Alter Everything Podcast
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In this episode of Alter Everything, we chat with Owen Coyle, a technical consultant at Bulien and the 2025 Alteryx Grand Prix champion! Owen shares his journey into using Alteryx, experiences competing in the Grand Prix, and advice for future competitors. We also talk with Owen about the excitement of the Alteryx Grand Prix, preparation strategies, and insights into his day-to-day work as a technical consultant.
Panelists
- Owen Coyle, Technical Consultant @ Bulien - @TheOC, LinkedIn
- Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn
Topics
Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
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[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 Owen Coyle, technical consultant at Bulien and the 2025 Alteryx Grand Prix champion. In this episode, we chat about the Alteryx Grand Prix, what it is, what Owen's experience was like, and his advice for future competitors.
Let's get started.
[00:00:33] Owen Coyle's Background and Alteryx Journey
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[00:00:33] Megan Bowers: Hey Owen, it's great to have you on our show today. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for your listeners?
[00:00:39] Owen Coyle: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm Owen Coyle. I think more people will know me as the OC, uh, in the community. I work as a technical consultant at Bulien, who are an Alteryx partner based in the UK. Uh, you can probably tell from the accent, and I've been using Alteryx for several years now. I actually got introduced to Alteryx while I was in like a software development role. Um, and I was coming from a computer science background, and so very much involved in that programming and, and Python world. Yeah, very quickly fell in love with Alteryx in the community due to the kind of drag and drop and how easy it is. It's "I can build as fast as I can think" mentality, which was, which was very sweet.
[00:01:18] Megan Bowers: That's awesome. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your Grand Prix experience in this episode.
[00:01:24] Explaining the Alteryx Grand Prix
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[00:01:24] Megan Bowers: So before we jump in to talking all about the Grand Prix, for any listeners who haven't been to Inspire, who've never heard of this, how would you explain the Grand Prix? What is the event? What does it look like?
[00:01:37] Owen Coyle: Yeah, the, the Grand Prix is, is an amazing event. Uh, it's, it feels a little bit like a fever dream, uh, when you're watching it and when you're in it, but the Grand Prix is amazing. I've heard the comparison similar to the, the Excel tournaments that, that sometimes get kind of live streamed. I think they're a regular occurrence. But in essence, it boils down to you've got a, a number of Alteryx users on stage. Uh, I think it's four or five, and they're competing to solve three challenges as, as quickly as possible. The really cool part is you've got all these screens live streamed and you've got them, uh, presented back to the people at Alteryx Inspire. So if you're at Alteryx Inspire, you can watch these people competing on stage to solve these challenges. And the really cool part is, you know, there's their preparation challenge, there's a spatial challenge, and a predictive challenge, and you can watch them both in their exact workflow but also in a progress meter as well. Uh, so you can actually see how quickly or how far through the build they are. And I think while that's going on and while they're building, they've got amazing presenters creating an atmosphere and, and making an interesting scenario. And you've got people competing on stage under the, the limelight and the pressure. There's so much going on there. The challenges themselves are in like a weekly challenge-based format. Uh, you've got some input, you've got a rough idea of what the output should look like. But the quite cool part about Grand Prix challenges is you've got this, uh, like checker macro at the end of your workflow. Um, so once you get to a point where you think you've got the answer, you plug it into this checker macro and you hit run. And if you've got the answer right and you've built the right workflow, you get a nice little success message. And unfortunately, if you get it wrong, uh, you get a "fail" your message and you have to then rethink your workflow and start debugging that workflow. But yeah, it's an amazing format. I would recommend anyone to, uh, watch any of the footage of the previous Grand Prix, or if you're at the next Alteryx Inspire, definitely get involved with the Grand Prix. It's worth sticking around for.
[00:03:30] Megan Bowers: Yeah, definitely. And I love that there's elements of it that feel a bit like the Formula One racing inspired, although this event goes back to before we had that tie-in with McLaren at Alteryx. But, um, round one determines the staggered start for the second round, which is kind of fun. And then the third round is just the final two. And then like you mentioned, that little checker macro, it's like these little checkered flags. And you had someone next to you for support. I think we called it pit crew. Yeah. Standing up next to you. And so you've got your pit crew person and they have their checkered flag, so that's like a fun element to it as well. While the content may be more similar to the Excel tournament on ESPN, the spirit of it, it definitely feels like very much racing and it's very fun. Fun theme and environment for sure.
