Welcome to the Boost Employee Spotlight! Each month, we feature a different member of the Boost team and their story. This month, meet Edward Drislane, Senior Product Manager.
What is your role at Boost and what does your role do? What does your typical week look like?
I am the Senior Product Manager for Data Products at Boost. That means that I work across teams to prioritize initiatives for the data engineering team, whose goal is to provide data-driven insights about Boost’s business so that our internal teams and partners can make well-informed decisions.
My typical week involves various meetings. Daily, I check in with the data engineering team to help determine what each team member will work on. If any questions arise during our meetings that need interdepartmental attention, it’s my role to get answers. Weekly, I check in with the data team’s stakeholders, specifically the Insurance and Finance teams, to break down the more complicated issues or determine if any needs have come up. Oftentimes, one-off meetings are needed—usually, they’re related to Looker/SQL training sessions or engineering breakout meetings for issues that need a little more focus. And occasionally, I take external meetings with data providers/recipients to discuss how to fix any issues with how the data is moving in/out of our system.
In non-meeting time, I am usually determining the next steps in our initiatives, helping out the data engineering team with stakeholder requests, and developing our long-term plan to build out Boost’s data offering.
What are some of the highlights of your time at Boost?
I’ve been at Boost for almost five months, and even in that short amount of time I’ve seen the data engineering team completely overhaul the flow of data into and out of the data warehouse. This transition has phenomenally simplified the understanding of where our data is coming from and how our data is aggregated, which is critical as we scale and need faster access and delivery to our partners and internally. It has created a single source of truth across all of Boost’s different teams. Simplifying and cleaning up the flow of data now is important to our way forward as we add complexity, and the data engineering team was able to flip it for the better in several months.
Seeing the data engineering team’s impressive ability to move as quickly as it has—knowing how important the data warehouse is to Boost’s future—is definitely a highlight for me.
What’s one thing you’re excited to work on / hope to accomplish at Boost?
Now that v0 of the data warehouse is in place, I’m really excited about what we can do for the rest of Boost. Over the second half of the year, I’m excited to see us build out a better and faster process to return data to our partners, automate many other teams’ more complicated processes, create various checks to prevent errors, and add in a significantly wider range of data to open up more complicated analysis in the future.
What is your favorite thing about your role / why did you decide to pursue your field?
My favorite thing about my role at the moment is twofold: (1) I really like the people I work with (shoutout to Shane, Filip, and David)—they’re smart, experienced, and kind, and (2) I really like the clean flow of data that I get to help put in place. As we mature as a team, I am excited to get into more complicated versions of what data is supposed to represent and how it can help inform decisions.
Subconsciously, I think I decided to pursue being a Data PM because I like building things and I really like numbers. To be clear, data is much more than numbers, but the reason I became interested in data was that I’m fascinated with what a number is supposed to represent in theory versus how it does in practice. On the product front, I really enjoy building accurate and repeatable things (like the incredible pipe structure that the data engineering team built). It adds order and aims to make things sustainable and perfectly processed.
If you enjoyed reading about Edward’s experience and are interested in working at Boost, let us know! We are hiring and would love to hear from you.
Check out our open roles and find out why Built In named Boost one of New York City's best places to work.
