Hi Everyone,

Thank you once again for your amazing support throughout 2024 and for joining us at our last event in October – it was a fantastic turnout!

We’re thrilled to announce that Meet-Up #6 is now confirmed for Wednesday 26th March (our first event for 2025)! 🎉

Join us at our London HQ, 100 Liverpool Street, for an evening packed full of insightful talks, great conversations and plenty of opportunities to connect with like-minded individuals.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper meet-up without pizza and refreshments to keep the energy high all night! 🍕🥤

🕕 Doors open for networking at 18:00 🎤 The first talk kicks off at 18:30 🚪 Wrapping up at 20:30

We can’t wait to see you there!

#1 Maryam Aidini \| Principal Product Manager @ Mesh-AI "Building Smarter Data & AI Products with Lean Experimentation" Maryam is a Principal Product Manager with a passion for building innovative, data-driven products. With over 12 years of experience, she has led high-performing teams and helped companies craft smart, effective product strategies that align with both business goals and customer needs.

Currently working at an AI and data consultancy, Maryam focuses on using AI and advanced technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline processes, and create scalable, customer-centric solutions. She’s a strong advocate for data-driven product management, believing that the best products come from a mix of strategic thinking, deep user understanding, and the right use of technology.

Beyond her work in product management, Maryam is also a course creator and presenter with O’Reilly, where she helps upskill product managers in AI, data, and product strategy. She is passionate about teaching and mentoring, sharing practical insights to help product professionals stay ahead in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

#2 Rebecca Vickery \| Senior Leader of Customer Insight & Targeting @ EDF Energy "SmartGuard: Optimising Smart Field Engineering with AI" Rebecca is the Senior Leader of EDF's Customer Insight & Targeting team, a Data Science and Research team dedicated to driving better customer engagement through data insights. With over 16 years of experience in the field of Data Science Rebecca mentors and leads her team to develop models for segmentation, targeting and personalisation. Passionate about technology and improving customer experiences she is currently leading a project to embed a new Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) that will streamline and improve customer communications across the organisation.

Outside of her day job Rebecca is a strong advocate for improving gender diversity in the data and tech fields. She also regularly publishes articles designed to help people break into the field of Data Science on her blog hosted on Medium.com.

#3 Zoe Higgins \| Data Analytics Manager @ Santander "Am I valued or just a metric?"

In this talk, I’ll explore the intersection of data, culture, and inclusion in STEM, drawing from my experience as a data scientist and my recent work in human resources. With access to the numbers and drivers shaping workplace culture, we’ll uncover what truly influences representation and belonging. Beyond the statistics, we’ll reflect on overcoming imposter syndrome, challenging stigmas, and ensuring that women in AI and data are not just counted—but truly valued.

Zoe Higgins is a Data Analytics Manager at Santander, with six years of experience leveraging data science to drive insights and innovation. Holding a Bachelor of Science in Data Science, she has built deep expertise in analytics, strategy, and problem-solving working on global projects from UK, Spain and Poland. Beyond her technical work, Zoe is a passionate advocate for equitability within STEM industries, working to create more inclusive opportunities. She brings her insights on data-driven decision-making and the importance of fostering diversity in tech and leveraging data to build the right culture.

The Data Product Management In Action podcast, brought to you by Soda and executive producer Scott Hirleman, is a platform for data product management practitioners to share insights and experiences. 

In Season 01, Episode 17, host Nick Zervoudis ( Head of Product at CKDelta) talks to Grace Halim (Product Manager with Power Digital Marketing). In this episode Grace shares her career journey and highlights the importance of diverse experiences in shaping a successful product manager. She discusses the value of empathy, strong relationships with engineering and data teams, and the role of curiosity in asking the right questions. Listen to Grace as she shares her plans for a career break to explore new projects! 

About our host Nick Zervoudis: Nick is Head of Product at CKDelta, an AI software business within the CK Hutchison Holdings group. Nick oversees a portfolio of data products and works with sister companies to uncover new opportunities to innovate using data, analytics, and machine learning. Nick's career has revolved around data and advanced analytics from day one, having worked as an analyst, consultant, product manager, and instructor for startups, SMEs, and enterprises including PepsiCo, Sainsbury's, Lloyds Banking Group, IKEA, Capgemini Invent, BrainStation, QuantSpark, and Hg Capital. Nick is also the co-host of London's Data Product Management meetup, and speaks & writes regularly about data & AI product management. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.  
About our guest Grace Halim: Grace is a seasoned product leader with a passion for building innovative products. With over 12 years of product management experience, Grace has honed her skills in leading high-performing product teams and delivering exceptional customer experiences. From crafting engaging data products to optimizing complex enterprise systems, Grace has a proven track record of success in the product management field. Grace is currently on a career break traveling around Australia in a caravan with her young family. Having been a product leader in the last two roles she held, Grace excelled in building and scaling product teams, fostering a culture of innovation, and driving business growth. Her teams' focus on customer focus and strategic thinking have been instrumental in delivering successful products that resonate with customers and drive bottom-line results. Beyond her corporate experience, Grace is an entrepreneur at heart. As co-founder of a data platform, she demonstrated her ability to turn a vision into a paying customer. Stay up to date with Grace’s adventure on LinkedIn. 

