoff at. [00:17:00] I mean, it was sad of course, because we had the AIM point family there and I wanted to do well for them. We actually had multiple people up on that stage, which was cool too, to see. But you know, Molly absolutely deserved it and just a overall fantastic experience. If I could do it again, I would absolutely, and just hoped to do better on that time.

I did want to touch also on Astrix, and for anyone that is unfamiliar, ACE Tricks is a video series that focuses on the Alteryx ACEs and them walking through some of their favorite tips and tricks for the Alteryx community platform. I was curious about your experience doing as tricks, and if you had a little bit of insight for us around that.

For me, just generally being an ACE has been really exciting because from that same Inspire conference back in Nashville, it was really a goal from then onwards to try to achieve that. I [00:18:00] have on my water bottle a future ACE sticker still to this day, and so being able to do the ACE tricks was a personal fulfillment to an extent of it's fun to now from this perspective of having like a credential in a way of.

Being this ace, being able to share my knowledge and what I have found useful over time. I think I did in this case, showing record counts and doing performance prior filing, all these little things that I think a lot of people may know about, but if you don't know about it, it becomes second nature. And for me, especially when I'm looking at pipelines and I'm wanting to see how performant they are and where the things may be dropping out, those two tips in particular are just.

Absolutely useful, but it's not only about mine, it's about all the little tricks that these ACEs use. And being able to have that video series as a group is really exciting, and I'm hoping that we can continue this on as a series, not only on YouTube or on socials, but even at Inspire, being able to show these little things to [00:19:00] all the new Alteryx users out there.

It goes back to that enablement piece of answering community posts, doing these teachings. I just delivered a three hour intro training and then I just love doing it even though I've done that training probably 200 times, if not more, at this stage in my career. So it's all going back to helping out people, which is what I'm passionate about.

I think the as tricks is definitely a testament to that. For anyone that's curious. We will put a link to the as tricks in the description of this video as well, so you can check 'em out yourself. I am interested, I know that you are expert certified and there are only 45 people that are expert certified right now as of this moment.

So, um, this is no easy task to complete. So I wanted to ask you how you prepared for your Alteryx expert certification, and if you had any tips for people that may be going through the same thing as you were. For my perspective, it comes down to [00:20:00] two main things. One is practice, practice, practice. For me, especially getting from zero to core, from core to advanced to now from advanced to expert, it was really important to just keep on.

Practicing and using the tools as much as possible. That was in the form of mainly weekly challenges, which I've been catching up slowly over time. I think I'm up to about 380 now, but there's about 450 out there, so I need to catch up to those remaining 70 in this case. Being able to use it in my day-to-day life.

Yes, I teach it. So I'm able to, from that perspective, learn, but also be able to do some of the work to practice those tools in a more realistic scenario. So whether you're doing that as a weekly challenge, as a simulated scenario, or whether you're doing that in real life, all of that practice is going to not only get your stamina up for producing those workflows faster, but it's also gonna get you answering those questions in a much.

Faster manner 'cause there is a time component to all of these exams. But the other point [00:21:00] besides the practice is to fail forward. And to me it was really demoralizing to an extent to fail the core, which I did the first time to fail the advance, which I did the first time I got a 79.8% and I was really annoyed 'cause I was.

At that point, it was the 80% threshold and the expert, I failed twice. And so it's not a bad thing to do that. In fact, I encourage it so that you know what to expect from these different exams and that you can practice and go back into that loop of knowing what to expect on those exams there. So again, failing forward, not getting bogged down by what you didn't accomplish, but taking those lessons and moving forward to.

Producing in the future. And I think to date, it's gotten me to where I am today and I really appreciate finally having passed that expert certification at this point. I think failing forward is a great way to look at. Chasing [00:22:00] certifications. It's not realistic to just ace it on your first try. It is no small feat and I think that you failing, but eventually getting there, it can be a beacon of hope for people that may have taken it one time, failed and gotten discouraged.

