Tell us about your path to Zulily and the team you’re on now.

I moved to Seattle from New York and have been at Zulily for six years now. I started as a marketing analyst on our Analytics team. I grew with the team as it did, and up until 2020, I was leading the Marketing Analytics team as a Senior Manager. We got to the point where analytics became deeply ingrained across the company, so a centralized Analytics team was formed. This team included Marketing Analytics, Merchandising Analytics, and Data Operations. Last year, I transitioned to our Tech team, where I’m a Data Science Manager on our MDML team, which has been an awesome experience.

Six years is a long time in e-commerce! How have you seen Zulily grow and evolve?

The most significant evolution was when we joined Qurate Retail Group and started getting to know our new colleagues at QVC and, later, at HSN and the Cornerstone Brands. What's been so unique about joining forces is that we have the benefits of being part of a larger organization, but our day-to-day still feels like we are very much in Zulily's culture. We always kept Mom as our central focus through the changes, which has been great—since I relate a lot to our customer. I’ve had both of my kids while working here and spent maybe too much time shopping on our site!

How has being a mom helped you relate more to our customer?

As a mom, I spend quite a bit of time on our site shopping for myself and my family. This has really helped me better understand our core customer and have a personal perspective of her. I completely understand how our customer orders things in advance to take advantage of our great deals and I appreciate the many unique finds we have. In a nutshell, when I am doing my job here, I can see through our customer's eyes and make improvements I know Moms will appreciate.

What’s your go-to shopping category on Zulily?

I actually have set up brand notification updates when new brands are going live, and I learned about other new brands from shopping from our site. I mostly purchase clothes for myself and my kids. Probably my top category is pajamas for my family!

When it comes to your work on the Tech team, what do you enjoy most?

I really love working with people and helping them achieve their career goals. The other thing I enjoy the most is working with subject matter experts in a wide variety of fields; I learn so much just from working with different people here.

At Zulily, I can directly impact our customers and the business overall. It would be difficult for me to work at a place where I didn’t feel like my work made a difference, and it truly does here. You feel like what you build and launch comes to life.

As you’ve progressed in your career, any advice for team members seeking to grow within the organization?

Be vocal about what you want to achieve! What I have found is that when my learning has plateaued, I open conversations with my manager to start exploring stretch opportunities. Zulily has always been great about that.

You recently won our Leading with Purpose Award. Can you tell us about that?

I joined our Data Science team at a really interesting time. We were renewing an initiative to bring our data scientists together as a cohesive team, and the squad I'm part of, Metadata Fabric and Search, had already done a lot of groundwork to help achieve our goals for the year. I see my role as helping to bring focus, to make progress on the highest priority items, to help create collaboration opportunities among teams, and to help team members achieve their own goals. We were able to launch a successful experiment in search and have improved team engagement. I wouldn't have won this award without the incredible team members who help drive our business forward every day.

Can you tell us more about your work to improve Mom’s search capabilities on our site?

If you go on the site now, search is not really a focus because we focus on discovery when shopping; mom can browse and come across a new find. Now, we have data tracking in place and see that most of our customers interact with our search capabilities. By improving search capabilities based on what mom has shared with us, mom's experience will be better. We can add an element of discovery within the search portion of our site.

That’s exciting, we look forward to hearing more about that this year. Before we close, what's an interesting fact about you your colleagues might not know?

I used to be a competitive ballroom dancer; I have competed nationally in the UK and United States. My goal is to one day compete in salsa dancing.