All views and opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect their employers or anyone else. 

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We're delighted to announce our next meetup will be hosted by Lyst.

Agenda: 6:00pm: Doors open, networking, food, drinks. 7:00pm: Talks start! 8:00pm: Talks finish, Q&A. 8:30pm: Further drinks and networking.

Speakers: Will GenAI replace Data Engineers? - Gaurav Tiwari - Engineering Manager @ Spotify Brownfield data integration: how to transition from complex legacy data sources to modern data platforms - Erik Schmiegelow - CEO @ Hivemind Technologies

The London Analytics Engineering Meetup is focused on discussing and spreading best practices in the growing field of analytics engineering. Whether you've set up the "Modern Data Stack" many times over or are brand new to tools like dbt, Looker, Snowflake, Bigquery and more, this is the meetup for you.

Food and drink will be provided by Lyst with additional support from Spectacles and SELECT.

PBI Manchester 27th July 2023 Location: Bruntwood Sci-Tech - 103, Oxford House, Oxford Rd, Manchester M1 7ED 5:40pm for a 6pm start (event will wrap up around 8:15pm)

Key note guest speakers

1. Rishi Sapra -
2. Mathias Thierbach

Who is Rishi ? He works as a Group Manager at Avanade - a Joint Venture between Accenture and Microsoft which has been MS Partner of the Year for the last 15 Years - specialising in Power BI. Prior to this he has spent 12 years in Consulting /Financial Services (Deloitte, HSBC, Barclays, KPMG) and is a qualified accountant with a background in Business modelling and process improvement. He is actively involved in the Power BI Community in London and has presented at Meetup groups and several global conferences. He also runs two core communities - LDI (www.learndatainsights.com) for people to take data analytics quizzes and courses and PPF (www.powerplatformfinance.com) for helping finance professionals apply the Power Platform technology stack in their roles.

Topic wise Rishi is planning on showing the (new) back end behind the Fabric quizzes he has on his LDI site https://learndatainsights.com/ - xml files for each quiz attempt pushed through real-time analytics in fabric with direct lake PBI on top

What's new for Power BI Source Control

Learn about three recent substantial innovations for Power BI Pro Developers: TMDL, Power BI Developer Mode, and Workspace Git Integration. TMDL, the new Tabular Model Definition Language, was announced in Public Preview in April 2023. It is a new declarative format for Power BI tabular models that is designed to be human readable and editable as well as collaborative. It is perfectly suited for use of source control and CI/CD when developing tabular models in a professional environment. Mathias contributed the language design and implementation to the Power BI product team as part of their Community Contributor Program. Learn from him, first-hand, what it is all about, how TMDL works, what problems it solves, and which tools are available. Power BI Developer Mode, released in Preview in Power BI Desktop June 2023, enables developer-centric workflows for reports and datasets. Instead of binary .PBIX files, Power BI projects are saved into a source-control friendly text format. Many people have been waiting for this feature for years! See how works, and what workflows it enables. Thirdly, the recent release of Microsoft Fabric has brought native git integration to Fabric/Power BI workspaces. Initially limited to Power BI reports and datasets, alongside Power BI Desktop Developer Mode. How is it enabled, what are the limitations during Preview, and what's coming?

• TMDL Announcement
• learn.microsoft.com: TMDL Overview
• Power BI Developer Mode (Release Plan)
• Introducing Git Integration
• Fabric Git Integration Docs

Bio

Owner of pbi-tools Ltd, Data Platform MVP, and Developer of pbi-tools and TMDL In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, the only complete source control solution for Power BI. During seven years of leading a data management team at YouGov, he experienced the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing source control and DevOps practices to the wider Power BI community now. In addition to his open source engagements, Mathias cares deeply about his role as an enterprise technology leader. Like many, once having started as a single contributor technologist, he had to pivot significantly when he moved into a manager role, responsible for building, stabilizing and growing a team of data engineers, analysts and architects. Mathias is now passionately sharing the many experiences and learnings that came out of that journey with the community.