Douglas Puett

About Douglas Puett

I develop comprehensive data practices for rapidly-growing companies that have achieved initial product-market fit and need an innovative data strategy in order to scale and build a sustainable business. My approach creates and nurtures a data culture by combining user-centered data analytics and strategy with machine learning to create holistic data product innovation. I’m as comfortable rolling up my sleeves as a senior-level, hands-on solo contributor as I am building teams and multi-site organizations. As an individual contributor, I extract value from under-utilized, ambiguous and hard-to-use data in complex product environments. As companies and products scale, I build teams and practices that deliver both near-term and long-term value by identifying strategic leverage points within a company’s data and developing products and insights that deliver immediate user value. A researcher at heart, I help teams chart the future and lay the groundwork to strategic transformation and accelerated growth by focusing on user-centered design and innovation while maintaining focus on user value and the long-term vision for a product. Key areas of impact include: Machine Learning and Data Product Innovation - Prove out and develop transformative ML/AI products and features - Establish strategic moats through inimitable data products - Augment and automating existing processes as a new competitive advantage - Make sense out of existing data sets and identify new value-add data assets to collect - Build out systems (people, cultural, technical) to continue a culture of user-centered innovation through data science and machine learning Strategy and Data Culture - Create a strategy for user-centered product optimization using data - Orient a product culture around user-centered north star metrics - Analyze highly complex systems such as multi-sided marketplaces - Discover and tap into adjacent users and markets for amplified growth I founded and built the data practice in successful B2C and B2B startups, including analytics infrastructure, machine learning platforms, metrics and data culture and business processes. I have developed and led teams to build cutting-edge machine learning products and platforms that have transformed user experiences and unlocked new sources of strategic value. The data practices and teams I’ve built and supported have created value from data sets comprising millions of users, thousands of enterprise customers, complex dynamic marketplaces, and petabytes of video, image and text data.

Experience

1. Senior Director, Machine Learning and Data Science

   UserTesting

   Jul 2015 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   I joined UserTesting in 2015, six years prior to IPO, as the first data hire. I built out the data teams (Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Engineering) and platforms (Data Warehouse, ETL, and Machine Learning) from scratch that transformed UserTesting into a data-centered organization with data science and data products at the core and was a significant component of the company’s IPO in 2021, featuring heavily in their S-1

Education

• Stanford University

  Design Thinking

  2015 — 2016

• Columbia University in the City of New York

  Master's Degree, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences

• Cornell University

  Bachelor's Degree, History

• Jesuit High School Portland

  High School