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Home Depot Canada

The retail dream job, where I learned how to test, manage, and get buy-in at scale.

— The Dream Job

Home Depot was the dream job.

Ever since iTquetas, I always felt like I had to come back to retail and e-commerce somehow. I loved the mix of customer behavior, products, marketing and data.

At the time, the Marketing Analytics team was still building a lot of the foundation. And I came in with my fresh SQL, Python, and Tableau knowledge ready to tackle every data problem right away.

— The Foundation

We were trying to get the marketing channels database in place while also handling a lot of reporting requests. So we had to enter Forest mode: heads down, build the foundation, to actually clean and build things up (and by "things" I mean our database).

A lot of that work was data automation and data engineering inside a very large corporate company. Which means, of course, that nothing was ever just "build the thing and launch it." There were approvals, many review cycles, conversations and then some more.

And honestly, that became one of the biggest lessons of my career.

Home Depot gave me corporate "jogo de cintura" like we say in PTBR (or adaptability which is not as cool choice of word).

It taught me how to move from point A to point B in a (very) strict environment with a lot of rules and a lot of stakeholders.

— The Evolution

Later, I became a manager and was responsible for Marketing Analytics as a whole broadly: data engineering, reporting, testing and measurement.

A lot of tests. Like, a lot.

One thing I'm proud of is that I didn't want my team to be seen as a reporting team only (nothing bad with reports, but I wanted to move us past that). Reporting was part of the job, of course, but I wanted us to be a projects team. A team that could build things, test ideas, improve the advertising program, and help the business make better decisions.

— The Ship

And we shipped a lot.

We worked on predictive audience segmentation, changed how teams selected products for ads and flyers, improved testing processes, and helped move the advertising program forward.

There was a point during Black Friday where my team was launching an ABCD test (yep, you've read that right) with 100+ people on a call just to get alignment.

And it worked. That test helped open the door for even better projects after that.

— The Takeaway

Spending almost seven years at Home Depot taught me how to manage, how to lead, and how to work with people at every level.

It also taught me that presenting a good idea is not enough. You have to bring people with you.

You have to explain the problem clearly, make it feel possible, and get people right beside you instead of against you.

— Results

• ~7yr — From individual contributor to manager
• 100+ — Stakeholders aligned on a single Black Friday ABCD test
• Team — Transformed from reporting to a projects-driven analytics team