- Name: Toru Takahashi
- Blog in JP / Blog in EN
- Twitter / linkedin / Github takahashi)
- Japanese
- Native Speaker
- English
- Fluent who can speak English well enough to manage members in US/EMEA, etc.
Director of Support -> Senior Director of Customer Experience
- Spun off from Arm and started business again as Treasure Data
- Organized the Customer Experience team with the addition of the Product Documentation team responsible for product documentation for the service, and assumed global responsibility for that organization.
- Responsible for a global team of 25 people in Japan, US, and UK.
- Responds to approximately 7,000 support tickets per year globally, with an average ticket resolution time of 24 hours and a support satisfaction rate of 99.2%.
- Currently reports to the Chief Product and Technical Officer.
Manager of Support Engineering -> Senior Support Manager -> Director
- Joined Arm's Data Business Unit following Arm's acquisition of Treasure Data (link)
- Supported various internal systems in preparation for organizational integration. In the midst of these changes, he continued to ensure the quality of global support. As a result, when Treasure Data was selected in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics industry survey, its customers rated its technical support as a major contributor to customer satisfaction and ranked it higher than other vendors. Treasure Data was selected by its customers in an industry study of the Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics. [(Link)](https://b2bsalescafe.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-data-management-solutions-for-analytics- january-2019.pdf)
- Reorganization of Support Organization from R&D to Customer Success Department
Technical Support Engineer -> Senior Technical Support Engineer -> Support Engineer Manager
- Joined the R%D department and hired as the first Technical Support Engineer globally.
- Provide technical support for all technical stacks related to Treasure Data in both Japanese and English.
- Appointed as Manager of Support Engineers as more support engineers are added in US/Japan respectively.
- Joined the company as a new graduate as a software engineer. Assigned to the Big Data division when it was launched.
- Pre-sales activities for Treasure Data's sales promotion activities as the first Treasure Data agency in Japan.
- Conversion analysis work including impressions of ad serving for ad agencies.
- Served as Treasure Data's first support engineer, providing support to Treasure Data's global clients.
- Sendai National College of Technology, Completed Information Systems Engineering
- Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Master's Degree Completed
- Experienced in US based startups from business startup phase to ARR $200M. In that time, he has experienced acquisitions and re-establishments, from phases of 10+ people to 600 people, and has knowledge from his experience with various challenges and solutions at the timing of organizational growth.
- As the first global technical support engineer, he supported the service and grew it to a team of 25 people as the global head. In addition, he also holds and leads organizations such as Operations and Product Documentation as well as Support Engineers.
- Through the OSS culture, he is accustomed to contributing to OSS through Fluentd / Embulk / Digdag and various other data related OSS and creating an ecosystem for them!
- Since we often start from 0, we are very good at catching up and getting familiar with processes, services, etc.
- He is remarkably comfortable with failure analysis and reporting through various product pains and service failures as the service grows.
I want to help people who work with data to use it to its fullest potential. I feel it is a shame that talented people in the world are not able to make the most of good services due to a slight lack of knowledge in order to create a better society. I am considering a career focusing on work that fills this knowledge gap. I believe that this problem can be achieved not only through support, but also through various roles such as solution architect and developer relations, so I would like to work on a wide range of initiatives, not limited to a specific job title.
I personally like and am good at working as an Indivual Contributor (IC). On the other hand, I am not good at management skills, such as developing team members and solving problems. However, I can be flexible in both IC and management depending on the business situation.
- Ruby, Python, Java, Javascript, Go, etc.
- AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.
- Ubuntu, CentOS, etc
- Zendesk, Confluence, Github, Salesforce, etc
- fluentd, digdag, embulk, etc
I can do some code reading and script writing for debugging and bug fixing. For example, Treasure Data's API library is available in a variety of languages, including mobile, browser, and other languages, so it is possible to read the code, identify defects, and make simple fixes in any language. On the other hand, I do not have much experience in full-scratch, large-scale system development from scratch. For example, I do not like to create a distributed DB from scratch, but I am good at combining existing IaaS/SaaS such as AWS to create a system.
Furthermore, I always try to catch up with data analysis/ETL/BI services, tools, and OSS that are in the same area as Treasure Data, and I am familiar with their usage and service characteristics.
- He has been using an agile development method for SaaS service development, especially in the startup phase.
- He is also knowledgeable about CI/CD, canary release, blue-green deployment method, and other common methods of how to safely release to customer environments.
- At Treasure Data, He created a Release Safety Advisor process where the support and R&D teams evaluate releases to ensure that they are released with customer conditions and stability in mind, and I was responsible for contributing to the process.
Continuous improvements to code and documentation. Some links are listed below.
- PyHive: Fix get/delete requests in Presto to accept headers
- ReDash: Feature: Support TreasureData as datasource #570
- zendesk_api_client_rb: Add "update many" to users #415
I have presented at internal and external workshops and conferences.
- hosted all four meetups for support engineers
- From 0 to 6 people to a global support team and Arm (Tatsu Takahashi, Treasure Data Co., Ltd.)
- CRE and Support Engineers on Data Analysis, GDPR and Retargeted Advertising vol. 11
- Customer-Driven Management Strategies, sponsored by Diamond Inc.
- Wovn.io Public Case Study
- Other past speaking engagements](https://www.slideshare.net/torutakahashi100)
I have been a Zendesk Community Champion and have been recognized by Zendesk for three consecutive years.
- Software Design March 2017 - Marketing & Service Improvement. Introduction to Log & Data Analytics Infrastructure
- 2015 - Gihyo.jp - This Works! Ecosystem of Big Data Analytics Infrastructure E3%82%B0%E3%83%87%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E5%88%86%E6%9E%90%E5%9F%BA%E7%9B%A4%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A8%E3%82%B3%E3%82%B7%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3 83%A0)
- previous technical articles @ Qiita