Antje Bustamante, director of data and analytics, Zoopla
Describe your career to date
I started my data career as an analyst about 20 years ago after finishing my studies of information science. I was, and still am, massively passionate about how data can change society and help solve real world problems, which has also led me to stay within marketplaces and particularly the property industry throughout my career. Building products that help making the right buying or selling decisions of your home is heavily driven by data and people want to feel they made the right choice. Being part of that was and still is very motivating and uplifting in my jobs.
I was selected into one of the first talent programmes of my employer about 15 years ago and moved into leadership roles soon after that. I built an award winning team at Scout24 that was leading on data transformation and left that company in 2019 to a great successor that I had built up to take on the head of data role back then. I moved to London and joined Zoopla just three months before the Covid pandemic struck. With that I encountered new leadership challenges as I joined to build a data team (consisting of data engineers, scientists and analysts) and a best in class data tech stack that would enable business growth and open new revenue lines through data monetisation.
I am very proud of the team and what we have achieved in such a short period of time. After all, my career has also been successful through the people in my team and their impact and development. I am a trained career coach and mentor of underrepresented groups inside and outside of Zoopla. I want to use my voice to help women in tech to be successful and help break the glass ceiling.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
On a scale from 1 to 5 we are a solid 3. We did invest into infrastructure and getting the basics right in the past years. We have hired new skills such as ML Ops and analytics engineers and use a very modern tech stack. The next level is to truly leverage these foundations as we move away from fixing the basics into using data and data science to build products. We have also seen an increase in data skills outside of the data team, which was driven by different data literacy initiatives. Yet, in terms of how product and tech could leverage particularly data science, we still have some room here in terms of maturity.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
I am leading about 40 people and report into the CTO. The team consists of analytics, data science and data engineering functions. Some of these people sit in rather central functions, and others are embedded into product teams. We are responsible for all things data across all teams in Zoopla, and support finance, commercial, pricing, P&T and marketing but would also underline that data is a team sport. Most of our work is project based, which also involves different functions. Collaboration is key, never isolate your data teams.
DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
Phone: +44 020 3821 5665
Registered in England: 9900834
Copyright © IQ Data Group Limited 2024