A hundred percent. For me, I've been using Alteryx for, it'll be seven years in March. It's not a easy journey for some Now, for hopefully some of you out there, it's been, I. Fun to learn Alteryx, and so you've been encouraged by all the community posts and all the things that you've built, and you're really excited about it.

So hopefully that gives you some encouragement to prove that to an extent with these certifications. But as you mentioned, be failing. It is not a bad thing. In fact, practicing and seeing how it comes about is only gonna make you learn more. And want to learn more of those different techniques, and I just encourage anyone out there who's taking or looking at these certification exams to try it out, [00:23:00] see how you do, learn about the platforms, or I should say the tool pals that you may not be as familiar with, and try it again and just keep on trying until you can get that done.

As you try more and more, that goes back to the first point about practice and you'll become a hopeful Alteryx expert in no time. Like that's great advice and for anyone that's interested in expert certification in the show notes of this episode, we'll put some resources for you so that you can take a look at it and see if there might be something that you are interested in.

But to, to wrap us up, Alex, I want to ask you if you have any goals for 2025, like, uh, maybe an Alteryx New Year's Resolution or anything that you're trying to work towards next year. Absolutely. So I'll take this from two perspectives. I think one, from an Alteryx perspective, I'm curious about Designer Cloud.

I've gotten all the certifications, I've done all the Cloud quest, which again, I highly encourage people to do for that practice. It's exciting. [00:24:00] I do think that Designer Cloud platform has a lot of potential to. Become that cloud solution, and I wanna see more of that parody happen over the course of this year.

So for me, I want to be able to get my only non-designer certification, which is the designer Cloud advanced. That's, I think, my goal on an Alteryx perspective from a personal perspective. I like to travel and for me, I try to travel to four new countries per year. It's really big for me to try to average that so that by the time I retire, I will have visited every country in the world.

So my goal is to visit four new ones. Currently on the docket would be The Bahamas. I think also I'm gonna try to go to Japan for the expo, which would be really exciting. And then we'll see what else comes about. But from my perspective, that's my goal is to just add some more countries I've been to. 47 at this stage and wholly hope to add to it over time.

How long have you been pursuing that kind of for country A [00:25:00] year thing. That's really cool. It was something that I came up with about two years ago if of that average, because I had done some calculations. Maybe I did an alter two nos. I have all these countries I want to visit, I visited this many, take the difference and then divide that by how many years I expect to be working.

And that's what the number came out to be. And so it was always something I loved doing of travel, but then I made it a goal as I was able to professionally develop and feel comfortable in my role to make that more of a priority for my PTO and for vacation and all that. So while it may not happen, some years, it may be two some years, maybe it'll be six.

That's okay. As long as I can try to keep that average going and visit maybe a few countries at one time, I'm gonna get there and I'm really excited to do so. Best of luck to you on your travels. Maybe you can connect with some Alteryx users in other countries along your way. But yeah, I want to wrap us up and thank you for your time.

We greatly appreciate [00:26:00] you and your work on community, and I know a lot of other users share the same sentiment. Thank you very much for your time as well for joining us on the podcast. No, thank you, Matt. Thank you Alteryx, for having me on the podcast as well. Really excited and hope that from this content that anyone gets encouraged to try out that certification and feel free to reach out to me at any point at Inspire on LinkedIn.

More than happy to connect with all the Alteryx users out there. Awesome. Thanks again, Alex. Thank you. Do

thanks for listening to learn more about Topics mentioned in this episode, and connect with Alex on the Alteryx community. Head over to our show notes on Alteryx dot com slash podcast. And if you like this episode, leave us a review.

See you next time.