[00:04:22] Owen Coyle: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It, it's a great, great bit of fun for both the, the people participating and, and also the, the people in the audience as well. And it's, it's fantastic.
[00:04:32] Owen's Role at Bulien and Consultancy Insights
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[00:04:32] Megan Bowers: I'd like to hear a little bit more about your role at Bulien and just what your day-to-day work looks like as a technical consultant.
[00:04:40] Owen Coyle: Yeah. I mean, being a consultant is very interesting. I mean, on, on any kind of given day, I can, I can be thrown between various different tasks. You know, one day I might be designing and, and building workflows from scratch for a particular client. The next it might be, uh, you know, assisting with a server build and assisting with the infrastructure on that. And it might be advising on data strategy and, and delivering training and talking about the data they have and where they want to get to, but they don't actually, uh, potentially understand the steps they've got to take to get from A to B. And I think that's where we, especially as Bulien and as a consultant, comes in, which is getting people and data from A to B, uh, as quickly as possible. To boil it down, it's often solving problems creatively and designing something interesting for, for clients, whether that's training or workflows.
[00:05:27] Megan Bowers: And do you feel like your work translated at all to solving these challenging problems on the Grand Prix stage?
[00:05:35] Owen Coyle: I would say so, yeah, I think that one of the bits that I personally really like about consultancy is that it's very high pressure at times, and I, I, it's probably no surprise, but Grand Prix was very high pressure as well. Yeah. Um, so it, it fit in quite well. But yeah, I would say it definitely translates quite well. I think every day I'm dropped into a, a new puzzle, uh, with a potentially new client and it's constantly being presented data in, in formats you wouldn't believe people store data in. Uh, and it's always interesting to try and then produce some interesting value from that, or, or like I said, get from A to B in the same way that you would with, uh, the Grand Prix. So simplifying complex logic or creating something from scratch and it's, you know, that Grand Prix style. We want to do this as fast as possible. Sometimes we want it yesterday. Uh, it's, it's that quick. So yeah, I would say it, it lends itself quite well to the Grand Prix.
[00:06:25] Megan Bowers: Nice. I'm curious, you mentioned file formats that you wouldn't imagine storing data in. I have to ask what some examples are of that.
[00:06:34] Owen Coyle: Oh, we, we've had some beautiful ones. I, I think that the most common one and that the kind of pet peeve is using Excel as a database. I'm sure there'll be a lot of people listening who will resonate with that one. It can be quite painful. You know, manually stored data, so, so PDFs can often be a pain and images and things like that. I guess a nice part of Alteryx is, I, I don't think we've found a format that you, we couldn't get processed into Alteryx. It's just always presents its own challenge, uh, where that data's being stored and, and who's owning it and how well it's being kept, I suppose.
[00:07:02] Megan Bowers: Cool. Yeah, I was just curious when you said that, what kind of data you're dealing with. I'm sure a lot of our listeners can relate. Yeah. And even the Excel thing at Inspire, there are the shirts that said on the back, "Excel is not a database."
[00:07:15] Owen Coyle: Yep.
[00:07:16] Megan Bowers: So I can tell people are pretty passionate about that point for sure.
[00:07:20] Preparation and Experience in the Grand Prix
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[00:07:20] Megan Bowers: Um, but yeah, I'd love to hear about how you prepared yourself for the Grand Prix and what that looked like for you.
[00:07:29] Owen Coyle: To be perfectly honest, I didn't envisage that I would be on stage competing in the Grand Prix when I attended Inspire. Um, that was very much a, a nice route to go down. Um, but I, I think a lot of that was, you know, I'm surrounded, especially at Bulien, but also within the wider community by very, you know, hyper-competitive people. And I think that kind of lends itself quite well to to Grand Prix training and preparation. We've internally run an internal Grand Prix once a month at kind of one of our inter-, uh, internal training days. And again, that was not even built up to this Grand Prix. It was just that we have such a competitive team that always want to, I, bounce off each other when it comes to things like that. Um, on a similar note, you know, we've got a weekly report that, that announces who's doing best in the weekly challenges and that type of thing. Oh my gosh. Um, so it's, yeah, it's, uh, friendly but extreme, uh, competitiveness that we've got going on at Bulien, I think, helps a lot. And it's on that note, yeah, kind of believe everything comes down to, to reps when it comes to getting better at things like that. See, you know, the amount of times that we've done that internally and the amount of times that have jumped on the client and solved something, or whether it be a "something's broken, we need to fix it," or "we need to build this from scratch," and it's been under a significant time pressure. I've learned to practice, learned to compose myself under those pressures. There's, there's so much, uh, knowledge being shared across the team that, especially in Alteryx, every day is a school day. There's always new, new things to learn, faster ways to build things, and we've kind of always got that at the forefront of our minds, I think.
