Berlin was the gift that kept on giving this year! After a successful virtual event in spring, and in-person meetup over the summer, we held our final Snowplow Meetup of 2022 in Alexanderplatz, at Diconium’s amazing offices. Throughout the year we held virtual events in London and Sydney, and in-person meetups in Vienna, Boston, Amsterdam, and Stockholm, but Berlin won the prize for most Snowplow events of 2022! The weather may have been cold during our final visit, but the welcome was as warm as ever.
With over 120 registrations we were hoping for a good turn out and Berlin didn’t disappoint, with c.80 attendees. With food and beverages kindly supplied by Diconium, the evening started with networking and general introductions before Eddie May & Chris Lubasch introduced Snowplow and its community.
Mattias Gloel and his team at Diconium then showed us how they have implemented Snowplow across the Volkswagen electric car mobile apps, and talked about the implications for how data is created and consumed within the VW group. Snowplow allowed them to implement a “one shop” data layer across all the brands, who historically didn’t share a harmonised approach to data collection or using the same tooling, and how using custom JSON schemas they have been able to bear down on consistent data structures and quality.
For Diconium, Snowplow has been integral to the development of their data capabilities, and their presentation showed they are able to innovate with Snowplow and produce real business value. By this approach, Diconium could create a lot of additional insights in a fraction of the time. The same level of governance, observability and insights can now be achieved among brands - at least for the use cases currently covered.
The final presentation was from Randell Helms on how his team used Snowplow to develop an advanced marketing attribution model at Penta.
In his presentation, Randell outlined the many attractions of using Snowplow, including data ownership, visibility, quality, effectiveness, and price. He also talked about design decisions in building out their attribution system, and how Snowplow fitted into the data stack at Penta.
Besides running the actual attribution use case, we learned how Randall and his team dealt with challenges typical to any digital business. From optimizing funnels, over stitching together data from different systems for a unique user ID, to stepping up the game in data quality and observability. By using Snowplow’s commercial offering, Behavioral Data Platform, Penta was able to focus their entire time and efforts on building their custom logics and use cases, without actually dealing with running the technical pipeline on their own.
To conclude, Snowplow Community would like again to thank Diconium for hosting us, and thanks to our other hosts across the year - the Vienna Data Science Society, Visma, Omio, and for all the speakers and attendees who’ve made these events possible and special. We plan to continue our Community meetups in 2023 - if you would like to consider hosting us, or want to speak or organise a meetup, please reach out to me at eddie@snowplow.io.
Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year from the Community Team at Snowplow.
ps - links to the presentation videos will be added soon
