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Shruti Ahuja is the Co-founder and Advisor of OmniFin UK. She has extensive experience in customer insights, analytics and conversion rate optimisation for over 15 years, spanning a range of industries such as automotive, luxury retail, energy & environment, media & publishing, consulting and travel & hospitality. Her experience ranges from start-up companies to SMEs and multinational organisations, such as Ralph Lauren, BBC Worldwide, lastminute.com, WPP and Pokerstars to name a few.
Shruti is now working to expand data and insights into the property technology industry with her partner, a leading entrepreneur in the sector.
Shruti tells that her father was one of the early adopters of digital technologies to power business solutions and from a very young age, promoted digital innovation and blue ocean thinking as a way of life. She recounts that she was exposed to the world of the internet from an early age and subsequently designed websites as a hobby in her teenage years. She says, "This eliminated any gender bias or inhibitions from the beginning, as my parents taught my sister and I to focus solely on progression and nurturing talent."
Shruti recalls that she was mentored by some very knowledgeable leaders in her first few jobs who pushed her to learn the principles of analytics and data innovation. She says that they guided her to become an evangelist of data and ensured that it was converted into powerful insights across businesses, regardless of size and industry.
Shruti believes that this enabled her to build an Analytics and CRO function from the ground up at a media & publishing company, with the diversity of talent at the heart of the strategy. She recollects that not only was her team had a good mix of data scientists, optimisation and technical experts but also was gender diverse and culturally rich. Shruti states that her company employed people with a range of experiences, from someone who owned their businesses through to senior analysts, apprentices and fresh graduates; thus, creating a diverse team where each member brought a unique skill to the table.
Shruti considers that with this approach, her company built a measurement framework from scratch, to centralise the Data and Analytics function by making some market-moving decisions with data at the core of the business. The media firm was nominated for Best Data Team in the Publishing Industry as a result.
After this, Shruti moved on to build her consultancy and has since reshaped the data framework of numerous companies.
Shruti says one of the best ways to bring about innovation is to be at the forefront of the industry and its developments. Industry events and networking with fellow analytics professionals, coupled with constant upskilling is key to ensuring you are up to speed with the data world. This helps keep us in context of companies as well as the industry, and one must use this as a basis to chart out the roadmap for their company.
Shruti says that data is objective and can often be perceived as intimidating. She asserts that data and insights must be therefore communicated in a digestible format which enables the end-user to understand its value and benefits quickly. She says, "I ensure any insights I produce are presented as simple visualisations that are tailored to the target audience."
Shruti further adds that she also spends time with the stakeholders to explain to them the interpretation of data and the best way they can action the findings in their strategies.
Shruti narrates the key challenge that she faced in most of her roles was the acceptance of data and learning in organisations. She says that there often appears to be a disconnect between hunches and agendas of senior management versus the reality in terms of what the customers experience or expectations from digital products, and solutions that are built. She shares, "You need to spend time with stakeholders to ensure they understand how they can leverage data to streamline their business models and products to become more customer-centric."
Shruti believes that closing this gap is fundamental to helping companies transform their business decision process.
She also noticed that analytics roles were mostly male-dominated and oftentimes she'd find herself being the only female in the room. While this never created barriers in her role, she feels that the industry needs to incentivise women to join the field to further enrich the industry.
Shruti thinks that the advent of Cloud Computing and AI has changed the way businesses function today. She says that there was a time when heavy budgets and planning was required to set up hardware and software to accommodate large datasets and operating systems, including several personnel to manage processes. However, Shruti believes that the capability to store vast amounts of data on the cloud has streamlined those processes. She adds, "We are suddenly landed in a world where most of those humongous tasks are being handled by singular solutions like AWS, taking the burden away from companies to create and manage large infrastructures."
She observes that similarly, AI is changing the decision game rapidly. Shruti remarks that the companies are now able to compute petabytes of data within seconds, it is almost overwhelming for the average analyst. She states that it has made the current customer rather impatient because the company knows that they can expect answers instantaneously. In her words, "We are automating everything, and so we expect learning instantaneously."
Shruti concludes that this would mean the concurrent leader has to be able to learn to digest information on the fly. She asserts that the leaders need to sift the noise from the data quickly and efficiently, focus on the fundamental findings and communicate these effectively across businesses. Shruti observes that this would mean a constant need to upskill and understand data systems more intricately. She tells about her fascination to see how fast AI is shaping the personalisation of websites for consumers.
Shruti believes that transformational leaders first focus on building a clear vision of where and how they want to lead an organisation. She states that once this vision is clear, drawing up a strategy to support this is fundamental to success, as is ensuring that the stakeholders are on board with the vision. She believes that, "It is also vital that a leader is open to collaboration and consultation."
Shruti observes the needs for passion to evangelise the mission and transformation at hand within the team, and then throughout the organisation. She believes in empowering her team members to grow within their respective fields, having a clear direction for them and allowing them to develop into strong analysts.
Shruti asserts that from her experience, it is paramount that emerging women leaders focus on becoming well-rounded experts in any field they would like to pursue.
She says, "We are in a world where knowledge and experience are your strongest assets. Once you have these two facets behind you, gender becomes a nonfactor in determining your success."
Shruti advises young leaders for building the knowledge base and to know one's worth but be realistic about it. She says that nobody is expected to know everything, so not to be afraid to admit one's flaws as much as one has the value of one's fortes. Shruti suggests for being honest about these to oneself and the potential employers, but also to use these fortes and flaws for improving oneself. She says that this holds for all budding leaders. She believes that the more constant one's efforts to learn and evolve, the clearer the path to strong leadership.
Shruti observes that working women are usually perceived to have soft skills and an ability to emotionally connect. She suggests that continuous rapport and emotional connect is important, as women leaders sometimes are juggling between being busy mothers, partners and leaders to name a few roles. Shruti says that it is crucial to continue to demonstrate those soft skills at any stage of one's career.
She thinks that a leader needs to also embrace mistakes as much as they recognise wins, and so every transformational leader needs to be a risk-taker. Shruti reveals that she would not have evolved and grasped an understanding of how technology is used differently from industry to industry had she not taken the opportunities she did.
She states that technology, especially in the field of data and analytics, is constantly evolving. And says, "I believe we are yet at the beginning of the data innovation journey and so a transformational leader must be driven to constantly keep up with and adopt new technology."
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