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Case Study

How Opendoor Set Up Data Discovery for Success

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Interview with Mike Zhao,Head of Decision Science, Product & Ops at Opendoor

Opendoor Overview

Opendoor (NASDAQ OPEN)  is a leading residential real estate digital platform that provides people across the US with a simple way to buy and sell a home. As their service grew in popularity, so did their need for insights from their data. They wanted to extract those insights to inform business decisions and focused on finding a solution to improve the data access and the data consumer experience across their organization.

Mike joined Opendoor to lead their data science and analytics efforts in 2021. Based on his previous experiences at Lyft, Mike knew how much potential value Opendoor could extract from its data if it had the right data discovery platform in place. He and his team began working on a foundational framework to decide on the necessary tools and actions to support an efficient and effective data discovery journey for Opendoor.  

Setting up Data Discovery for Success

The data team widely communicated their long-term vision of success, and Opendoor created a space to experiment and focus on setting up a scalable foundation to grow their data discovery efforts. 

The data team broke apart the first phase of data discovery optimization into four parts focused on driving awareness of the data discovery platform and its value to everyone.

Step 1: Make Participation Easy

Data organization is a community effort. The team chose Select Star as the data discovery platform to act as Opendoor’s single source of truth for data. The easier the tool is to use, the easier it is to drive adoption. 

“The lightweight nature of editing and the ability to automatically ingest documentation from third-party data sources directly into the Select Star platform is extremely valuable,” said Mike. 


Custom tagging and descriptions in the Select Star platform

Mike also aligned the performance of the data discovery program with the data team’s OKRs, further prioritizing participation.

Step 2: Set Priorities and Scope 

Mike and his team set out to provide immediate value that established trust and awareness with new users. They added documentation for Opendoor’s top 100 tables based on each table’s popularity score in Select Star to jumpstart the organization’s transition to the platform. This practice established champions across the team who helped optimize the platform and prepared to share it with the greater organization.

Step 3: Spread Cross-functional Awareness

When the initial documentation was filled in, they were now ready to market the value of using Select Star to data consumers horizontally across the organization. They created guides to help ease first-time users into their new workflows.  They took time to share strategic direction and answer questions to help heavy data users and teammates ramp up successfully. 

“In just four months, we were able to double the Select Star monthly active users,” Mike reported.

Step 4: Continue to Optimize Over Time

As they gained traction, they concentrated on motivating Opendoor’s data users to use Select Star, which was now established as the main source of data truth at Opendoor. The more active users they had, the more documentation was added organically. As users began to benefit from accessing Select Star as a reliable reference for up-to-date and accurate data context, it became easier to gain their trust for self-servicing their data questions and contributing back to the platform.

Data Discovery is a Continuous Journey

The results from the first phase of Opendoor’s journey are encouraging, but they’re looking forward to further optimizing their approach. Building on top of what they’ve already achieved to grow and optimize their data strategy with the organization's needs. Mike plans to focus the team's future energy on optimizing the data model to be even more useful, flexible, and reliable.

Mike found that engagement, awareness, trustability, consistency, and a long-term view of success are essential to the data discovery journey. Using a data discovery platform supports all of those initiatives. 

Mike stated, “Data discovery platforms are a key part of the modern data stack for a good reason,” 

At Select Star, we’re focused on solving data discovery challenges. To learn more about how Select Star can help your organization set up an automated data catalog in just 15 minutes, schedule a demo today.

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