Ep 177 Final Mixdown [00:00:00] Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am passing the mic to my colleague Matt Rotundo, who you may know as Alteryx Matt on our community. In this episode, Matt Chats with Alex Abbi Naam, a community top contributor in Alteryx, ACE. They talk about how Alex got his start with analytics, his passion for enabling others with Alteryx VR community, his experience with the Alteryx Grand Prix, tips for the expert certification and more. Let's get started. Hi Alex. Thanks for joining us today. Why don't you start us off by giving us a little introduction about yourself. Thanks, Matt, Alex, Evan. I've been an Alteryx user for almost seven years now. I currently work as a solutions and enablement lead at AimPoint digital teaching companies how to use the Alteryx software, [00:01:00] but also recently became an Alteryx, ace and Alteryx expert this year. So really love the platform itself and really excited to be with you today. Awesome. Thank you. So just to start from the very beginning, for you, looking at your career journey as a whole, what's it been like up to where you are right now at your current role? Yeah, I feel like I have a very interesting journey because while I've always liked numbers growing up, I was always a math person. I actually grew up in the restaurant business. I grew up. Waiting tables, busing tables, doing anything at my PMs restaurant in the DC area and coming outta school, I always assumed I would go back and work there, but there was an opportunity to work at Marriott International, at their headquarters here in the DC area for a little bit. That's where I first got introduced to the Alteryx platform. There was actually a consultancy that said, Hey, you should learn this platform. And here we are seven years later having done a [00:02:00] lot of work at Marriott at the time in Alteryx, and then having come to AimPoint Digital to now train on it full-time. I. So while I've always liked numbers and felt like I had a sense of analytics as a whole, I would've never guessed that my journey would bring me even to this moment today. That's very, uh, admirable that you took those steps to think, Hey, I can do this, so maybe I should try. I think a lot of people, it stops them being like, oh, I'm comfortable where I'm at. So maybe not, but it sounds like you knew what you wanted, knew what you liked. You had that affinity for numbers and math, so I think that's a really great way to use that in your everyday life and take that extra step, take that leap of faith and go for something bigger. Absolutely. For me, coming out of school, I, yes, did some analytics classes, but never really liked coding either that much. It was more from a business perspective. I liked working with numbers, but my [00:03:00] worst class in school was accounting and finance, so I also knew that I didn't want to go down that path either. So analytics seemed like a natural way to mix together working with data, but also being able to put a more business lens on it. Coming out of school, a lot of the opportunities that I was looking at were in that field of analytics, but really in school we learn about RapidMiner Excel, a little bit of Tableau. So coming into the new role at Marriott and they said, Hey, learn this new platform that has no coding and allows you to work with data in a very visual way was really enticing to me. It was this project that I was working with to do all this reporting for Marriott twice a week for a whole year, and it ended up being the springboard to the rest of the career. I feel like that's a barrier for a lot of people is like the coding is very daunting and it is a difficult thing to pick up after not knowing anything about it, but [00:04:00] like in your case, knowing about. The different products that Alteryx works with, Tableau and Excel, and it can really take that and transform it is, I'm sure that was just like a slam dunk for what you were looking for, so I'm happy to hear that. Absolutely. From my perspective as well, the sheer volume of data that we were getting for this project just wasn't. Any way of handling it in the Excel platform. So for us, it was a matter of need to an extent, but once you got down to it and was able to see the entire pipeline grow from end to end. Then be able to just hit run and have it do everything. It got me really excited. So that initial project ended and I said, look, I want to continue using this platform in the rest of my role for other reports that I can see being a lot more valuable to automate. And we ended up by the end of the process and going through all the reports that we would do on a. Daily, weekly basis, I would probably estimate that we saved [00:05:00] about 75% of the total time to that it took to build those reports to just automate them and make it easy to click on a run of a button, and it was able to handle more volume for that matter as well. On the topic of beginnings and firsts, I want to ask you of your first use case using the Alteryx platform. You said that you had to use it for some automation, so I would love to hear about your first use case with the platform. I. Absolutely. So the first instance I had with Alteryx was being able to produce biweekly reporting, meaning twice a week reporting on all the