[00:08:58] Megan Bowers: Yeah.
[00:08:59] The Grand Prix Prelims and Main Event
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[00:08:59] Megan Bowers: So then moving forward to the prelims, so this year at Inspire, we had prelims that were like live in the expo area for anybody. Who wasn't able to make it, we basically had these stations where you solved a workflow under time pressure, live in the expo area with someone watching, and then those times were recorded and actually put into an Alteryx database and displayed as this leaderboard. And so for me, it was really fun to watch. I was like staffing mostly the booth across the way and seeing people really locked in at those prelim stations. Um, and also noticing that I think that problem ended up being a little trickier than people may have anticipated and seeing people spend a quite a lot of time over there solving it. So what was the prelim experience like for you?
[00:09:51] Owen Coyle: I think "locked in" is the, the right term to use. I got quite lucky and I, I got one of the last slots to actually be able to, to participate in the prelims. So it was like, right. And the, the kind of last part of the day, thankfully, I think, uh, double-shot coffees were keeping me awake. Uh, I was still, still had a little bit of energy. Nice. But yeah, it was in, it was very interesting doing it at the conference. I think, uh, you know, I've, I've tried the prelims previously and I mean, you've got your own environment. You've got your own music. You, you know, you can settle into your own desk. Yeah. But standing within the conference center with all of your peers and, and different members of the community walking around, it adds its own level of distraction. And I, I think it's good, like it helped in a sense because that same distraction is definitely true when you're on stage. There's plenty going on around you, but I think it was really interesting competing from a prelim perspective that kind of live at this stage as well. And you're right about the challenge as well. The challenge caught me off guard a little bit. Uh, there was a couple parts. No, I won't spoil it for anyone who wants to do it. It's a weekly challenge when it, when it eventually gets released, but there was definitely a couple parts that caught me off guard a little bit, and I had to, had to rethink my strategy. But, you know, that makes for a big challenge, right? But it was one of those where I submitted and, and I didn't know how, I didn't, it was a surprise to me seeing my name on the leaderboard, which was, yeah, it was, it was very exciting. I think slightly scary. The, the competition I was on with was, was very impressive. But yeah, it was very good. Very cool.
[00:11:15] Megan Bowers: There are definitely some fierce competitors. Um, yes, previous winners. Everybody vying for those four spots, so it was pretty, pretty exciting. I was at one of those racer booths the very first shift, and I mean, when you're talking about the distractions, people kept coming up to say hi, coming through the doors. It's like expo hall, everything. So yeah, I think that that added an extra element of pressure and distraction, but definitely, like you mentioned, prepares you for the chaos of being upstage at the event.
Oh, totally.
[00:11:49] Owen Coyle: I think you, you're right, it's a good warmup because if I couldn't keep my composure there, sat in the prelims, I was never gonna keep my composure on stage. So it worked quite well. I think if, if I'd experienced the prelims, you know, at home within silence, it probably wouldn't have been the same warmup for the Grand Prix, I don't think. And you're totally right.
[00:12:06] Megan Bowers: So then fast forward to the Grand Prix. It was the last night of Inspire. What was that experience like for you from rehearsals up until the main event, solving those problems?
[00:12:20] Owen Coyle: It was very intense going into the conference. I was lined up to, to do a couple of talks anyway, um, but I wasn't expecting to be in mid-stage and, and that many people, so I, I think it helped delivering those talks previously. I, you know, calmed my nerves a little bit. I, I got familiar with people, I suppose. Um, but, you know, there's so many layers to, to being on stage competing. You know, you've got great competitors next to you and you've got the lights and the presentation going on, and just that, you've got to tune into that challenge, which is quite, quite stressful. But, you know, it was, it was fantastic. It was so much fun. The others on stage were fantastic. I mean, we all sat down prior to going on stage and had a chat and I, I think it was quite warming that everyone was giving tips to each other as well. It wasn't a case of sat in the corner with the Alteryx documentation open, like keeping the secrets. Uh, it was great. And then as soon as you got on stage with the kind of adrenaline kicked in and I, you know, the, the nerves slowed down slightly. And I think once we got through that first challenge and, and I kind of found a, a little bit of rhythm with it, it really became enjoyable. But yeah, it was, it was very cool seeing everyone out in the audience and all the energy in the room. I think you, that's maybe something you, you don't really see until you stand up and actually take it in. Uh, 'cause once you're kind of within that challenge and you've got, you know, you're canceling headphones on, it's actually kind of hard to take in the rest of the room. You, you actually get sucked into the challenge that you, you are working through. But yeah, it was fantastic overall, a bit of a blur. I think. Obviously, you know, a lot happened within a short space of time and, uh, and yeah. Amazing. Really?
