Case Study: AVO Saved Weeks of Data Integration with Aggua

Overview

Avo, is a platform that allows companies to create amazing employee experiences whether teams work in-person, have a hybrid arrangement, or are 100% remote. Avo enables companies to take advantage of hybrid setups, from virtual pantries to hybrid event planning and personalized gifting for employees.

Before Aggua, Avo's operations consisted of three distinct domains: supply, demand, and products.

Each arm primarily worked independently, but they needed to understand the significance of each growth activity and how it affected operations. Tal Montal, Head of Data at Avo had a new goal: to build a single, unified source of data, where all the data is being managed. He had a small but highly proficient data team consisting of six analysts, one data scientist, and one data engineer. Additionally, they recruited and trained 10 business analysts who worked for different teams (product, growth, and unit economics) but required access to data.

To help Avo’s data team realize their goal, Aggua provided Avo with a consolidated perspective of its data processing operations. “With Agua, two junior analysts I recently hired gained a pretty good understanding of the business domain in terms of data structure, main tables, keys, and joint keys within three weeks.”

The result? The company's data teams can quickly onboard new members, analyze data more efficiently, and streamline their overall operations.

About Avo

New York- and Israel-based Avo is a B-series startup that aims to help companies create top-notch employee experiences. With their tools, these companies can take their hybrid setups to the next level and connect with employees through virtual pantries, hybrid event planning, and personalized gifting. In 2021, it had raised over $80 million in funding.

Avo was founded in 2017, with a mission to help parents in Tel Aviv by delivering products to nurseries. Since then, Avo has grown into a global powerhouse, with offices in Israel, New York, Chicago, and Houston, serving thousands of residential communities, businesses, hospitals, and universities.

Over the years, Avo has also expanded the range of its features. Among Avo's partners are many of the most well-known real estate developers and property managers in the country. Avo was utilized by Facebook, KPMG, Microsoft, Apple, and AT&T, among many other Fortune 1000 businesses, to boost employee engagement and satisfaction.

The Problem

Avo’s operations had three basic domains: supply, demand, and products. Avo's business success depended on all three working seamlessly and efficiently.

Unfortunately, they found that their information systems were not designed to support this kind of cross-departmental coordination. Each department functioned as a separate unit and could not see how each growth activity affected operations.

They had multiple data sources, such as MetaBase, and various CRM systems (AppSpot, Customer.io, Stripe, Segment, and Mixpanel), but their main data platform was Google Cloud. In total, Avo had 10 to 12 data sources connected to Google Cloud.

As Head of Data, Tal Montal found that Google Cloud’s data catalog had many restrictions. One of their biggest problems with it was that when you overwrite a table, it sometimes deletes all the metadata. This caused a lot of problems for them, according to Tal. “Then someone connected me with Aggua guys, and then we started talking. I realized there were a lot of features—more than I even thought I would have used—such as lineages and a single source of metadata in terms of our use.”

Furthermore, because Avo was in hyper-growth mode, many new employees were joining the team: business analysts, data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. Avo started experiencing issues with onboarding and knowledge sharing.

“Before Aggua, even two months after an employee joined our organization, they would still ask questions that gave the impression they didn't fully understand their domain, whether the supply or demand side,” Tal shared.

Solution

After a recommendation from industry connections, Avo connected with the Aggua team and began discussions. To get through the obstacles they were facing, Avo enlisted Aggua’s expertise—a data command center that provides end-to-end column level traceability and lineage across systems.

In terms of addressing the knowledge gap and onboarding issues, Tal said, “Aggua seemed like a good place to start containing and aggregating all this knowledge.” With Aggua, the team is better equipped to gather all of their knowledge and effectively convey it to new hires.

They also utilized Aggua for other requests. For instance, when Avo needed a tag table level, tag column level, or a log of analysts who use Aggua, they requested the features, and Aggua had them done immediately.

“We would turn to Aggua, and it would be implemented quickly. It was excellent work.”

Results

With Aggua's support and quick turnaround times, Avo was able to build a single unified source of tools for analysts and data scientists. They found that even though they had multiple data sources, implementing it onto Aggua was very quick, as fast as two to three days instead of the usual 6 weeks before it could be fully used by an analyst.

The process was also made simple because they had all the metadata and API explanations. Internal and external data sources were onboarded very quickly.

Aggua provided a different perspective. In terms of technology, even though Avo worked with some of the platforms that Aggua didn't have experience with, Aggua rose to the challenge and delivered all that was asked of them.

Avo’s onboarding process had also been sped up. Instead of clear knowledge gaps even after two months, Tal shared that the junior analysts he hired had a better grasp of their business domains in terms of data structure, main tables, keys, and join keys within three weeks. "Handling and working with them was made a lot simpler for the team leaders and I," Tal said. As a result, Avo’s operations were further streamlined, and productivity rose significantly.

While Aggua frames itself as a tool for data engineers, Tal shares that in his team, the data analysts used it more than our data engineers or data scientists.

“I'd say it's a tool for everyone on the data team, as well as business analysts who aren't on the data team,” Tal notes.

He went on to say that Aggua could be presented as a tool for anyone in the organization who works with data in some capacity.

According to Tal, “As data guys, we always want things to be structured—in life, in reality, our work, and our data sources. Aggua helped create structure in our data structure.” By providing Avo with a central location for all of its data sources, connections, tags, and explanations, Aggua has helped the team make better sense of their data structure.