Business Intelligence uses business analytics — including predictive, prescriptive and descriptive analytics — to explore past and current data to ask and answer the following questions for business; what has happened, what could happen and what should we do? Business Intelligence allows an organization to reduce risk and unveil opportunities that could have gone unnoticed if BI initiatives were not prioritized. I advocate for BI initiatives to be a key contributor in an organization's workflow.

Specifically in the gaming industry, BI can offer a great way to tie together business and game design decisions. By leveraging player data, the organization has the ability to understand the player base to a deeper level and adjust the game to align with what we can see player's are enjoying in their interactions with the game. Tying together qualitative player sentiment to the players' interactions in the game via quantitative data gathered via event tracking, game designers are empowered to adjust their game design decisions to align with player needs. In my work thus far I have had the opportunity to use my data analysis, BI and UX knowledge to help implement and manage an analytics data pipeline for a gaming studio that allowed the organization to tie together qualitative and quantitative data form players to make data drive game design decisions.

In this position I acted as the Product Manager and Data Analyst in charge of overseeing the entirety of analytics for a cross-platform multiplayer MOBA arena battler game. Acted as a one-person team to establish, maintain and develop the analytics infrastructure for the organization. This encompassed:

- Conducting research and cost-benefit analysis to strategically source an external vendor for database management and ELT processes in our data pipeline, optimizing costs and obtaining expert support in navigating complex data landscapes.
- Collaborating with internal engineers and our external vendor to discuss SDK implementation and data collection methodology. By discerning between server-side and client-side data collection, we ensured the elimination of duplicate data, minimized server load, and optimized storage space utilization.
- Working cross-functionally with the external data team, game developers, engineers, and QA to ensure the analytics data pipeline functioned effectively at every step of the process.
- Utilizing agile product management methodologies to manage analytic events; created Jira tickets for engineers to create events in the backend to extract insights from players, tracked in our analytics in Tableau.
- Employing system thinking to test and document edge case scenarios for various metrics, ensuring all player journeys were considered when creating events.
- Working alongside the external vendor as our internal data analyst to leverage SQL for transforming raw event data into views and visualizing them in customized Tableau dashboards.
- Establishing a functioning QA process for analytics with our internal QA team to validate events and maintain data integrity amidst game changes or reported bugs.
- Collaborated directly with product, marketing, game design, and executive teams to create specialized Tableau dashboards catering to each field's needs.
- Obtained extensive knowledge of gaming industry standard KPIs and produced technical documentation supporting various metrics visualized in Tableau dashboards.
- Created custom player segmentations based on defined engagement metrics to gain deeper insights into player interactions with the game's functionalities, implemented as filter abilities across Tableau dashboards.
- Produced reports of player findings, tying together qualitative survey data from players with their quantitative in-game interactions to understand sentiment at a deeper level and iterate the game using such insights, as well as providing high-level KPIs to investors.

Additionally, I assisted in User Research and User Testing via onsite gaming cafes, Discord groups as well as using Playtest Cloud software.  I used UX best practices in producing various surveys, conducting contextual inquiries, and coding qualitative data to understand player sentiment. Produced reports and presentations to various teams to help guide design and business decisions based on player findings.

Tools used: SQL, Tableau, Jira, Gitlab, Perforce, Playfab, Unity, Unreal, Google Suite, Discord


I was empowered to take on this role due to my Masters education, in which my BI specialization allowed me to do the following:

- Build experience in SQL using both Snowflake and Microsoft SQL server management studio. I have built a database from scratch — the conceptual, logical and physical databases. I started with defining business requirements, creating and refining ERD diagrams, normalizing my database through primary key/foreign key relationships and lastly using DML DDL, DCL & TCL SQL in Microsoft SQL management studio to create, implement and manage my final database. (This project can be found under my project page)
- Build experience in Tableau to transform these data-backed findings into visualizations that are enhanced by my UX background to allow for the main insights and deliverables to be quickly understood by all members of an organization.
- Obtain knowledge around data warehousing architecture and processes. Learn the importance of data warehousing initiatives and insights into the Kimball and Inmon methodologies to creating a cohesive architecture. I have experience creating a relational database from scratch using  logical, subject-oriented, entity relationship modeling and normalization techniques in SQL Server Management Studio. My second data warehousing project took place in Snowflake and consisted of a non-normalized Kimball approach. Both of these projects have given me invaluable insights into data warehousing architecture, database creation & management, as well as strengthened my SQL abilities.

Business intelligence combines my passion for UX and my technical mindset by involving data manipulation and analytic techniques to produce information that supports actionable insights into an organization that is portrayed in a clean, simplified & aesthetically pleasing manner on finalized dashboards that everyone in the organization can quickly understand.