The second week is over, and quite a lot of things have happened. Fortunately this week we also managed to go on sightseeing trips and we almost finished Andris’s must see list. We visited Baker Beach, Ocean View, Lombard Street and a lot of other great places, and at lunch time we continued to discover the local restaurants. Even with these programs the days were dominated by work.
At the beginning of this week it crystallized what the tasks we should accomplish during our internship are. the beginning of this week it crystallized that what are those tasks that I should accomplish during my internship. Luckily I can try myself in a lot of different positions which I always wanted and get very diverse tasks:
● My first task is connected to front end development. During this I have to rebuild a landing page for the marketing according to the needs of the marketing and design team. To understand what landing page means let’s start at the beginning. The company’s goal is to sell their product to as many customers as they can. To achieve this in the first step marketing defines what those customer segments are which the company should target (with its product). After that in the second step they are creating a marketing campaign in which they are trying to convince the targeted customers with personal messages to buy their product. In this process the landing page (webpage) that I have to rebuild is actually the personal message whose link’s attached to every mail that are sent to the targeted customers. In the last step the customer opens the mail, then clicks on the link which opens the landing page where he reads the marketing’s message and he has the opportunity to buy the product.
● In my second task (where I’ll be a business analyst) I have to learn how to use a visual analytics tool which hasn’t used before by the colleagues in SF. After the learning period I have to help and encourage the business users (sales, marketing and business analysts) to use the analytics tool, because it provides a lot of information which supports them in the daily decision-making process.
● My third task is connected to product ownership where I have to design an internal application which helps the customer support (CS) in their work. The demand behind this new application is that today CS is using several separate tools to get the necessary information which is required by their work. The goal of my task is to eliminate this information fragmentation and design a tool which provides the customer support with all the necessary data.
While I spent my first week mainly with front end development and with learning the basics of the data analytics tool (which are pretty lonely activities), fortunately this week I had a chance to work with my colleagues. For example I had a session with one of the business analysts where we checked that how she could extract more information out of the current data with the help of the visual analytics tool. Beside that I had a meeting with the leader of the customer support team who told me what his expectations are for the application I am going to design for them.
In my previous blog entry I mentioned how cool the USTREAM office is, but I forgot to write the three things that make it really cool and special: the colleagues, the kitchen and the dogs.
My colleagues are very friendly just like most Americans. Even in the streets you can meet with random people with who you can have short conversations about general topics. Inside the office the kitchen and the dining place is where the social life takes place. The main reason for this is that there are plenty of food in the fridge and on the shelves so usually the employees eat their breakfast and snacks there. On Fridays usually there is a beer drinking event, which is pretty awesome too. The last thing what makes the office special is dogs, because employees have the opportunity to bring their puppies here. First it was unusual for me, but now I have gotten used to it because maximum one or two dogs are in the office a day and they are pretty calm and just lie beside their owner.
