Groupon, Reed Winter Externship, Richard Adcock
Through Reed’s winter externship program, Richard Adcock, junior linguistics major, worked with Groupon, an online commerce marketplace. This post highlights a few of his impressions:
The conference rooms in the Groupon office are called things like "Touch me, I'm sick" and "Hold all my calls." The open floor plan houses more than one standing desk, and there are more Seahawks jerseys than button-ups. Employees in all departments bounce from teleconference to meeting to teleconference, this being the marketing hub for a rapidly growing, multinational corporation.
A given call might be to go over the week's numbers and prep for an internal meeting, but even this level of bureaucracy and internal review is dispatched in minutes, and employees are back to their own projects. This is a common thread I came to appreciate in my short time at Groupon--analytics are collaborative, ongoing, and maximally quick and responsive.
In fact, many people and lots of resources are devoted to improving this speed and responsiveness--letting marketing teams see how their projects are doing with what populations in as close to real time as possible. Other engineers are working on tools to make campaigns quicker and easier to build and target. This is another impression I formed about the Groupon ethos--while the methods and metrics might be traditional (as far as that makes sense to say in e-commerce), the mentality is not. Even on a micro level, new strategies and improvements are being developed more quickly than ever.
Tags: winter externship, commerce, online, technology, groupon