integrations between Marriott and Starwood because Marriott had bought a. This hotel chain of Sheratons, Westins and so on, and all of the systems had to come online, had to be matching together, had to train up all the employees, had to make sure that they had all the Marriott trainings down. All of this data [00:06:00] for each individual who worked at a Starwood property or a Marriott property, and all the courses they had to take was millions of records. It just wasn't feasible to do in any. Excel platform, which is what a lot of reporting was done, and so. The reports were being able to send out to different global leads and different hotels of saying how ready you were to do this merger, essentially. And it was a lot of really exciting time because again, this is my first foray into Alteryx. It was really cool to see how the reports transformed over time, how the workflow transformed over time, all the different little exceptions that we did. By the end of it, we were able to hit that run button, get all the data together and let it ride. And not only did that save a lot of people time that had to produce these 'cause it was very time sensitive, but it did it in a very structured, [00:07:00] rehearsed I. Auditable manner. That made it really easy for us to say, okay, if we need to make a change, how do we go about doing that? But I'll take a second stab at this, and instead of the first use case, I'll tell you what also my favorite use case was. My favorite use case was being able to map all of the Marriot properties worldwide based on latitude, longitude. In our system. We had that value, but we didn't have any way to geocode that very easily. This is my first foray into the spatial tools as well. We were able to use that latitude, longitude value to produce a full map of all the properties. At that time, there were about 7,000. Now they're up to about 9,000 worldwide and be able to not only. Correct some of those values because they were showing up in incorrect locations, but also for the reporting side. We were getting a lot of the metrics in a standard UTC time, but we needed to offset those to local time because for hotels, the [00:08:00] time of local time check-in matters. Are they checking in at 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM We needed to know that rather than this time that was standardized. We had to map the individual hotel property points with these time zone polygons to be able to do that offsetting measure and therefore be able to give more accurate reporting about who was checking in at what time. So really cool secondary use case, again, probably my favorite use case that I've done even to date. Wow. Yeah. Looking at millions of data entries and then having them all be combined at the push of a button is No, I. Easy task. So props to you for looking at that and being like, oh yeah, I can definitely handle this. I was definitely very nervous. I'll tell you that. For me, it was exciting though because at by the end of it, we were hitting that run button. It did take a lot of time. It took probably a few hours each run because of how much volume of data there was [00:09:00] across all these different systems. All the data systems, of course being different in some way. So we had to make sure to reconcile them, to make them consistent, but. By the end of it, it was very much hit that run button, let it ride, check a couple things if we need to, and it all was in one fell swoop. So really exciting to have that be a part of it. And then that kind of took from there onwards into the rest of the work that I did at Marriott and now to what I do at AM point as well. Awesome. Hopefully that serves as a a story for people to maybe look at their own data a little differently. With all the time that you're saving with automation, you've definitely been very active on the Alteryx community. I authored the top contributor blogs and of the last 11. You were in nine of them for the year of 2024. So I wanted to bring that up because I wanted to ask you what your strategy and approach for answering discussion posts is. Do [00:10:00] you look for certain things or what's your approach to the different discussion posts on the Alteryx community? For me, having the community as a place to answer these questions ties back into what I like to do with Alteryx today, which is enabling people. And when people ask questions on the community, it's really important to me that people know there's someone out there who can answer those questions, get them going in the right direction. And I try to keep up to date with all the things that are being asked so that we can go in and also help promote ideas that are going in the field. Into the Alteryx Designer pipeline, being able to go in and enable more and more people so that the community grows further and further. So for me, there's the strategy is really just to be a lifeline for people who want to know more about the Alteryx platform, or maybe better yet said, just a teacher to help grow their knowledge in the platform itself. Yeah, I think it's [00:11:00] very noble of you to be. That person. For other people, it's a very empowering thing. Like you said, a lot of your time is spent enabling other people, so I think your time on community definitely reflects that about