How I automated my Business Analyst job (& got promoted)

This is part 2 of my career story. If you’re interested in part 1 (how I landed a job at Amazon), you can read it here.

I call this part of my career “Death by Automation.”

Long story short… I hated my job so much that I decided to automate it. This decision to automate my job resulted in a change in role AND a promotion. Ultimately, it led me to landing my dream job as a Data Scientist at Meta.

I was a SQL monkey

I don’t like the term SQL monkey because it feels derogatory. But this was exactly what my role as a Business Analyst at Amazon was.

My day-to-day looked like this:

• I’d get a request for a specific report

• I’d pull the data by writing SQL queries

• I’d send the data to the requestor

Every day looked pretty much the same. And I very quickly got bored of the job.

I saw an opportunity to automate my work

One day, a coworker showed me how to build a pipeline. And that’s when a bulb went off — “Why don’t I build pipelines for the SQL requests?” I thought to myself.

It was the perfect opportunity to do so because the SQL queries I wrote:

• Were long and complex, BUT they often had the same (or similar) first few processing steps

• Took a long time to process because they involved very heavy data processing

So I thought, why don’t I build a data pipeline to do all of the early-stage processing of my data?

Then make it really easy for people to build their own reports on top of that data pipeline.

My executive sponsor loved the idea

I honestly didn’t think much of this idea. But I still decided to pitch it during a team meeting with my executive.

He loved the idea.

But I thought he was “just being nice,” so I did NOT start building the project 😅

Two weeks later, he followed up with me and asked how the project was going. (At this point, I had actually forgotten about the idea.)

But because he followed up, I realized… DAMN, this is a good idea.

And so I started building it out.

The process of learning to build a database was tough

I won’t sugarcoat it. I knew nothing about building and designing databases.

It was hard.

So I spent my weekends learning about databases and slowly building out a database at work.

There was a steeeeeep learning curve. It felt like months of trudging through mud.

• Learning to manage costs

• All the design decisions I had to make

• How to build a reporting tool on top of the database

Thankfully, I was able to recruit a few more Business Analysts to work with me on this project.

Before we knew it, we had a small working database.

But then, we had a whole new challenging problem to solve.

An automated SQL writing tool BEFORE the age of AI

This entire story took place in 2017. We didn’t have access to AI back then the way we do now.

So… how do we build an automated SQL writing tool on top of the database so that our stakeholders could query their own data?

We explored lots of different options, but:

• We didn’t have the budget for Tableau or Power BI

• Quicksight didn’t have the functionality that we needed

• We didn’t have the skills to build out a bespoke Python or JavaScript solution

But it turns out a simpler solution was in front of us.

Excel + VBA = cheap + easy to build.

What did we build?

A very simple tool in Excel that allows you to select the columns you want (dimensions and measures), and the filters you want.

Then you click Run, and the VBA code generates a SQL query on the backend and runs it against the database.

And BOOM—our stakeholders could use this simple tool to get the reports they needed… without having to make a request to the Business Analyst team.

Learning to be a Product Manager

While we were building, I also stepped into the role of Team Lead and Product Manager for this workstream. I helped build out our product roadmap, manage collaboration across the teams, and communications with leadership.

I didn’t have a product background. But I figured it out as I went.

• I asked questions when I was stuck

• I got help from other PMs

• I focused on keeping things simple and clear

This small “product management” stint became a critical point on my resume and future interviews.

My role change and promotion

Funny how my entire motivation for building this was me disliking my job.

But thanks to this crazy idea (that my executive saw the merit in before I did)… I was able to use this project to transition to a Business Intelligence Engineer and got a promotion at the same time.

Instead of writing SQL queries, like a SQL monkey, I was now building databases and data tools.

Pretty neat.

The most important lessons that I learned

• Trust your data gut — if you have an idea that feels right, pitch it to your team and manager. If they like it, maybe it’s a good idea and you should go build it!

• Find executive sponsors. I could not have done any of this if it weren’t for the buy-in from my executive. Because he liked the idea, I was able to put this on my roadmap and use my work hours to build it (and learn new skills while on the job).

• Spend your weekends learning. People hate it when I say this… but honestly, if you want to grow in your career, you have to put in the overtime.

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