Last month, paid subscribers read:

As I was brainstorming what to share today, I started with the same core principles I do for every article of “What will be most useful to my readers?”. With that lens, I came up three main questions that I thought would be fun to answer that help frame the story of how I built Uber’s Brand Science team:

Andiamo!

I moved to Amsterdam in October of 2019 and became the Global Head in May of 2020. In those 6 months, there were so many pieces that needed to come together, but these types of organizational decisions rarely exist in a vacuum.

There were 4 factors that made the perfect storm:

To put it mildly, Uber’s IPO was a disaster with the stock falling the first day and basically going down almost 50% over 6 months. The knock against Uber had always been “Sure you have hyper growth but can you do it sustainably” .

Under that lens of scrutiny, Brand Marketing spend was a BILLION dollar line item so naturally there were questions around the impact and ROI of it.

Brand Marketing was in the cross hairs.

Rewinding a bit, I first shared that I wanted to move to Amsterdam with my boss in the Spring of 2019 as my wife was preparing to graduate business school and we wanted to try Europe before settling in the States (spoiler alert…6 years later we’re still in Amsterdam and not going back).

What happened next was pure chaos:

April 2019 → I applied for a Senior Marketing Data Science role, interviewed, and got the offer

May 2019 → Then we were hit with a Marketing reorg where all offers were paused.

June 2019 → My offer is officially rescinded. I was devastated!

But sometimes you just need luck on your side.

July 2019 → My skip level manager, as part of the reorg, becomes the Global Head of Marketing Science. We had a really great relationship.

August 2019 → They decided to send me to Amsterdam as the new EMEA Head of Marketing Data Science. I went from going as a Senior IC to a Manager overnight.

In addition, over the next 6 months, both the Asia and LATAM lead decided to leave Uber and things were going well enough that I was asked to take over those teams.

Somethings you can control. Some you can’t.

When I first started as the EMEA Head of Marketing Science, I thought I’d be working with the Performance Marketers because the Marketing Science team was also under Performance Marketing. Naturally they’d be my stakeholders. Duh. But they already had support from Central HQ or other contractors.

Turns out there was a whole other half of Marketers (the Brand Marketers) that had no analytical support. The crazy part was I didn’t even know these Marketers existed. I’d never talked to them or even heard of this part of the organization. Imagine that… you’re in a Marketing org in a company and discover another set of Marketers. It felt like Parent Trap where I discovered my long lost twins!

As I’d learn, these Marketers were spending a lot of $$ and had a lot of impact on the business so there was a huge Analytical desert just waiting for an oasis. I brought this up with my manager and told them that there was this huge opportunity for us to be able to support Brand Marketers with work that would be extremely impactful.

By 2019, Uber was a clear household name and had made bets in Uber Rides, EATS, Freight, and numerous other markets. From a competitive sense, Uber had exited any markets where we weren’t 1-2 which meant we only stayed in competitive markets.

At the same time, we were tapped out on paid marketing in many markets. Many of our core markets we had been in for over 9 years and with a name like Uber that everyone knows, Performance Marketing has strong diminishing returns.

Sad side note: The only place we were getting beat badly was in the US on Delivery. DoorDash was crushing it. 😢

So, the next big bet was on creating and maintaining a unified global brand and we brought in a new VP of Brand leader from Google to build a unified Brand Marketing team at the beginning of 2020. They’d sit complementary to the VP of Perf Marketing and take Uber to the next level. Coming from Google, this new leader was extremely data driven which meant they identified a need for a global brand science team.

How convenient… I saw there was a need. Some one else saw there was a need. And we filled that need.

In most situations when you’re inheriting a team, it’s quite messy. First, Uber had six different and distinct regions:

This resulted in a variety of different methodologies, assumptions, and even trust in how things were being measured. In addition, most markets were severely understaffed with effectively no brand scientist meaning teams would use whatever methodology they wanted to measure their campaigns.

From a resourcing perspective, Brand Science was super barebones. The reorg in 2019 had decimated the number of analysts outside the US. Here’s what that looked like:

So, as you can see and as I mentioned, there were no Brand Scientist 🙂.

Lastly, Uber was a very ops-heavy organization and operations teams have often owned the P&L. This mean that they often looked at Brand Marketing as a waste of money and that they could better deploy that budget elsewhere. 

In summary, a mess of an organization, under pressure to prove impact and a need for global alignment. To be honest, these are the types of challenges that I really enjoy. Data science is a strategic function so being dropped into a strategic clusterfuck is as exciting as it can get (if you like this stuff).

Below I’ll share the carefully orchestrated set of chess moves I used to rise to the top and expand my analytics empire in a bid for world domination.