you. A lot of people talk about the Alteryx community and how much it's helped them and their learning journey. I wanted to talk to you about how it's personally impacted you outside of just answering posts on the discussion forums. For me, when I initially started off with Alteryx in early 2018, there was a particular question that I had that couldn't figure out for the life of me at the time, and this is a very normal, I feel like for a lot of people who start off that, yes, we have all this experience, but early on you need to find out how to get those answers really quickly. I did my first post on the community. It was a post about converting decimals into percentages. A very common question that I'm sure a lot of people have to the state. [00:12:00] And there was someone, Jamie in particular who answered that question. And from then on I was hooked. And even today we worked together, which is ironic 'cause it just comes as a full circle moment. But for me to have that. Point to be able to ask that question. It really got me excited about Alteryx at an early stage, and now almost seven years later, I go in, like you mentioned, and answer these all the time because I want people to feel like they have someone that they can rely on to an extent, and the Alteryx community does a fantastic job of having all these. ACEs experts and just general advanced users to answer these questions. So from my perspective, how it's personally impacted me is, yes, I've been one that's asked those questions, but also now it's led me to become an ace, which has been really exciting for my professional journey. Yeah, if you think about it, I mean, you've come full circle in that you had a question on the community, somebody was [00:13:00] there for you, and they answered your question. Think about how many people you may have been that person for where they had a question and you were the person that answered the question and they were like, oh, huh, this is a great resource. Maybe I should follow in his footsteps like you did when you first started. So that's a neat parallel for you first starting out and coming full circle. I hope so. Throughout the trainings and enablement that I've done, I've probably tutored. Over a thousand, maybe even 10,000 people and know of hundreds that have gotten their core certification, for example, or I've seen them later on the community answering questions. So to me, that makes me really excited and shows from a personal perspective how much I've hopefully impacted the community. In a positive manner. Now, I'm not the only person who does it, of course, as a whole community out there who's answering these questions, I could probably point to these five or 10 users who are with me in that top contributors blog, but it's really [00:14:00] exciting to me and I plan to continue to do it into 2025 and beyond. I'm glad to hear. I look forward to seeing you on the top contributor blogs for 2025 as well. Absolutely. So. Let's talk about Inspire. I want you to recount your experience with the Grand Prix. I know the Grand Prix is a big thing for a lot of people. There's a lot of hype around it. It's a big selling point for people getting excited about Inspire. So I would love to hear about your experience personally with the Grand Prix. For me, it actually started back in my first inspire back in Nashville and I was up on near the stage watching the Grand Prix happen. It was my also now colleague Phil Maning, who won that Grand Prix and it got me hooked right from right there. I mean, that inspire really, I. Set the tone for what I wanted to become an ace, an expert, and maybe to an extent I thought that I would wanna [00:15:00] be on the Grand Prix stage, although at a more realistic level, I was like, that is very scary. I don't know if I could ever do that. Hmm. Eddie, that is a year and a half into learning Alteryx. So at that point I was like, okay, there's a long way to go. I'm sure. But fast forward now to inspire 2024. I had done all the advanced certifications. I was on the expert track. I have done all these trainings. I figured it'd be a great opportunity to try out those preliminaries and see how I could do, and turns out it was a lovely spatial problem. I love spatial data. It's one of my favorite tool pallets in Alteryx, and was able to finish the prelims first, which was fantastic, and qualify as the fifth and final racer on the Grand Prix. And. Needless to say, once I figured out that I was going to be on stage, it was very nerve-wracking practice to know what it entailed. All the people who were up on the stage for that inspire had been there and won it before. So I felt like I was a bit of an underdog [00:16:00] to an extent, but wanted to convey confidence and feel like I belong there in this case. And everyone was fantastic. It was a. Brilliant experience to be able to go up there, provide a little bit of energy, unfortunately, was not able to make it to that final round. It was a tricky question that I couldn't get past for that spatial one. But I also heard later on that the problem itself was supposed to take even us about seven to 10 minutes maybe, just to extend the second round a bit further, and they solved it in. Two to four minutes. Wow. So it just showed the level of people that were in the Grand Prix