Her Story
About Janani
My career started over 14 years ago on Wall Street, where I worked with both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. My remit was to build risk and regulatory analytical platforms, and I used to publish reports that were sent to the SEC and FINRA during critical financial phases like MIFID and Brexit. That gave me the discipline to build analytical systems that were truly trusted. I then deliberately shifted gears because I wanted to switch industries to gain a new perspective, and I joined Amazon. Within Amazon, I built an analytics team ground up within Amazon advertising. It's funny because when I joined the team, I was the only woman who was hired in New York, and then the team grew. I was able to bring the change, hire more women in the role, and build our analytical forecasting systems ground up. After that, I moved to Audible where I led Performance Paid Media. My team was in charge of building an experimentation roadmap to start measuring effectiveness of our marketing spend through the lens of incrementality, and we've seen a lot of success since I took up that role. Now at Samsung, I'm Director of Media Measurement where I lead our U.S. media measurement work across all our lines of businesses including mobile, electronics, appliances, and e-commerce. My core remit is to bring all these experiences and build this unified measurement and analytical infrastructure that defines how we measure success here at Samsung.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Janani
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
For someone fresh out of college, I would ask them to ask more questions and be very curious. When you're given a task, don't just work on it immediately. Make the best effort to understand the context and how it helps the business. Does it help the business grow money, or save money, or reduce risk in certain cases? How your work is going to contribute to the overall organizational goal is something I would ask them to think deeply about. For someone who is a little more experienced, I would tell them that when it comes to technology and building an analytical framework or measurement framework ground up, the problem is twofold. One is that you need to get the technology right - you need to make sure the data signals are trustable and the systems are very resilient. But the other equally important piece is to get the organization in alignment. Making sure everyone is on the same page before you start building things, because that's one of the bigger pieces when it comes to measurement that we need to take account for - getting alignment of all the leaders and defining what success looks like.
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