"Stop having conversations about saving 5k yearly on the warehousing tool. It's literally one campaign gone wrong on one day in marketing spend."
Sascha Urban's honest reminder that data teams need to think bigger hit home during our recent conversation about driving business impact.
In this episode, I want to tell you Sascha’s story and share how you can benefit from Sascha’s experience to create more business impact with your data team.
Sascha Urban is the Global Director Data at Go1.
In 2023, Go1 acquired Sascha’s former company Blinkist, the popular book-summarizing app that transforms thousands of books into 15-minute reads and listens.
Since its founding in 2012, Blinkist has grown to serve over 20 million users worldwide and has raised significant funding from investors including Insight Partners.
With over a decade of experience in data and analytics, Sascha has been instrumental in transforming Blinkist's data function from a service desk into a revenue-generating powerhouse.
Before Blinkist, he spent almost 6 years in the data team of Amazon’s audiobook service Audible.
The Early Days: When the CEO Wrote SQL
When Sascha joined Blinkist three and a half years ago, the company was already past startup-phase:
- Scaling-up after product-market-fit
- Small data team of 5-6 people split between BI and data science
- Data engineering initially sat under the CTO
Fun Fact: Blinkist's first data pipelines were built by Co-Founder and CEO Holger Seim using Matillion, a drag-and-drop ETL tool.
While these pipelines weren't built to modern best practices, having a CEO who understood data pipeline complexities proved invaluable for future data initiatives.
Evolution of the Data Organization
The first dedicated data hire was a tech-savvy analyst.
Interestingly, proper data engineering expertise came relatively late:
→ First dedicated data engineers were hired after Sascha joined
→ Previously, data engineering was handled as a "side project" by backend engineers
Today's structure:
15 people across three functions:
- Data Science
- Analytics
- Engineering
- Analysts are embedded with business teams while maintaining central reporting
- Data science operates almost like a product team, building customer-facing systems
Reporting Structure
Sascha reported to the CFO for most of his tenure, though this has recently changed and he is now reporting to the CEO.
Activities with most business impact: The Black Friday Success Story
The most significant wins for Sascha’s team came from supporting marketing campaigns. During Black Friday 2024, the data team spotted a critical issue in the campaign setup:
- Discovered suboptimal filtering of customer segments based on app versions
- Changed the approach to show all plan options regardless of app version
- Result: Shifted sales from 50% to just 20% on the cheaper plan
- Impact: Six-figure revenue increase in a short timeframe
Biggest f*ck ups
Sascha’s biggest regrets and f*ck ups center around people decisions:
→ Inconsistent promotion criteria
→ Promoting too early to retain talent
→ Not being tough enough on proving ROI for each role
A particularly painful moment came during layoff discussions: "If you can't prove your team's value with data, you're not in a strong position to defend headcount."
What does Sascha love most about being a Data Leader
What Sascha loves most about his role:
- Working with data professionals who embrace rational, self-critical thinking
- Having a holistic view of the business, from revenue streams to technical systems
#1 advice to other data leaders and future data leaders
"Put yourself in a hypothetical situation where your company needs to cut 10% of staff next year. Could you prove with data why none of your team members should be let go?"
Practical steps:
- Focus on revenue impact over cost savings
- Take calculated risks even if it means occasionally disappointing stakeholders
- Build a team that generates measurable business value
- Think like a C-level executive: focus 80% of conversations on improving top or bottom line
- Stop optimizing for stakeholder happiness alone - optimize for business impact
Remember: A happy stakeholder won't save headcount in tough times, but proven revenue impact will.
Watch the full conversation above 👆
