Matt Lovell, global director of data & insight, Pret

Describe your career to date

When I was younger, I didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and, frankly, the concept of having a career in “data” just wasn’t something that really existed, or, where it did, it was limited to financial analytics.

My first role out of university was as a planner at a digital media agency which unbeknown to me when I took the job, instantly threw me into a world saturated with data that was largely overlooked. I had a great opportunity to start exploring the art of the possible and look at both analysing and optimising campaigns for a wide range of clients. 

After eight years, I moved in-house and having worked for a range of well-known brands and having taken on broader roles/remits with each move, it’s been great to play a part of the ever-increasing focus on data within businesses.   

While I’m a capable technical practitioner, I’ve been lucky that my ability to help dissect a problem and look at the different ways we could use data to help answer the question at hand has proved invaluable and enabled me to establish data-driven decision making in each organisation. That said, I’m always learning, particularly from the new generations of data candidates we see coming into the field who often introduce me to a completely new way of approaching problems.