At The Very Group, we want everyone to feel a sense of belonging and thrive by being their authentic selves at work. We’re building an open and inclusive culture; one that celebrates the business benefits that diversity can bring, and where leaders are proactively progressing female talent to achieve an equal gender balance at all levels. We’re super excited about this new partnership, and look forward to supporting and championing the incredible women in data and technology, both at Very and the wider data community.
Expertise: Delivering Data & Digital products by enabling teams of connected specialists
Jo has been delivering Data, Digital & Technology projects and programmes for over 20 years and joined The Very Group in 2021 as a Data Product Owner. Jo loves to help bring business goals to action through collaboration and sharing ideas on new technologies or insights and helping crystallise these goals into clear plans to drive value – all underpinned by keeping data & insight front of mind.
Jo believes that working in a data driven environment is crucial to the ongoing success of organisations. Data helps us develop a deep understanding of the world around us, ourselves and our customer and therefore is a powerful and sensitive asset so we all need to ensure that trust & security sit at the heart of our approach.
Jo has worked with a wide range of organisations in the private and public sector with differing internal cultures, varying blends of employees and third party support organisations both onshore and offshore and has had to navigate gender politics and the challenges this brings on many occasions, and through this experience it has made her passionate in encouraging more women to get involved and add value to the Data and Technology world.
Expertise: Data Warehousing and Ingestion, Python, AWS, Scala, Terraform
Education: University of Liverpool, MEcol Master of Ecology
Sophie started her career in Data as a Graduate at Moneysupermarket in 2015 as part of their Data Warehousing Team, learning the domain with a focus on Analytics and Testing.
Since joining The Very Group in 2019 she has been given the capacity, support and encouragement to grow into a development role, recently having been promoted to Senior Data Engineer.
Sophie has been trusted with the data provision of cross-tribe initiatives across the organisation, most recently with providing a new data warehouse containing modelled Digital Conversion data to stakeholders, as part of the Data iNsight Action roadmap The Very Group employs to ‘make good things accessible to more people’.
In her downtime, she can be found on the PlayStation or trying to balance that with a long walk.
Expertise: Digital Analytics
Education: 2016-2019 Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester
BSc (Hons) Information Technology Management for Business
Ksenija remembers attending her first lecture on Data Analysis at University. Little did she know, she was uncovering a great delight in her life. After travelling to the UK, Ksenija found herself in a new country, in a different culture and surrounded by a curious mixture of unfamiliarity and excitement. This sense of excitement is still with her today, though now, she focuses it on honing her skillset in Analytics at The Very Group.
Since joining the business as a Graduate Analyst, her learning has been accelerated by rotating to support different business areas during the two-year program. She has had the chance to work across the customer journey, to understand what makes customers highly engaged, and immersing herself in the intricacies of data analysis. She finds analysing large data sets and detecting changes in behaviours particularly stimulating. Most of all, she has found it fascinating to work on projects that she would interact with as a customer and really bring to life the impact she can drive through data led decision making.
Developing Early Talent is a real focus area within the organisation and in July of 2021, Ksenija successfully completed the Graduate Program within Data Analytics and was promoted to a Senior Analyst, specialising in supporting our Digital Customer Experience Tribe.
Expertise: Customer Analytics
Education: BSc Management Science – Lancaster University
Nicola joined The Very Group back in 2007 and has since held a range of roles across Analytics and Data Science. She has been part of a wide variety of projects, from forensically understanding customers to transforming conversion rate analysis from a digital metric to a cross tribe problem to solve.
Being able to work on so many different questions and with different areas of the business is one of the reasons that Nicola has been with The Very Group for so long.
Nicola attributes her long tenure to the people that she works with. The team offer her great support and are always there to provide knowledge and advice on how to tackle a specific problem. In addition, as a data professional at The Very Group, the breadth and depth of the data available to analyse and model is a wonderful asset.
Outside of work, Nicola has 2 young children. She was supported by The Very Group in her desire to return part-time after maternity leave. And more recently the flexibility that she’s been shown when needing to home-school / parent during a global pandemic, for her, has been priceless.
Nicola is looking forward to moving to a hybrid way of working, bringing together the benefits of remote and office working and the flexibility this allows for a better work / life balance.
At The Very Group, retail, financial services, technology and data come together to create one of the richest consumer focused data sets the UK has to offer. Understanding our customers, modernising our tech systems and democratising data at all levels to empower everyone at Very to access the information they need is a huge focus for us. The demand for data is rising, and so we’ve created a centre of excellence for data platforms, customer forensics, martech and data management and governance. We will use our centre of excellence to mine for growth in our new customer base and look to sharpen our customer classifications, segmentation, and predictive value models. At Very, we’re encouraging data discovery and collaboration by implementing cross-functional data labs that encourage hypothesis testing, investigation, research, and data-literate subject matter experts to partner with and train their colleagues
We’re the people behind Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com. We’re the UK’s largest integrated digital retailer and financial services provider, and we’ve been helping customers say yes for over 100 years. We make good things easily accessible to more people. That means combining 1,900 brands our customers love, a seamless customer journey driven by data and technology, and flexible ways to pay.
