Employee Spotlight: Long Hei

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I graduated from Northwestern University with a PhD degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. My thesis was about numerical optimization algorithms. After graduation I had the luxury of working in different industries and companies, including financial derivatives trading, financial services, e-commerce, insurance technology and mobility technology. At Photomath I head up the data organization.

How did your Photomath adventure begin??

I have been with Photomath for one year and six months. When Photomath presented the opportunity to me, I got excited by the executives’ vision of building the best math learning app in the world, as well as the outlook of building out and managing the data functionality in a fast growing company. Choosing Photomath was not a hard decision at all.

Tell us more about your job.

My job is mainly about building, developing and owning the company’s data roadmap, answering the question of “how can Photomath leverage the vast amount of data that we accumulated over the years to generate and/or add business value”. This entails building, managing, running and developing a team of data professionals to deliver new data products and improving existing ones.

What does a typical day look like?

In short - many meetings, a lot of writing. I consider myself to be the “data product manager” of the company, which includes but is definitely not limited to: connecting the dots, identifying and prioritizing opportunities, defining (data) product requirements, making sure the data team’s joint force is pointing towards the final deliverable, and owning the stakeholder relationship.

Tell us about your team.

I am so lucky to have the best team in the world - smart, diligent, business-minded, always learning and always striving for success. There are three main types of roles within the data team: data engineers (Nikola and Kristina), data analysts (Mislav, Alvaro and Paolo), and data scientists (Sinan). All of us are helping add business value by working with data, delivering “Data as a Service”, “Data as a Product”, or “data consultation”, including but not limited to: data pipelines/ETLs, data warehouses/marts, dashboards and visualizations, data insights, predictive/prescriptive statistical or machine learning models, together with a lot of on-demand data analytics. We work very collaboratively and creatively.

How do you collaborate with other teams?

It depends… Sometimes we get precise business requests and deliver the work exactly as prescribed. Sometimes when the requests are not so clearly defined or are very vague in nature, we would first brainstorm with the stakeholders to define commonly agreed-upon goals, then work to achieve those goals. We ask a lot of “why” and “what if” type of questions, in order to better understand the business context and make sure we are adding value.

What is your favorite part of your job??

To me, the favorite part of the job is the process of figuring out ways to achieve the desired results from known facts -- a process that happens in the early stage of every single project. We do this by effectively communicating with the stakeholders and creatively exploring the data.

What’s your favorite thing about working at Photomath?

Obviously, the people! I enjoy working side by side with so many smart and hardworking colleagues, on things that help millions of people unstuck from math learning - isn’t that fantastic??

What’s the best advice you can give to someone who wants to pursue their career in this field?

Here’s what I intentionally made up to confuse you: Never stop learning, and never stop sharing the learning with those who are learning.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Watching sports (soccer, basketball, etc.), watching movies and of course, enjoying time with the family.

How would you describe your job to a class of kindergartners?

My job is to find and tell the stories behind the numbers. These stories are like hidden gems buried in a jungle of numbers, and we need to work hard to figure out where these gems may be, what they may look like, how to properly dig them out and how to make the best use of them when they are found. Sometimes people tell us where to look and what to look for, but there are also times we point somewhere and tell people “You may not have realized yet, but there are gems there and we’ll find them for you, so you can make beautiful things with them”. Then we go dig some gems out with people’s permission and collaboration, followed by cheering with them!

Want to join the Photomath team????

Check out?our?Careers page ?to see all?open?positions!