Ever wanted to know more about the people behind your favorite Enterprise AI platform? You're in luck — every few weeks, meet one of the humans at Dataiku working every day to ensure customers and users find success on their path to Enterprise AI. This week, meet Harizo Rajaona, Director of Tech Enablement!
Where's Waldo Challenge: Can you spot Harizo in this group shot of the Paris office in 2018?
What is your role as Director of Tech Enablement about?
Joachim and I are in charge of building an internal technical enablement program at Dataiku to spread our tech culture and knowledge across the company, especially with customer-facing teams. We organize and lead workshops, hands-on training, and regular Q&A sessions across various teams to help them get field-ready for answering questions on our product and its ecosystem.
Why was the Tech Enablement team created?
The learning culture at Dataiku has always been very strong, and the leadership team wants to make sure this does not disappear as we scale. Our goal is to empower Dataikers with tech knowledge and to build more bridges between the engineering team and our customer facing people. We are also here to show them nothing’s too complicated as long as you stick with the essential concepts, by highlighting and separating those from more complex implementation details.
How did you become Director of Tech Enablement?
I joined Dataiku early on, in 2017, right after I finished my PhD. I started as a data scientist, and I helped expand the company’s footprint outside of France by being part of our initial EMEA team. I got to deal not only with data science but also with a bit of presales work, customer success, architecture, and more. I learned a lot, and this experience gave me the opportunity to join our R&D team in 2019, working on technical ecosystem integration topics (for example, cloud-based technologies) for our product.
Alongside these changes in roles, I had joined a task force that was in charge of creating our very first tech onboarding training back in late 2018. The idea was to gather newcomers from various teams and offices during one week of intensive work to dive into advanced technical sessions, both theoretical and hands-on. It was a success, and it soon became a recurring project I was co-leading. When the decision was made to structure Dataiku’s tech enablement effort in 2020, I applied for the Tech Enablement Director position.
What do you like the most about your job?
I constantly learn a lot! I realized the best way to train yourself is to train others. I lead workshops and trainings on many different topics, and I need to stay up to date to be able to answer any question. The good thing with our sector is that it’s changing all the time, so you never get bored, and you are never able to say “I know it all.” For instance, a few years ago we focused on topics like Hadoop or deep learning, but nowadays everyone wants to know about Kubernetes, MLOps, or interpretable machine learning. Which topics will be of interest in one or two years? Only time will tell, but it’s highly likely to change from what we are focusing on today.
What do you like most about Dataiku ?
The thing I like the most about Dataiku is definitely the people. It’s a mix of outstanding yet humble and nice individuals. As a tech enthusiast, I feel very happy at this company. I feel challenged enough so that I never stop learning, and at the same time — even at the very beginning — no one ever made me feel like I had asked a silly question. At Dataiku, you are surrounded by people who are not only excellent at what they do but also at sharing what they know with you.