Building Connected Data Teams at General Mills with Zach Wasielewski

Mining Your Own Business Podcast

In this episode, we are joined by Zach Wasielewski, Senior Data Scientist at General Mills. Evan and Zach discuss Zach’s role in strategic revenue management and how data science teams operate cohesively in a large multinational company like General Mills. They discuss change management strategies and how General Mills has grown as an established company. Zach also shares about his background in financial services and discusses his transition to consumer product goods.
We recommend enjoying this episode over a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Tune in for an entertaining and informative conversation!
Key Takeaways:

• 🥣How various business units across the company strategize together through knowledge-sharing

• 🥣How an established company like General Mills has incorporated data science strategies and grown over time

• 🥣What strategic revenue management looks like and what challenges they work to solve

• 🥣How data teams interact with the supply chain and future directions for data science projects in supply chain shortages

Quotes:

• 💬“We're learning as we go and building on top of what we've got in place to make sure that anything that they could be using and testing and looking at historically is what we're also incorporating into our models.” - Zach Wasielewski

• 💬“The data science group, especially in the SRM space, is all very interconnected... we are all very much one team, even if we work in different things, different products, different stores.” - Zach Wasielewski

• 💬“We are one giant cohesive organization...What I learn in my day-to-day job is something that is important for them and what they learn is equally as important for us.” - Zach Wasielewski

Featured in this episode:
Evan Wimpey
Director of Analytics Strategy at Elder Research
Company website: www.elderresearch.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-wimpey-40469b47
Zach Wasielewski
Senior Data Scientist at General Mills
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-wasielewski/
Zach’s athletic accomplishments: https://datacolumn.iaa.ncsu.edu/blog/2019/04/25/intramural-softball-winners-2019/
Join General Mills’ team: https://careers.generalmills.com/careers

Chapters:
01:51 Zach’s background and how he got started at General Mills
04:00 Zach’s role at General Mills
08:55 Data flows at General Mills
10:41 How are data teams organized at General Mills?
15:48 How change is implemented at General Mills
18:36 From finance to consumer goods – how did Zach get up to speed?
24:34 What data science project would Zach like to tackle in the future?

Find more show notes, transcripts, & more episodes at:
https://www.elderresearch.com/resource/podcasts/