Ritual’s top 3 tips for nurturing a strong data culture

If you haven’t given much thought to your daily multivitamin, now might be a good time. At Ritual, we’ve re-imagined multivitamins — bringing high-quality nutrients to our customers and helping them make healthy habits a daily ritual (does it get more convenient than vitamins mailed directly to your door?). One of the ways we’re leading the pack is through our commitment to creating and sustaining a data-driven culture.

Why is data culture important to Ritual?

In the fast-growing vitamin and supplement industry, we’ve scaled our business quickly by combining strong data technology with a thoughtful data training program. In doing so we’ve not only become a data-driven organization, but created a data culture.

During a recent Looker webinar, "A 360-View of Acquisition" , I joined my colleague and Associate Manager of Acquisition, Divine Edem, to share how Looker has enabled rapid customer acquisition, provided cross-team perspectives and insights, and helped foster a strong internal data culture at Ritual.

Three ways to create a strong data culture

Ninety percent of our business users access Looker nearly every day. I attribute this to an intentional effort on my team’s part to foster a strong data culture. We have three priorities in creating our Ritual data culture:

1. We’ve made data — and Looker — easily accessible.
2. We’ve set regular and useful office hours to increase usability and knowledge.
3. We’ve established data advocates.

Tip 1: Make data easily accessible

When I talk about making Looker accessible, the end result is making data democratized throughout our company and to the key stakeholders that really need it. We do this in two primary ways.

The first is leveraging the Looker Slack integration to send scheduled dashboards to specific teams and projects on a regular cadence, and to send out report quick links to people who may not have full Looker access. This encourages people to get interested and involved.

The second way is to use the Looker alerting system. This has been fundamental to help us quickly notice bugs, user experience difficulties, or anomalies in the business.

Tip 2: Empower stakeholders to embrace a data driven culture with office hours

Having office hours with the data team won’t move the needle on a data culture unless the organization really gets something out of them. That’s why I have a clear four-pronged mission for our biweekly office hours sessions: they must be accessible, recurring, interactive, and rewarding. This is the best way to encourage our stakeholders to become more independent in the data analysis process.

Accessibility means anyone can attend, which aligns with Ritual’s core value of transparency.

The office hours are held regularly and have formalized agendas. Having them on a recurring basis emphasizes the business importance of data and encourages people to prioritize attending.

I also make sure they are interactive. I invite guest speakers and internal data experts from different teams to talk about wins and techniques.

Finally, we’ve found that incentives are important for strong participation. Pre-pandemic, we used vegan baked goods at our in-person meeting, and, once we moved to a virtual format, we’ve continued to maintain good participation.

Tip 3: Establish data advocates

When individuals or teams experience wins with Looker, Ritual encourages them to spread the word and get others to utilize the information for their own work. My colleague Divine has become one of these advocates, sharing wins and insights with her acquisition team and showing them how they can easily access insights on their own in Looker.

Ritual’s data-driven journey is only beginning

We’ll continue to hone insights and encourage our teams to collaborate. Personally, I see the continued expansion of Looker and data insights as giving Ritual the opportunity to learn, optimize, and grow customer acquisition and our overall internal team data culture.

Watch the webinar, “A 360-View of Acquisition,” here.