Inside Twilio Product: Rachel Baskin

Inside Twilio Product is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of people behind Twilio & Segment products. We publish a series of articles that follows team members on their career path and journey to Twilio.

Today I’m very excited to introduce everyone to Rachel. Rachel joined the Twilio Segment product team focused on building out campaigns and marketing analytics offered in Twilio Engage. Rachel and her team think about how to help marketers get the most out of their campaign efforts and optimize their performance through that understanding.

So Rachel, tell us a little bit about yourself. How’d you get into product?

I spent the first chunk of my career leading internal Analytics teams in Product and Marketing orgs. Finding insights and optimization opportunities was very fulfilling, but then realizing that teams never took action on those insights was frustrating. I wanted to have a higher impact on the end customer experience and working as a Product Manager to deliver on these insights provided me with that opportunity!

Why did you choose to join Twilio Segment?

I am a SUPERFAN of Segment. I started using it in 2018 and could not believe how many use cases and issues it solved for our teams. We finally had one source of truth for all our customer data. We could launch new marketing campaigns without engineering effort and measure A/B tests in our app in real time. When an opportunity arose to build out my favorite topic (analytics) in my favorite tool (Segment) I could not pass it up!

What products are you focused on?

Twilio Engage! Trying to ensure our customers who are running campaigns within our platform can understand their individual campaign performance and overall ROI using our capabilities.

What are some early things you’ve learned about the Twilio Segment product?

It is complex! A CDP provides a ton of value to the end user but the back bone Engineering work to support this is not trivial. Figuring out how to continue to solve new customer problems while ensuring our core competencies continue to be first in class.

You recently had a big launch announcement around Journey Analytics. What’s Journey Campaigns all about, and what problems can it solve for marketers?

Customers have repeatedly asked for more information to understand Journey performance and this is the first step in our overall effort to uplevel the analytics available for marketers in Engage. 

Journey Analytics helps marketers understand the performance of their campaign by providing baseline reporting on total entries, completions, exits, & in-progress counts. In addition, we launched step level analytics to be able to view the number of users at each step of the Journey and understand conversion rates through the journey flow.

We have already heard feedback that our customers can now determine campaign effectiveness in-app without the need for data science and can create more effective follow-up campaigns and optimizations!

What’s next for Journey Analytics?

As mentioned, this is just the start of Analytics within Twilio Engage. We want to ensure we have measurement capabilities across all the campaigns a user can launch in Engage. This means support for Single Sends which will beta in Q2, improved metrics across all our existing and new channels, and improved Audience analytics. At the core of this is a goals hub where users can track their campaigns against custom conversion goals as we know this is the most important metric to marketers!

Outside of work, what do you like to do for fun?

I live in Williamsburg, NYC with my wife. We spend a lot of time walking around the neighborhood, trying new restaurants & various gym classes. If we have a weekend free you will find us on the golf course, going for a bike ride, spending time with friends/family or dreaming up our next big vacation (Japan is next on the list!)

What’s a book that’s changed your thinking?

Think Again by Adam Grant! I have a tendency to be afraid to say something I did in the past was wrong (I mean, who wants to be wrong?). But this book has taught me to embrace the joy of making mistakes! As the world, especially the tech world, is growing and evolving on a daily basis, I strive to get more comfortable with changing my mind and rethinking previous decisions if it's in the best interest of the customer moving forward.

What’s a guilty pleasure right now?

Coconut water!! I can’t get enough of it but it's way too expensive to be a consistent habit. For those who also have this thought, I recommend Harmless Harvest from Costco as the only way to not go broke!