Barking up the Right Tree at LendingTree with Eric Sims Mining Your Own Business Podcast

Today we welcome to the show Eric Sims, Senior Analyst of Strategy and Analytics at LendingTree, an online lending marketplace. Eric and host Evan Wimpey discuss the process of getting projects off the ground, ways of making analytics accessible to business units and stakeholders, and gaining alignment on business endeavors. Eric also shares how he has been enriched by personal investigative data projects, and tips for others endeavoring on a side project. Finally, Eric speaks about the importance of understanding one’s clients and truly putting oneself in their shoes. We hope you enjoy this insightful episode! 
 
Key Takeaways: 
🌳 How LendingTree communicates and coordinates its projects amongst various teams 
🌳 How to make analytics accessible to non-technical stakeholders 
🌳 How M&Ms helped team members feel more comfortable with data concepts 
🌳 Ways to truly understand and immerse oneself in a customer’s experience 
 
Quotes: 
💬 The most valuable thing to me, and I think to any company... is knowing your customer – and knowing not just your customers’ data, but knowing your customers’ voices and their problems. 
— Eric Sims 
 
💬 I really like teaching and showing and sharing. Here's how you can do it. Ask me when you forget later. And we'll just keep practicing through it.  
— Eric Sims 
 
💬 The most important thing when it comes to you have a list of projects you want to do: pick one you like, just pick one that you're interested in. Because even if you are working on something you like, sometimes it's a slog. And so you gotta want it. 
— Eric Sims 
 
Featured in this episode:
Evan Wimpey
Director of Analytics Strategy at Elder Research.
Company website: www.elderresearch.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-wimpey/ 
 
Eric Sims, Sr. Analyst, Strategy & Analytics 
Eric’s personal brand can be summed up in one word: originality. He’s always in search of new and interesting ways to approach learning and problem solving. He currently works as a Sr. Data Analyst at LendingTree, supporting the Small Business vertical, and in his free time he builds machine learning applications. He’s also interested in how recommenders can be used to connect social networks, and his latest project is a tea recommender system. 
Besides working and building side projects, Eric contributes to the LinkedIn data science community, plays paintball in VR, travels with his partner, and does normal home stuff (#RealLife). 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericsims2/  


LendingTree is hiring! Check out current opportunities here:
https://www.lendingtree.com/careers/jobs/

Chapters: 
00:00 Introduction 
01:00 Eric’s background and how he got into analytics 
03:12 Eric’s role and projects at LendingTree 
06:47 How do new projects start? 
09:52 Biggest challenges to getting projects from ideation to final product 
13:54 Communicating data terminology: making analytics accessible  
17:41 Lightbulb moments: making data make sense with M&M’s 
21:33 Eric’s personal projects: learning new skills 
28:33 Truly understanding the customer
Find more show notes, transcripts, & more episodes at:
https://www.elderresearch.com/resource/podcasts/