With many talented and driven people at Harvest Group, there is always an appetite for exploring ways to improve existing processes and expand capabilities. Several years ago, Harvest Group dedicated a small group of people to focus on innovation full-time. Research suggests this method is the best way to achieve disruptive outcomes (see The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen). The Harvest Group Research & Development (R&D) team is the result of multiple iterations of this idea.
The R&D team is a leading-edge team at Harvest Group for projects that create efficiencies, solve problems, prepare for future industry shifts, provide a competitive edge in the market, and ultimately create real-time solutions for our clients in the quickly evolving retail landscape.
In this blog post, you’ll learn more about the Harvest Group R&D team individuals including their backgrounds, favorite projects, current work, and more.
Meet the R&D Team
Brad Cook is the Director of Research & Development at Harvest Group. He has spent the last nine years at the company working across client services, advanced analytics, and technology. Brad is known as a problem solver with deep expertise in sales analytics, forecasting, and retail media measurement (specifically Amazon Marketing Cloud).
What is the objective of the R&D team?
Our goal is to discover, prototype/test, and commercialize innovation that will enhance or disrupt our service offering. Over the years, we’ve realized that we’re in a unique position to generate new approaches that give our clients competitive advantages faster and at less cost compared to what we see in the market. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from a McKinsey article titled “Building an R&D Strategy for modern times” that simply suggests treating “R&D not as a cost center but as the growth engine it can become”. An important way we hope to be a consistent growth engine is by being closely embedded with client service teams, so we have constant reads on the value of what we are doing for our clients.
What does the R&D process look like at Harvest Group?
Often times our process can look like us reading about a new dataset, doing some initial exploration, working with an account team to assess value, and then handing off a prototype to our tech teams to productionize.
What makes you feel proud of the team you’ve built?
R&D can be super exciting and fun at times, other times it can feel like getting lost in complexity because so much of what we’re doing is totally new and untested. I’m proud of the way my team has stuck with really challenging projects and achieved some pretty incredible results in the last year. For example, we have a few impressive projects in the works with Amazon Marketing Cloud and we’re using statistics and machine learning to do things like detect anomalies in performance or improve forecasting.
Beyond that, I’m proud of the depth of character my team shows – focusing on building relationships, forgiving when we get on each other’s nerves, and supporting one another through life’s challenges. This team has tech skills second to none, but I think it’s the character of each person that is our biggest asset.
Tony Woods is a Research & Development Engineer working on new technology and data that could reshape how Harvest Group serves clients across retail media. Tony joined Harvest Group in 2020 as a Sales Insights Manager managing retail analytics for clients and naturally pivoted into more automation, advanced analytics, and exploratory technology/data work. Tony is currently completing his Masters in Analytics from Georgia Tech which he has been able to quickly apply to his work on the R&D Team.
What has been your favorite project at Harvest Group so far?
Applying some of my grad degree by building an “item anomaly detection” algorithm using machine learning techniques has been by far my favorite project. I get to apply my retail analyst background with my data scientist skills to create a custom machine learning model to automate the process of an analyst getting item-level actionable insights. I was able to ideate and create the model from the ground up, from data acquisition to data pipelines/ETLs, model training, testing, dashboarding the output, and now we are scaling this model across our Amazon portfolio. The technical challenge, collaboration, and creativity required has been extremely rewarding.
What challenges have you seen solved with R&D’s work?
It has been incredible to learn Amazon’s user-level advertising data to become experts of the platform and creators of cutting-edge ways to leverage this data. Harvest Group has already been invited to the platform and we’re currently collaborating on testing use cases with Amazon’s AMC product development team because of our overall team’s expertise and creativity. All the work put in on AMC has already and will continue to give Harvest a huge advantage in the ad space to increase advertising performance for our clients.
What makes you feel excited to be on the R&D team?
Getting to think 1-2 years ahead and work on potentially high impact projects using my business and tech skills excites me. I love to be creative, think of new solutions to problems, and dream up how we can continue to provide our client service teams with the most intelligent tech, data, and tools to scale their efforts in a fast-moving and demanding retail landscape.
Marc Seuser is a Research & Development Engineer at Harvest Group. In his current role, he is focused on new retail media technology and data, including Amazon Advertising. Marc’s experience allows him to specialize in data/technology exploration and automation in addition to being the subject matter expert for data clean room offerings such as Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).
What has been your favorite project at Harvest Group so far?
During my first few weeks at Harvest Group, I built a mobile app for our Walmart teams to help them scan barcodes in bulk and streamline their mod analyses – it’s fun to see this still being used two years later! Getting to work on building out the value of the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for Harvest Group is challenging every day, but it also feels like a big privilege to feel the trust I get from leadership to spearhead the newest technologies in our industry.
What makes you feel excited to be on the R&D team?
I love to learn and am naturally very curious. As part of the R&D team, we constantly get to look at the newest topics in the industry and work on making sense of it. Delivering value by steering business teams towards what is truly impactful (among a sea of opportunities that are heavy marketing but low impact) is very satisfying.
What makes the R&D team unique?
We have the freedom to invest time into research and the testing of new products and technology. In that, we might succeed or we might fail. But either way, we record our learnings and with that streamline how our business teams serve our clients. With freedom also comes the need to make wise decisions on what to focus on. Also, taking a pilot project from start to finish requires a wide array of technical abilities from data acquisition to data architecture to data analysis and making the insights or data available to the end user.
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