Alter Everything Podcast
A podcast about data science and analytics culture.Podcast Guide
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In this episode of Alter Everything, we chat with Paula Maddox, self-service analytics manager at Truist. Paula shares how Alteryx revolutionized her career, enabling her to automate Excel tasks and save significant time for her company! She highlights the importance of storytelling, Alteryx Certifications, and continuous learning in advancing an analytics career. Join us to hear Paula's advice on upskilling with Alteryx and the impact it has had on her professional journey.
Panelists
- Paula Maddox, Manager, Self-Service Analytics & Automation @ Truist, @MadYX, LinkedIn
- Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn
Topics
Transcript
Ep 187 How Alteryx Helped Me Land a New Job
[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome
[00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with Paula Maddox, self-service analytics manager at Truist. In this episode, we chat about how Alteryx has transformed her career, how she's automated Excel work at her company, her Alteryx upskilling advice, and more. Let's get started. Hey Paula, it's awesome to have you on our show today. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners?
[00:00:38] Paula Maddox: Sure. I'm Paula Maddox. I am a data analyst with Truist Bank. I'm based in Atlanta, but spend a lot of time at our corporate office in Charlotte.
[00:00:49] Paula's Background and Introduction to Alteryx
[00:00:49] Megan Bowers: Well, I'm really excited to chat with you today and to hear more about your awesome career journey with Alteryx. Let's kind of start at the beginning. Can you tell us about your background in accounting and your role prior to using Alteryx?
[00:01:04] Paula Maddox: I, um, I'm a traditional accountant by trade. I've always leaned towards reporting and data. In my career, I haven't done so much of the traditional closing of the books kind of work, but gosh, in 2022, I had a teammate who was telling me about this thing she was using called Alteryx. I didn't know anything about it. So I went to a community of practice, which is just kind of like a center of excellence, but it was more like social, more for users to get together and share things. And somebody shared this amazing workflow. I mean, it did all these incredible things. It had taken them many months to build, and I was like, wow, that's really impressive. But it really didn't connect with what I did in reg reporting. So the next month she's like, okay, you have to come back. You have to come and see it again. We're doing a different demonstration. I think you're going to really like it.
[00:02:01] First Impressions and Early Experiences with Alteryx
[00:02:01] Paula Maddox: And that time, they demoed an ad hoc comparison of like a loan file from last month and a loan file from the current month, and they put it to a Join tool—my favorite tool, by the way. If I ever get a tattoo of the tool, it's going to be that one. And immediately it was like, on this side are the loans that have dropped out, on this side are the new ones, and through the middle are the ones that have not changed since last month. I was like that cartoon character light bulb above my head. All of a sudden I could think of a hundred ways I could use this, and I'd only seen one tool, like literally one. And it was just, that was it. I was off and running. And luckily for me, the girl who had introduced me to the tool was extremely generous with her time, and she had had the same kind of thing that I did where she just went, whoa, this is great, and had loved it. And so we, and we weren't in the same city, so every afternoon for, I think it was a month, we would turn on a Teams call, and we would both just do our work. And as I was building workflows and got stuck like, oh, how do I do this? Or what do I do here? She would just jump into the call and look and see whatever I was stuck on, offer a suggestion or a tool or something, and I would keep going. So I had this live expert trainer at my fingertips who was so generous, and that was it. I started developing workflows immediately. I did all the things that I could think of in my area, and pretty soon I was kind of like this little go-to person for all these adjacent teams. They were like, Hey, can you do that for me? Can you do something for me? And it just became like this little side job, like my own little thing that I was doing just by word of mouth, and I loved it.
[00:03:56] Megan Bowers: That's awesome. I mean, to have like a mentor that like sits in a virtual room with you, I can imagine that makes the kind of the learning and trial and error just so much nicer. But, but also clearly you hit the ground running where just doing a lot on your own and then pulling in people for help sounds awesome.
[00:04:16] Building Expertise and Helping Others
[00:04:16] Paula Maddox: Yeah, I honestly don't think I took formal trainings or even did much in the community for the first, maybe two or three months because she was so available to me. And Beata, thank you. Thank you. And I then tried to do the same thing, paid it forward with other people and same kind of, uh, with my time. And then she got a little busier when tax season came around, and I had to start doing the traditional things and taking trainings and using the community, which I discovered was just amazing. So much better than Google.
[00:04:49] Megan Bowers: Yeah, that's great. For those kind of use cases you were working on, like you said, it became kind of like your little side job at work. Like how did you identify what would be a good thing to do with Alteryx, or how did people hear, oh, Alteryx might be good for my data because of this? How did those little side projects come about?