and being able to solve these problems. I am more than happy to be beaten by the best out there. Well, kudos to you for being up there in the first place. I know that going from sitting behind a desk to being up on a stage, performing all of this in front of people cheering and watching you is no easy task. So congratulations to you for even making it that far. That's nothing to scoff at. [00:17:00] I mean, it was sad of course, because we had the AIM point family there and I wanted to do well for them. We actually had multiple people up on that stage, which was cool too, to see. But you know, Molly absolutely deserved it and just a overall fantastic experience. If I could do it again, I would absolutely, and just hoped to do better on that time. I did want to touch also on Astrix, and for anyone that is unfamiliar, ACE Tricks is a video series that focuses on the Alteryx ACEs and them walking through some of their favorite tips and tricks for the Alteryx community platform. I was curious about your experience doing as tricks, and if you had a little bit of insight for us around that. For me, just generally being an ACE has been really exciting because from that same Inspire conference back in Nashville, it was really a goal from then onwards to try to achieve that. I [00:18:00] have on my water bottle a future ACE sticker still to this day, and so being able to do the ACE tricks was a personal fulfillment to an extent of it's fun to now from this perspective of having like a credential in a way of. Being this ace, being able to share my knowledge and what I have found useful over time. I think I did in this case, showing record counts and doing performance prior filing, all these little things that I think a lot of people may know about, but if you don't know about it, it becomes second nature. And for me, especially when I'm looking at pipelines and I'm wanting to see how performant they are and where the things may be dropping out, those two tips in particular are just. Absolutely useful, but it's not only about mine, it's about all the little tricks that these ACEs use. And being able to have that video series as a group is really exciting, and I'm hoping that we can continue this on as a series, not only on YouTube or on socials, but even at Inspire, being able to show these little things to [00:19:00] all the new Alteryx users out there. It goes back to that enablement piece of answering community posts, doing these teachings. I just delivered a three hour intro training and then I just love doing it even though I've done that training probably 200 times, if not more, at this stage in my career. So it's all going back to helping out people, which is what I'm passionate about. I think the as tricks is definitely a testament to that. For anyone that's curious. We will put a link to the as tricks in the description of this video as well, so you can check 'em out yourself. I am interested, I know that you are expert certified and there are only 45 people that are expert certified right now as of this moment. So, um, this is no easy task to complete. So I wanted to ask you how you prepared for your Alteryx expert certification, and if you had any tips for people that may be going through the same thing as you were. For my perspective, it comes down to [00:20:00] two main things. One is practice, practice, practice. For me, especially getting from zero to core, from core to advanced to now from advanced to expert, it was really important to just keep on. Practicing and using the tools as much as possible. That was in the form of mainly weekly challenges, which I've been catching up slowly over time. I think I'm up to about 380 now, but there's about 450 out there, so I need to catch up to those remaining 70 in this case. Being able to use it in my day-to-day life. Yes, I teach it. So I'm able to, from that perspective, learn, but also be able to do some of the work to practice those tools in a more realistic scenario. So whether you're doing that as a weekly challenge, as a simulated scenario, or whether you're doing that in real life, all of that practice is going to not only get your stamina up for producing those workflows faster, but it's also gonna get you answering those questions in a much. Faster manner 'cause there is a time component to all of these exams. But the other point [00:21:00] besides the practice is to fail forward. And to me it was really demoralizing to an extent to fail the core, which I did the first time to fail the advance, which I did the first time I got a 79.8% and I was really annoyed 'cause I was. At that point, it was the 80% threshold and the expert, I failed twice. And so it's not a bad thing to do that. In fact, I encourage it so that you know what to expect from these different exams and that you can practice and go back into that loop of knowing what to expect on those exams there. So again, failing forward, not getting bogged down by what you didn't accomplish, but taking those lessons and moving forward to. Producing in the future. And I think to date, it's gotten me to where I am today and I really appreciate finally having passed that expert certification at this point. I think failing forward is a great way to look at. Chasing [00:22:00] certifications. It's not realistic to just ace it on