[00:13:49] Megan Bowers: Yeah. And it was super close. Right. How was that like seeing that everybody was finishing so close together?
[00:13:56] Owen Coyle: It was scary close. Don't get me wrong, I, I wouldn't have expected to, to be significantly quicker than any of the others on stage, but it, it didn't make me feel safe at any point. It was, yeah. Ridiculously close. So I, I think you know that, that's a good, that's a good Grand Prix, right? A close Grand Prix is a good Grand Prix. Um, but absolutely right. I think, you know, it just kind of shows that everyone on that stage was capable, deserved to be on the stage, and, and it, it made for a really awesome event, I think.
[00:14:23] Megan Bowers: Yeah, definitely for this Grand Prix. I was actually backstage helping with some of the comms stuff, and so I think it might be interesting for listeners to hear like some of what goes on backstage because basically we have monitors back there that are just a mirror of each monitor, upstage, and we had an Ace sitting in front of each one and they were looking at the progress as it was going along, just watching each of you progress in your workflow. And then they had headsets that they're using to say, "Red 25," and the, and that was what prompted the AV person to light those little lights to indicate on the screen for everybody. "Okay. This person is, you know, a fourth of the way there." And so being back there watching over all of that, seeing like "Red 25, Blue 25," I was like sweating. Um, because everybody was progressing pretty fast. And then, then for the second round, it was literally so close for that second place that we had to, you know, look at the timestamps of the workflow. It was, I think, 0.03 seconds apart. And that was very exciting to see that and make that call and see just how close it was and how fierce the competition was. But I was definitely sweating a little bit backstage. I think we all were, as much as you guys were probably sweating on stage.
[00:15:45] Owen Coyle: No, I, I, I fully imagine. And yeah, it's, it's, I guess really exciting to hear like the kind of behind the curtain. I think I obviously got a little bit of that being part of the event as well, but it's cool, cool. Hearing about how that was for you. And I, I think you had to kind of split finish on that. I think it was the second challenge. It was really interesting. I'm sure it will have happened previously, but I don't remember in kind of the last couple of Inspires that I've been to that, uh, having finished that close where, where it really has to go to the milliseconds to work out who was through to the next round. So, uh, yeah, that was a, that was a nail-biter. Um, but yeah, really, really cool hearing about how that worked backstage.
[00:16:20] Megan Bowers: It is hard to describe sometimes for people outside of Alteryx, people who have been to Inspire. 'Cause it's very unique. It's very, it's very nerdy, but it's very fun. And just overall, it's gotten to the point. I mean, this was year 16, I believe. It is very high production. I think that's what, and you probably saw that in your preparation. It's a high-production event and to solve puzzles under that kind of time pressure, that kind of production value is super intense. So you mentioned that like giving talks at Inspire you felt like helped prepare you a little bit for that, being in front of that audience. But is there anything else that you feel like helped you succeed once you were up on that main stage?
[00:17:05] Owen Coyle: Yeah, really good question. Probably the main one would be like that kind of preparation. I think, uh, you know, the night before I was doing the previous Grand Prix questions, I called it an early night and, and did a few more questions. And I think trying to make sure I wasn't hungover was, was probably a good skill as well.
[00:17:20] Megan Bowers: Good. Yeah. You gotta make sure. Yeah.