[00:05:09] Paula Maddox: Once you start using Alteryx, you realize the limitations that you had in Excel that you were putting up with 'cause you didn't have any choice. And so I started having this little sales bit. I'd say, Hey, do you have any files over 500,000 rows? Do you have any files where you have to turn off calc, and when you turn it back on, you have to go get coffee and come back for it to finish doing the update? Do you have any files that have more than 20 tabs or that have pages and pages of reminders, what to update when the next period comes? All those things need to move to Alteryx. Alteryx can handle all of your limitations. A friend of mine said, oh, I wish I could see a year's worth of data, but every file is just so big. I said, well, where are your files? And so she pointed me to a directory. And while we were talking, I pulled a directory tool on, pulled in a dynamic input and said, okay, well your 12 months is out there now. How do you want it summarized? She's like, what? I was like, yeah, just put it all into a little Alteryx database and now I can just, you know, what do you need to see? And so next thing you know, we're all on the phone and she's looking over my shoulder. She's like, oh my gosh, this is so great. Having this without going to it and putting in a formal request for a report and writing criteria and waiting six months. And anyway, so especially for, I think your Excel super users, it's just not much of a jump. It's just so intuitive. It really does take your Excel and go, ooh, hey, no more limitations. No more things you have to wait for. Let's just do it. And, um, it was very easy. It's an easy sell once you start talking about it.
[00:06:51] Transforming Workflows and Career Growth
[00:06:51] Paula Maddox: And I also, from the beginning, kept track of what I was building because I was doing this for other people and other teams. It wasn't work that I was even owning after about the first eight or 10. So I was keeping track of, you know, how long does it take you to do this, and how big is it, and how frequently do you use this report. And I started realizing that I could easily capture the wins, like how much time they were saving and new capabilities that they couldn't even do before. And so I pretty early on realized I wanted to work in the Alteryx application and I wanted that to be my job. And that was really like, not my job. It was kind of a side hustle. I mean, I was doing data and analytics, but I was also doing a lot of other things, and I really wanted the focus to be there. So as soon as I realized I could capture these things and easily tell the story of how valuable it was, and then I started branding myself and almost managing up, I started summarizing these wins into three, four little short memorable bites that I could say to my manager, that I could say in various meetings, and he started remembering them and repeating them to other people. Well, you know, Paula has saved us almost 7,000 hours for a year's time. Do you know what kind of value that is? And she's letting people stop doing all the manual stuff and start actually doing more analysis. And he was repeating these soundbites to other people. And then purely from that, an adjacent manager on his level came to me and said, I've got this thing and it's really big and it's really burdensome and I'd love it if you could take a look at it. And she became like my promoter. I did that one thing for her and next thing I knew, every time I turned around, Kim was saying, Hey Paula, I've got another thing over here on this team. I have another one here on this team. And I started having to say to her, I better check with my boss and make sure that he doesn't need me. And he started just kind of going, go do it. Yes. And the other managers were really appreciative. And so I think it was like a year and two months from the time I created my first workflow to the time I got a call that said from my boss, he goes, Hey, come up here next week. And okay, so I get there and he's like, Kim asked me to join her team and focus on automations as a full-time job. So Alteryx gave me a completely different job and career.
[00:09:49] Megan Bowers: That's so awesome.
[00:09:51] Advice for Aspiring Analysts
[00:09:51] Megan Bowers: And what would your advice be for other people who are looking to do the same thing, who maybe started to enjoy some analytics projects and want to move in that direction? I think you had some cool examples of keeping track of the value of your work telling through story to your boss. But yeah, I'd love to hear your advice for those people
[00:10:14] Paula Maddox: Recognizing when you have good stories to tell. I'll tell you one more. That was really easy and kind of a wow. We were doing a training and sitting around in a room in a break between the two trainings and somebody was talking about this situation they had with two years worth of daily files that were anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 rows each in Excel, and they needed to search these files for data anomalies, little bitty things. And they were doing it by opening each file and doing a control F to search. And they had gotten through two weeks worth in a month, and they were doing this as just like a side thing. And they were talking about having to hire someone whose job it would be to search these files. So Clay, my teammate and I start talking about it and we're like, this sounds like a really easy thing. Maybe we're oversimplifying here. But I think we can help. So we built this little workflow. I swear, I think it had like six tools in it. And as we started our afternoon training, he hit run and I'm up there talking and all of a sudden I heard it like 10 minutes later, the little ping, the complete. And I was like, did it error? He goes, no, it's finished. Like what? So they're like, okay, everybody pause for just a second. We go over there and look at it. It has analyzed 27 million rows of data. And found 402 data anomalies in that data in less than 10 minutes. Just the fact that it ran so fast, I was so shocked, and it pulled data on the very first time we tried to run it. It was just, it was just such a wow moment. And so I started telling that story. I was like, I'm saving people at this time. And then ad hoc, we just saved somebody from hiring consultants to do a search, and it took us 10 minutes. It was 27 million rows. And so just those numbers, you just go, blah. But that's not unusual. It's exciting and it's fun to be able to tell the story, but that's not an unusual scenario. That's what Alteryx does. That's one of the many things that it can do, just so much data and so quickly, and without coding, without a data science degree, without extra studies or all the things. And so having scenarios like that that you can pull from and recognizing that there are interesting stories and being able to tell them really helps get that word of mouth because you know you're doing these things and it's fun and exciting and it's making things better, but when other people are able to relate