How a "side project" helped fast-track my promotion at Amazon
The most unconventional project in my career
Hello friends,
Do you know this newsletter is not my first newsletter?
Back in 2016, I built an internal newsletter about "A/B testing case studies" that grew to 1000+ subscribers (including VPs) while working as a data scientist. Here's the crazy part - no one asked me to do it.
Why did I do it?
In 2016, I worked with a team that provided A/B testing tools for all retail teams. My main responsibility was to help other teams analyze their results and advise them on product decisions. It was a fun job as I got to see how teams change the colors of buttons, messages of Prime deals, and different layouts of the pages, and it really opened my eyes to marketing and consumer experiences.
Part of my job was consulting. We host office hours to answer questions from our users - software engineers, product managers, and other data scientists at Amazon. I noticed that they often ask similar questions and even want to test similar features. However, because the users come from different teams, they don't know what each other is testing, and it's hard for them to learn the lessons to gain new perspectives and avoid the same mistakes.
At that time, my manager and I wanted to start a new project - a meta-analysis of all the experimentations running over the past year. I don't recall the exact number, but it's in the hundreds. We ranked the experiments based on p-value, sample size, and other criteria to identify the experiments that drove the most significant changes.
We quickly realized that we were the only team with access to ALL the learnings from the experiments. When I think about the questions our users asked, I know that if we share those learnings with them, explain what happened in those successful experiments, what best practices they followed, and what new things they tested, other teams will be inspired and develop better ideas.
However, this means it'll take more time to write an essay on what I learned in addition to the data science work I need to do. My manager suggested I treat it as a side project if I had time. I thought it was an interesting idea, so I said "yes".
If you have ever written anything, you know that you'll always underestimate how much time you'll spend on writing. So did I. It's not just a report; I really want my readers to take action after reading it. And because nobody asked for more work emails from their inbox, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I tell an interesting and useful story, how many statistical details I should leave there, and how I fact-check my assumptions about why some treatments perform better than others.
I took it as my weekend project as well, and I even signed up for a writing course for this. It took me more than three weeks to write my first newsletter; we had a very serious reviewing process involving not just my manager but our senior manager as well.
After I sent out to the users and asked them to subscribe to the list if they wanted to get future ones, we immediately got positive feedback -- from A/B testing users to directors and VPs. This gave us more confidence that sharing the learnings from our meta-analysis as a deep-dive helps our customers. So I continued to write the second, third, fourth... I wrote eight letters in total, and at that point, we had over 1,000 internal subscribers, and some of them subscribed their entire team.
This is the information our users didn't know they needed.
We saw the impact, and my manager let me spend more time on it and gave me more resources. I got help from one technical writer and one research scientist.
I also got a "Learn and be curious" award during the all-hands of our org meeting. Although this was not the most technical project I worked on while I was on that team, it was the project that had the most impact and visibility, and it helped me get my promotion.
If you have been reading my newsletter for a while, you can probably tell I enjoy sharing my learnings with others and helping people grow. I wasn't thinking about getting an award, nor did I plan it for my promotion. I did because I felt it was like withholding a big secret for success if I didn't share those A/B testing stories and best practices with the users.
You don't have to start a newsletter at work as I did, but if you feel something you learned through your work can benefit the broader team, share it during a "lunch and learn" session, or just write an internal doc and share it with the team. It helps you think in a more structured way when you write it down, and it is a great way to document for future project reviews, annual reviews, onboarding for new team members, or as a part of your promotion doc. Other team members might find it on your internal wiki and invite you to collaborate with them on similar topics, and this is the way for you to build influence - even if you don't have a senior title.
You don't need 1000 people to read your article or attend your session; it might help one teammate and help them save 20% of their time - that's huge.
And that’s how you create more impact; that’s how you create your own scope and grow your influence without the title.
What are some things you want to write down and teach your team? What kind of impact will it have on them and your own career? I know you probably have something you have on your mind for a long time, and I hope this article will finally motivate you to get started.
Share your idea with me in the comments!
Daliana
