My name is Ariadna Cuffi Teixidó and I am from Calella, Barcelona. I love drawing, traveling, and spending time with my family and friends.
The truth is that my profile didn't start out being techy. I studied Business & Technology at La Salle, in Barcelona. It is a very innovative degree that empowers business students to understand the importance of technology and how to take advantage of it. We studied technology in a more conceptual way, but having that experience was enriching because it made me realize that I wanted to know more.
At first, all the internships I did were in the area of marketing. In my fourth year, I was lucky enough to find an internship at a company that was technologically-oriented and with a strong component of social innovation. Most of the people who worked there came from a very technical background and I was working on the business area. I was the youngest person in the company, and there were a lot of talented people to learn from. They insisted that I could improve and do cooler things if I dug deeper into the technical tools. The dilemma I had was that I wanted to take that step to grow professionally but I did not want to put business and strategy aside because it is something that I really like. After doing some research, I realized that data science was the perfect path for me.
One of my colleagues, where I was working at the time, is one of the founders of All Women, the first bootcamp created by women for women. She told me to go work as a Digital Project Manager and, in the meantime, study with them. The truth is that I fell in love with the philosophy behind this opportunity. We all know by now there is a very significant gender gap in the tech sector and I decided that it was the right place for me to start the career boost that I had been searching.
I completed the full time Data Science & Machine Learning bootcamp in the middle of the pandemic. I graduated during quarantine and in fact my final project was about Coronavirus, in which I tried not only to see and predict how the virus was expanding, what factors were accelerating it and how it compared to other pandemics, but also to analyze the economic impact that it was creating.
After graduating, with all the uncertainty and confusion, I didn't really know what to do. I had several interviews but the truth is that the market was frozen. Luckily, I found a great opportunity at Domestika.
I thought that even if I had business skills, today, companies are governed by data, and if I wanted to optimize my analysis I needed a way to know how to draw conclusions from all that data, so that I could help companies make informed decisions.
I think that now what I want to do is to continue learning and developing my technical skills. I want to do it in a team where I can also manage strategy, which is what I am doing now at Domestika. In the future, I would like to lead a team and bridge the gap between business profiles and more technical profiles.
Domestika is one of the creative communities with the highest growth and projection in the creative industry. With this level of growth, data is being taken very seriously and the data team is growing a lot. The truth is that there is a lot of talent in my team. In my case, I am a Data Analyst but specifically for the Revenue and Pricing team. My job is to optimize the pricing strategy across all channels, markets and products.
I think that Barcelona is making a very big push on the technology sector and the role of women in start-up companies. In many technology companies, it seems that there is more and more balance between men and women but that the leaders still tend to be men. It must also be said that we are in the early stages, women are beginning to enter this sector and little by little we will have enough experience to take on more leadership roles. We continue to push ourselves to change that. In Domestika 12 people in data, of which 7 are women, my boss is also a woman. The truth is that there is a lot of talent, so it’s great to be a part of this team! It is the balance between both men and women what makes us powerful, we need each other.
No. I think that sometimes we are the ones that reinforce the idea that limits exist for us, because we are used to seeing it be that way in society. Until now, men have always been the great icons of the technology sector. But, my colleagues have always helped me a lot to get into and grow in this sector. As I mentioned before, in leadership positions an important gender gap continues to exist but little by little women in tech are growing, improving and gaining ground. I'm sure we will succeed.
The fact that my work has societal significance has always motivated me a lot. I believe that my work has to be aligned with my values to be able to do what I have to do. I am also very inspired by the people I work with. It is very important for me to be a part of a good team in which we can all learn from each other. And the truth is that so far I'm having a lot of luck with this.
Apart from learning Data Science from the wonderful All Women’s bootcamp, I think the most important thing I learned was knowing when to stop for a moment and focusing on what really matters: spending time with my family and doing things that I like.