the story of what you've done or talk about the how you've given them back all this time. I had a workflow that a lady used to work on from six o'clock in the morning to 11 o'clock at night. I would get on the phone with her at 10, 11 at night and I started building her a workflow, or I should say, modifying a workflow that she had. Um, once we were finished, she can now run that in a matter of minutes and she can get her work done before lunchtime. And to this day, she will just, Paula just gave me my life back. I would just, you know, doing nothing but this one thing and now I finish it in the morning. And for me, tracking the savings that was being generated and being able to relate that to, in a year's time, in a month, in a day, we've given the company 33 hours back. Like 33 hours in a single day through all of these different workflows. And I always tell everybody, if you have a something you do every day and it takes you 30 minutes and we create an Alteryx workflow for you, and it runs in 10 seconds, I've given you 30 minutes back and your day and in a year's time, the massive savings, the things you can do. Otherwise, it's just, you just have to be able to recognize that what you're doing has a value and has a story, and that is, I am a hundred percent certain what made a difference for me. Not just doing the work, but actually getting it appreciated and noticed and spreading the word to other people. And plus I was, it was so much fun. It was just, I just really enjoyed it and wanted to do it as a job and I, and it happened.
[00:14:43] Megan Bowers: That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like Alteryx for you, and I've heard this happen for other people, can make you pretty popular in the workplace because you're saving everybody time, you're taking care of people's Excel tasks, manual data tasks that were really time consuming. But I really love that tip of crafting your story, being able to tell your story and amplifying it upwards, I think is so important. And like it can be something we don't think about. You're at the analyst level, you're just in the day to day, but if you're able to tell your story, it can make career moves like that and pivots like that, so that's super cool.
[00:15:23] Certification Journey and Learning Resources
[00:15:23] Megan Bowers: So shifting a little bit, I'd love to hear a bit about your journey towards getting Alteryx certified and what does that look like and what resources have been helpful for you?
[00:15:33] Paula Maddox: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, about the time that, or shortly after I got the new role, I started taking it seriously. We had the subscription training service, so I started signing up for these one hour, two a week trainings. I was, okay, I'm just going to commit to taking a training. I put 'em all out there on my calendar. So they'll just come up and be like, okay, time to go and learn this tool. Time to go and learn about macros. And, and those were great 'cause they're small classes, they're live. You can ask questions, you can interact. I found those really helpful and by putting them on my calendar, I just committed to doing this. This is just going to become a habit. I'm just going to do it. 'Cause otherwise I kept trying to go, I'm going to do the self-trainings, and I did those and I love like the interactive ones where you actually have to pick up the mouse and go and move it to the thing. And I found those really helpful. But I also found myself finding excuses to not have enough time. Oh, I need to finish this or I need to do that. But if it was on my calendar, it was booked time, I committed to it. And I also, 'cause there were only 10 people in the class, I would feel guilty if I canceled. I was like, oh my goodness, I've got a live teacher over there. I have to go. So I found those and that commitment to doing it really helpful. And then I started taking the microcredential training certifications and I loved that was the way that they started because once I took the Advanced, I really appreciated having the certification broken up into more bite-sized. Yeah. I kept trying to set up time to do the Advanced certification and I couldn't find a window of time where I knew for sure no one was going to interrupt. 'Cause I was so nervous about finishing in the time window. Oh, I've only got this amount of time. And, but I did take one of the trainings where they offered like advice on how to take the training, and that was super helpful because I didn't realize that, that the capability was there to flag questions and come back to them. And that really helped me move through the test with competence and say, okay, this is going to take me more time than I want. Let's keep going with the ones that I know right off the bat and then I'll circle back. And that turned out to be such a good plan for me. I was almost finished with the exception of eight questions after only an hour, and I was really shocked if you have a two and a half hour window. But it was because I could keep moving and keep answering the ones that I knew with competence. And then that gave me this whole window of time to go back and focus on the questions that needed more thought or needed more of my attention. And I was so thankful that I had taken that prep in order to get there and figure it out. The other thing that I did that was kind of fun was I took a download of the PDF for for the certification. There's a PDF that's like, Hey, this is what's going to be in the course, and it had an image of all the tools that you want to do. And I loaded it into my iPad and I started check-marking on the PDF the tools that I knew and the tools that I needed more training on, and then I refocused those hourly trainings to cover the tools, especially things like spatial tools. Because I work in a finance space, I don't have much opportunity for mapping or I need a boundary around this location. I didn't have any use cases for those, and around the time that I was trying to do the Advanced cert, I finally got the nerve to start trying weekly challenges. I think I had seen like one or two weekly challenges and they were like really complicated a lot, and they had tools I didn't know, and so they had scared me. So around this time I discovered where you can filter on like beginning, intermediate, you could filter different tools that you wanted to practice with. And then I, the second weekly challenge I did was super simple and I, and the answer came to me immediately. I was like, so from that point on, I started really using the challenges, going back in history and just finding the ones that I needed to try and practice on. And that helped a lot because I then when scenarios were presented during the certification, I was more comfortable with trying to sort out like, what fields do I really need in here? Or is there a lot of extra noise? And so I think that those things really helped me to move and take more seriously. Okay, I want to get certified. I want to have that, the badge, the icon on my LinkedIn and all of those things.
