DataGrail’s Employee Spotlight series highlights the person behind the professional, digging deep and discovering what drives our team members. This week’s spotlight features Aisling Grogan, Strategy & Operations Manager.
I’ve worked in B2B SaaS companies since 2012, first in London then in the Bay Area. My career has been pretty circular in nature, starting out in sales/account management and then shifting to customer success and now ops! I love learning and have put that at the front and center of all my career choices which also led me to do a deeper business dive by getting my MBA this past year where I took a lot of finance and data science courses.
What excites you about joining the DataGrail team?
So many things! I can tell already that DataGrail is comprised of a very ambitious, collaborative and humble set of folks working in a highly relevant space that is going to only become more relevant. So I‘ve had that excited feeling of “there’s so much impact we can bring to companies and their customers” since day 1, and think that will only grow over time. I love that my role is highly cross-functional and I get to work with lots of people in different areas of the business so the collaborative culture makes that all feel so seamless and enjoyable.
What was your most memorable experience while pursuing an MBA at INSEAD?
During my MBA at INSEAD, I was on the winning team of a case competition in Sustainable Fashion. My team was comprised of four folks of highly varied backgrounds and was memorable because it was a strong emphasis of how when a diverse set of folks works really well together, the diversity is a strength to a team. For us, we set terms of collaboration and brainstorming with divergent thinking from the beginning which meant we came up with a huge variety of crazy ideas, and then we pared that down using basic assessments of feasibility and business impact and developed a strategy proposal from there. The opportunity to collaborate with people from different backgrounds is something I highly value and want to take with me throughout my career.
If you could learn to do anything, what would it be?
I used to climb regularly indoors at Mission Cliffs in San Francisco and enjoyed the mental and physical challenge of tackling new climbing problems, but I’ve never done any outdoor climbing. So perhaps first would love to learn the techniques of outdoor climbs and then maybe try some deep water soloing – that looks very fun from pictures.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
These days it’s a lot of running and I’m starting to add in more strength training as I develop a mini home-gym. I mostly enjoy running through the streets of Oakland and Piedmont and occasionally hit the track, but have a goal to better get to know all the different trails in the Oakland/Berkeley hills over the next year. I also was a poll worker for the most recent election, and enjoyed talking to the voters about the election process so hope to maintain some kind of civic engagement going forward.
Aisling dressed as the shredded banksy painting for Halloween in 2018
Enjoy this piece? Check out our previous spotlight, featuring Jon Matthews, VP of Engineering!