Matteo Secchi: Scaling HelloFresh’s Product Analytics Team at Pace

Matteo Secchi, Director of Product Analytics at HelloFresh,
discusses how the company is ensuring its analysts are driving
business impact as the company scales

Meal-kit company HelloFresh has enjoyed fantastic growth in
recent years. Demand for its services remained strong through the
pandemic, even when companies in other sectors suffered.


As Matteo Secchi, HelloFresh’s Director of Product Analytics,
explains in this week’s Business of Data podcast episode, this
rapid expansion has created challenges for the company’s
analytics function.


Not only has the product analytics team grown since Secchi joined
HelloFresh in 2018, so too has the number of staff he and his
colleague must provide with easy-to-digest data-driven insights.


“It’s really challenging, especially when the organization is
changing so much, going from 1,000 employees to 10,000
employees,” Secchi says. “What is the right form of
communication? What is the right level? That has been my most
interesting challenge which I face at HelloFresh.”


“I don’t have the perfect recipe,” he continues. “It’s a
combination of things. You have to constantly change not just the
way [we communicate, or] the frequency, the tool, the tone of
voice, the type of content. We have to change everything and be
ready to change everything.”


In response to this challenge, Secchi says he monitors the
traffic HelloFresh’s analytics portals get carefully to gauge
which types of insight business stakeholders engage with the
most. He then uses this information to tweak his approach to
ensure staff can access the most timely, relevant insights.
Secchi Sees Upskilling as a Weapon for Retention

For Secchi, creating processes that enable staff to continually
improve their skills and share knowledge has also been
fundamental to the analytics team’s success. He says this is
about more than building teams that deliver results; it’s also a
weapon for staff retention.


“You have to try to make it part of your ongoing ceremonies,” he
recommends. “So, you finish a task, a job, an analysis, a
research, and then attached to this research is also the sharing
part with the rest of the team. It [must be] part of the normal
lifecycle of every task.”


Secchi says there are two sides to upskilling analytics staff at
HelloFresh. One is technical and the other relates to ‘soft
skills’ such as data storytelling.


“If I had to choose one single coding language,” he says. “That’s
Python, for us, because it allows us to automate a lot of
processes and we upskill literally every analyst which we have in
the team.”


“Without a very advanced knowledge of Python, we would never have
been able to do software engineering, but also more data science,
more business intelligence,” he adds. “Everything we are doing
today is based on Python.”


While staff can easily find courses on the technical side of data
visualization from any of the major platform providers, Secchi
says learning how to use those charts to tell a compelling story
requires domain expertise. It’s something analysts must learn ‘in
the field’.


“You need to know the principles of storytelling,” he explains.