your first try. It is no small feat and I think that you failing, but eventually getting there, it can be a beacon of hope for people that may have taken it one time, failed and gotten discouraged. A hundred percent. For me, I've been using Alteryx for, it'll be seven years in March. It's not a easy journey for some Now, for hopefully some of you out there, it's been, I. Fun to learn Alteryx, and so you've been encouraged by all the community posts and all the things that you've built, and you're really excited about it. So hopefully that gives you some encouragement to prove that to an extent with these certifications. But as you mentioned, be failing. It is not a bad thing. In fact, practicing and seeing how it comes about is only gonna make you learn more. And want to learn more of those different techniques, and I just encourage anyone out there who's taking or looking at these certification exams to try it out, [00:23:00] see how you do, learn about the platforms, or I should say the tool pals that you may not be as familiar with, and try it again and just keep on trying until you can get that done. As you try more and more, that goes back to the first point about practice and you'll become a hopeful Alteryx expert in no time. Like that's great advice and for anyone that's interested in expert certification in the show notes of this episode, we'll put some resources for you so that you can take a look at it and see if there might be something that you are interested in. But to, to wrap us up, Alex, I want to ask you if you have any goals for 2025, like, uh, maybe an Alteryx New Year's Resolution or anything that you're trying to work towards next year. Absolutely. So I'll take this from two perspectives. I think one, from an Alteryx perspective, I'm curious about Designer Cloud. I've gotten all the certifications, I've done all the Cloud quest, which again, I highly encourage people to do for that practice. It's exciting. [00:24:00] I do think that Designer Cloud platform has a lot of potential to. Become that cloud solution, and I wanna see more of that parody happen over the course of this year. So for me, I want to be able to get my only non-designer certification, which is the designer Cloud advanced. That's, I think, my goal on an Alteryx perspective from a personal perspective. I like to travel and for me, I try to travel to four new countries per year. It's really big for me to try to average that so that by the time I retire, I will have visited every country in the world. So my goal is to visit four new ones. Currently on the docket would be The Bahamas. I think also I'm gonna try to go to Japan for the expo, which would be really exciting. And then we'll see what else comes about. But from my perspective, that's my goal is to just add some more countries I've been to. 47 at this stage and wholly hope to add to it over time. How long have you been pursuing that kind of for country A [00:25:00] year thing. That's really cool. It was something that I came up with about two years ago if of that average, because I had done some calculations. Maybe I did an alter two nos. I have all these countries I want to visit, I visited this many, take the difference and then divide that by how many years I expect to be working. And that's what the number came out to be. And so it was always something I loved doing of travel, but then I made it a goal as I was able to professionally develop and feel comfortable in my role to make that more of a priority for my PTO and for vacation and all that. So while it may not happen, some years, it may be two some years, maybe it'll be six. That's okay. As long as I can try to keep that average going and visit maybe a few countries at one time, I'm gonna get there and I'm really excited to do so. Best of luck to you on your travels. Maybe you can connect with some Alteryx users in other countries along your way. But yeah, I want to wrap us up and thank you for your time. We greatly appreciate [00:26:00] you and your work on community, and I know a lot of other users share the same sentiment. Thank you very much for your time as well for joining us on the podcast. No, thank you, Matt. Thank you Alteryx, for having me on the podcast as well. Really excited and hope that from this content that anyone gets encouraged to try out that certification and feel free to reach out to me at any point at Inspire on LinkedIn. More than happy to connect with all the Alteryx users out there. Awesome. Thanks again, Alex. Thank you. Do thanks for listening to learn more about Topics mentioned in this episode, and connect with Alex on the Alteryx community. Head over to our show notes on Alteryx dot com slash podcast. And if you like this episode, leave us a review. See you next time.

This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.

alexnajm

Thank you to everything the Community has done for me and my career over the years! I hope y'all enjoy the episode 😊

caltang

Loved hearing every second. Your passion is contagious my friend @alexnajm ! Great one @AlteryxMatt

Aniesh_Kumar

One of the best podcasts🔉 I've listened on Alteryx. 👏

Alter Everything Podcast

Podcast Guide

177: From Community Newbie to Alteryx ACE

Panelists

Topics

Transcript

This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.