[00:20:20] Megan Bowers: We'll definitely link some of those resources in the show notes for listeners, and I'm glad the trainings were so helpful for you too. But yeah.
[00:20:28] Current Role and Team Dynamics
[00:20:28] Megan Bowers: Now that you're in this analytics role, what do you enjoy most about it?
[00:20:34] Paula Maddox: Well, I have one direct report and we're working on growing the team, and he is someone just like me. He had a light bulb moment and went, oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever. And he started pestering me, Hey, when are you going to build your team? Do you need anybody else just yet? And when, when the opportunity came up, I was like, okay, I know who's at the top of my list and, and that, that worked out. So now there's two of us at least, and we're starting to intake requests and triage them and work with a whole variety of teams across all of finance, not just the areas that we had been working in previously. So it is definitely growing and, and it's fun. Each new scenario is a challenge. And the interesting thing to me is that I don't really have to understand what they're doing. I just have to know how to get them there. And so I always laugh 'cause people want to tell you the whole history of this data and this report. And I'm like, that's okay. Just show me the data, let's see what it looks like, and then show me what you want. And if I have the beginning and the end, oh, I can totally get you there. Or if you don't know what the end is, then we'll do a working session and we'll start seeing what your data has. And I think everybody, especially when you have some big process that you've done for years, you're passionate about it and you know it, it's your baby and you want to talk about it. And I found now that I can be a little bit more agnostic, I'm like, okay, let's just get the data and let's see what it tells us. And it's a lot of fun. I've, I've put together data for all kinds of teams that I never would've even worked with until now, and that, that's really been interesting.
[00:22:21] Megan Bowers: That's super fun. I mean, it kind of almost feels like solving a puzzle when you're getting that input and here's what I want out. And then you're just like putting the puzzle pieces together. It's pretty fun, I think. Oh
[00:22:32] Paula Maddox: yeah, same. Me too. And I love that you never lose anything. And I think that's something that, that people who don't work in Alteryx have a hard time understanding because we've all had that experience in Excel where you took out a couple of columns, oh, I don't need that information. Then you discover a week or two later, oh, I totally needed those. Oh, what have I done? Now I have to rebuild that and get it lined up again, and oh, maybe I can just pull the data down again. With Alteryx, it's always there. You might peel it off with a filter and send it into Neverland, but you can always go back and get it, and I love that. And the whole visual of being able to follow the data and step on every tool and see, all right, what went in and what came out, is that what I expected it to do? That the visual element of it just is such a strong appeal and it's a strong selling point. People get panicky when they're used to working in Excel, and they're like, oh, but we might need that. And I'll try to narrow down all their fields. Okay, let's just focus on what we need. Oh, but I might need that. Well, we can come back and get it. It's not going anywhere. We're just unchecking it here in the select tool, but it'll still be there. And it's such a funny thing to try to convey to someone who's afraid of losing things. You're like, Nope, you're good. We got it.
[00:23:49] Megan Bowers: There's a lot more like traceability. You can go back, you're not deleting things ever, so just makes a lot easier to handle. That's great.
[00:23:58] Conclusion and Final Thoughts
[00:23:58] Megan Bowers: Yeah, it's been really awesome to chat with you today, Paula. Thanks so much for coming on the show and for sharing your story. I think it's really inspiring and I'm hoping other people listening can be inspired as well. Well, absolutely. Thank you so much and I'll hopefully see you at Inspire this year. Sounds good. Thanks for listening. To learn more about Alteryx's training offerings and other learning resources, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/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.
