I’m always surprised by how many roles it requires to run a successful organization, from HR to marketing, product development, and the executives overseeing it all. Even between those categories, there are roles I’m still learning about. Today, we had a chance to sit down with one of our data scientists, Simon Klimanov, to learn about the ins and outs of his role, his journey to Wrike, the decisions that have shaped his career, and what keeps him fired up about business intelligence at Wrike.
When you look at the seamless flow of features at Wrike, you witness the powerful impact of our in-house data scientists. As Simon explains, his role as a data scientist at Wrike is similar to that of a savvy pattern detective. The models Simon and his team develop using data analysis shape Wrike’s strategic operations and guide future decisions.
Let’s dive into our chat with Simon.
Can you give us a brief overview of your role at Wrike?
As a data scientist, my role is to solve data-related problems using AI and statistics. Wrike then uses the models our team builds and maintains in many business-critical processes, such as scoring leads, predicting customer churn, analyzing user feedback, and more.
How would you explain your role to someone unfamiliar with the tech industry?
Imagine you’re interviewing customers at a huge supermarket. If you want to know why a random person has bought certain items, it’s easier just to ask them. If you want to predict what customers will be buying in the next year, you might need a data scientist because interviewing each walk-in is unscalable. At some point, it becomes more efficient to build a model to generalize and predict future shopping behavior. You can think of a model as something that is really good at detecting patterns without knowing anything about the actual data.
What’s your background, and how did you come to join Wrike?
I got my business negotiation and management experience from sales roles and my machine learning and coding experience working in the biology field. I was looking for a job in St. Petersburg after leaving an extremely promising but unsuccessful start-up there. I joined Wrike’s St. Petersburg office as a customer success manager, in part because sales roles weren’t available there. While that wasn’t my favorite role here at Wrike, it eventually led me to data science, which I really do enjoy.
Could you walk us through your career progression at Wrike? What have been some key milestones?
Well, first I delivered educational webinars to customers, and then I was a customer support manager overseeing an entire book of business. Then, I moved into a project manager role on the product experience team and finally, a data scientist.
After working in sales for a while, I realized I didn’t really enjoy being a CSM and wanted to move to a more technical role. The key milestone for me was when I was able to start coding in a job as a product experience manager that didn’t actually require coding. I quickly realized that many tasks in that role could be solved better if I could add a technical component to the process.
Could you describe a typical project you work on? How do you collaborate with different teams?
Every project I work on at Wrike is different, but if I were to generalize for better understanding, it would be something like this: here is the problem statement, here are the stakeholders, here is the data we need, and here is how a delivered project ought to look.
Cross-department collaboration is very important because you need to make sure your problem statement and expected results align with the stakeholders’ needs. As data scientists, we also maintain existing models, design and run experiments for new models, draft solutions, and implement them into production if the results are compelling enough.
How does Wrike’s culture support your work and professional growth?
I’ve always valued the ability to openly discuss my career path at Wrike. That has been a big plus and has led me to move around within Wrike to gain more experience and find the best fit for my interests and skills.
How do you continue learning and developing in your role?
New developments in AI emerge every day, so you have to keep up. The industry keeps me highly engaged and constantly provides me with food for thought.
What advice would you give to someone looking to grow their career at Wrike?
Your growth is your responsibility, so you need to be proactive. As the saying goes, farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. I’d say this applies to life in general, and to careers here at Wrike.
Thanks so much, Simon, for sharing insights into your role here at Wrike. We’re glad to have you on our team!
To learn more, check out open roles to see if you might be a good fit.