[00:17:22] Owen Coyle: And I, I guess like similar, I think, like I said before, like I think the, you know, reps is, is everything as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I think being surrounded by a team that, that generally make it most days feel like a Grand Prix, uh, that level of, of hyper-competitiveness and, and that type of thing. Um, and I think the other thing is trying to remain calm when something goes wrong. The, the second one, the spatial. Uh, I really went down the wrong route. And for me, it felt like forever. It was probably only 20 seconds. It was probably, you know, a very small amount of time. But for me, it felt like I was down this wrong route forever. And I, I could see that I, you know, was getting the wrong answer or was getting an error, whatever it was. And I remember quite genuinely having a small conversation with myself, "Let's take a step back. Like, what, what have we got? What have we got wrong? How can we fix this?" And I, I think it was that element of, if I went into that with panic, I, I would've been a lot more trouble there. Uh, so keeping that calmness when things go wrong and having that practice and, and soothing the nerves, I think helped a lot. Um, I think that was the kind of main things for me is being ready, going into it, and then keeping calm. As calm as you possibly can be anyway. I think it's, it's impossible to say that you're calm when you're on stage in front of that many people, but, uh, sure. But not
[00:18:33] Megan Bowers: Letting mistakes or missteps or feeling like you may have gone down the wrong path, not letting that shake you and just taking a minute and saying, "Okay. Time to course correct." Yeah. Um, and just doing that instead of getting too wrapped up in, in any sort of error or backtracking that you have to do. 'Cause I know that could be very flustering in the moment for sure.
[00:18:55] Owen Coyle: No, a hundred percent.
[00:18:56] Advice for Aspiring Grand Prix Competitors
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[00:18:56] Megan Bowers: So then you've covered some of the things that you feel like helped you along the way, but for other people, maybe they're newer to Alteryx, what would your advice be for them if they want to eventually do this, get up on stage, solve workflows really fast, what advice
[00:19:16] Owen Coyle: would you give them?
That's a really good question. I think there's, there's a lot of good content on the, the Alteryx community. I think a, a lot of people are on there and, and solving challenges daily and doing weekly challenges and, and uh, things like the Advent of Code, there, there's some amazing ways that people are using Alteryx to solve things that necessarily aren't challenges built for Alteryx as well. And I think that's where it gets really exciting for me is, you know, how, how are different people solving different challenges because I often learn that I have my own way of solving a challenge, but when I open that out to a group, we'll see other people that are solving that same challenge. Whether that's, you know, checking the answers on a, on a weekly challenge, or checking over people who have done Advent of Code, for instance. There's amazing ways of doing things in different ways, and there's always something to learn, even in, uh, even in simple challenges. So I think that there's an element there of like that repetition and, and, and kind of comparing yourself or comparing your solutions to other people's and seeing what the strengths and weaknesses of that. I say, I also like thinking outside the box. Uh, there's a project and a couple of the, the Bulien guys are starting up recently, actually. There's a bit of a competition on the, on the community as well and following Project Euler, I think it's called, which is like math-space challenges. So very similar to the Advent of Code, but like challenges that don't even have Alteryx in mind, it's bringing those challenges to Alteryx. And again, it's that kind of like thinking outside of the box, having this data and having this Point A and Point B and working out how to get there. Um, so I think definitely knowing the, the platform inside and out is a good skill to have. You know, there's a lot of different ways to use the tools in Alteryx and you can only really learn those by, uh, seeing what other people are doing. Uh, so I think the community's number one for me, you know, whether that's solutions and, and answering those designer discussions or getting involved with weekly challenges or a couple of, like I said, the wider competitions like Advent of Code, you, there's a bit of fun competitiveness there for everyone. If you do end up going to the Grand Prix, uh, and try not to let nerves get the best of you. Which is far easier said than done. But I guess the same with, with working in Alteryx anywhere, it's, Alteryx is such a good platform because mistakes don't not happen, but they happen so quickly that you can easily resolve them and, and take a step back and fix them. And I think that's the, the good part about Alteryx, but also a good part about what you could bring to the Grand Prix. It's just bearing in mind, you know, you're not gonna get the, the answer immediately and you're not gonna get the answer in the first work stream that you built. So it's taking a step back and, and understanding what you, what it is you've built, uh, you know, that debugging quickly I think is quite important.
[00:21:47] Megan Bowers: Yeah, I think that's great advice.
[00:21:49] Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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[00:21:49] Megan Bowers: Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Owen. It was really fun to hear about your experience and hopefully this gets people excited about trying to go for the prelims, try to go for the Grand Prix next year.
[00:22:01] Owen Coyle: Yeah, and absolutely. Thanks for having me. And yeah, anyone listening, give it a go. You never know what might happen.
[00:22:08] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening. To learn more about the Grand Prix, head over to our show notes on Alteryx dot com slash podcast. Special shout out to the other amazing 2025 Grand Prix competitors for making it such an exciting competition this year. Great job, Alex Abi Najm, Ali Clark, and Carolyn Canter. 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.
