“Being a data scientist is addictive”. That’s how Rocío González, Analyticae’s CEO explains her passion about her job. It’s not always fun, and trying to solve a complex problem can often lead to frustration, but, “when you find the solution, it’s like fireworks go off in your head: that mix of knowing how much effort you put in, a bit of frustration, with the reward of solving something that no one else had figured out yet is really addictive”.
Besides being CEO, Rocío is the business mind behind Analyticae, but her talents go way beyond marketing. She holds a degree in Mathematics with a specialization in statistics and a PhD in Data Science from the Complutense University of Madrid.
Her entire career so far has been all about data analysis, especially in Marketing Analytics. Her path has led her from being a data analyst at Ikea Portugal, to going freelance due to family commitments, eventually founding Analyticae and even becoming a university teacher.
The company, which began with a partnership with CTO Julián Gómez, joined Kimia Group in 2023 and is now a growing team.
Get to know her journey
Rocío, what motivated you to start your career as a data scientist?
I think it was my big curiosity. I’m a restless person and I like to understand why things happen. Nowadays, we’re called data scientists, but in reality, we are just scientists, because our work involves a lot of trial and error. It’s like, ‘If I do this, what would happen?’. It’s like a CSI in a lab. We do the same, but our raw material is information, it’s data. I’m a mathematician, so I like to understand why things happen and what the consequences of our actions are.
So how did Analyticae come about?
Analyticae is our baby. It’s the way Julián, my business partner, and I have found to bring order to so many ideas we have. Julián, as an expert in infrastructure and Big Data, has a huge technical knowledge base and I contribute with the more business-oriented, social side of things. I talk to the clients, understand their needs, their business problems and translate that into algorithms.
“Data Science” seems like a relatively new thing and something incredibly abstract and complex. Why is that? And how do you make it palpable to clients?
Nowadays the media has only just made popular terms such as ‘Big Data’, ‘machine learning’ and ‘artificial intelligence’, creating a perception that all of this is more recent and revolutionary than it really is. There’s a lot of noise around it, but in the end the basis of everything we are doing is traditional statistics and the type of mathematics that I studied, which is universal mathematics.
It’s true, though, that many times, people talk about these issues without fully understanding what they are. So I try to explain it to clients as if I were explaining it to my grandma. Also because, you can actually know all you want about data science and there are people who are great technically, but you also have to know how to communicate all that knowledge and explain its applications. I’m very extroverted and empathetic, so I try to put it in a way that the person in front of me will get it.
Plus, years of experience helped me understand what clients want, even when they can’t verbalize it clearly. The questions we get are often very broad, like ‘How do I sell more?’ and we translate that into analyzing and interpreting data and variables to get those results. Convincing them to take that leap [to lean into data to sell more], is difficult, but it’s what we do. We don’t sell campaigns, we find solutions to problems, even when our clients don’t even know how to define their problem, and that is the key to our success.
How does that look like on a daily basis? What is your modus operandi?
The first thing we do when we start with a client is have Julián access all their different data sources and thoroughly study them, whether structured or unstructured. That allows us to take it and synthesize it, check its quality, clean up what isn’t useful or doesn’t work and start building. We create a ‘data lake’ [a library of raw data] in the cloud. That allows us to structure the data we sorted, all cleaned up and ready to work with.
After that, we build the models needed to solve the client’s specific business problems. For example, if the problem is customer churn, we build a model that predicts the likelihood of each customer leaving. With that information, the client can take actions to prevent it. This entire process is a cycle that continually feeds itself. It’s a job that never ends. We’re not the typical company that normally comes in and does a campaign or offers a one-time service and then just leaves.
It has been almost a year since Anayticae joined Kimia Group, how has the integration been?
Kimia has given us a lot of oxygen. Being a small company, even if you’re technically very good, you can’t do it all and you end up drowning in your own growth. Kimia has provided us with resources like a communications department, design department, human resources and even finance departments, which we, of course, didn’t have before and allow us to focus exclusively on the technical side of our business and continue growing.
So, the integration has been very easy. We’re a very approachable company and we’ve adapted quickly.
So has collaborating with other departments and companies from the Group been easy?
Yes! People at Kimia have always been very open and accessible to us. We always try to help everyone we can and I think that attitude has really helped us integrate ourselves as well. Plus, we try to partner up with other companies in the Group and we see ourselves already as a part of the big Kimia family.
Looking in, how would you describe the Analyticae team?
They’re spectacular. We’re building a team of good people, solid, honest and technically flawless. We work as a team, we help each other, and that allows us to solve problems more efficiently. Plus, by working on so many different projects, the team is always motivated and learning.
Also, seeing how my experience combined with Julián’s, after so many years of breaking our backs and studying, gets passed on to the juniors with fresh ideas… it’s just a spectacular combination of youth and experience.
Being such an evolving and technical field, how do you all stay up-to-date?
Well, I did my Ph.D. exactly because of that. In the end, it’s not enough just to have a degree or even a lot of experience. We always need to be studying and, in my case, teaching. It’s a mentally and emotionally demanding profile because you need a very high level of concentration to do your job, stay updated and be very creative.
There’s never just one solution to anything, you can solve a problem in many ways and you have to find the best one. That’s how we work and it requires constant studying. That’s why I went back to university five or six years ago and enrolled in a Ph.D. program, and that’s why I think it’s so important to teach the new generations and that’s why ‘education’ is one of Analyticae’s pillars.
With that in mind, what advances within your field are you excited to see?
I think that when LLM models (Large Language Models) become more developed, there’s going to be a significant advance in the quality of our work as data scientists. These tools are already making our lives easier, but it’s going to have an even bigger impact, especially for SMEs [Small and Medium Enterprises], which often don’t have the resources that larger companies have.
Now, is artificial intelligence here to stay? Definitely. It improves and changes at speeds that we are not able to assimilate. But will it be independent of the human being? I have my doubts. We are going to create robots that clean our houses (which I’ll sign in for as soon as it happens), but, in the end, there will always be people who maintain them, train them and, in our field, interpret and apply the information they provide to businesses.
Looking at the big picture and all that’s happened so far, could you tell us a success story that you’re especially proud of?
It’s more on a personal level, but being able to raise a family of three kids and also run my own business is something I’m very proud of. It’s difficult and many women don’t achieve it. I’ve managed to balance it, and I’m at a really happy point in my life, seeing my kids grow up and my business growing too.
On a professional level, when I started working for IKEA Portugal, IKEA Family was simply a customer club, not like now that we transformed it for gathering data and understanding customers. We began analyzing that data to anticipate customers’ needs and respond to them. We were the pilot country in the world to develop these analytics and then we implemented them in Spain and other countries.
Regarding what’s about to happen, what can we expect from Analytyae in the future? What long and short term plans do you have for the company that you can tell us about?
Our plans are to grow and triple our turnover in the next three years and also increase our team, of course. We also want to develop new lines of work that are less linked to marketing, but I can’t tell you more because we haven’t finished defining those goals yet and we’re still in our first year of the merger with Kimia, we’ll have to see where it takes us…
To finish off, what three words would you use to define Analyticae?
Professionalism, trust-worthiness and human touch: we’re a team of people who join forces to work hard, together, with top-notch technology and without losing our humanity.
If you want to know more about the company, check out Analyticae, data science and big data specialists!
