the magic of matchmaking

Before joining the founding team of AI Roots, I used to work as a team lead for analysts and data scientists at Sanoma Media Finland. The best part of my previous role were the moments when me, my team member and the business stakeholder realized that there was a match. It is hard to define what that "match" really means, but I will try, as it will be an important role for me and AI Roots also in the future.

When you have been working as the team lead for somebody for several years, you most likely know quite well their personality, working style, challenges, growth areas, skills and competencies. It also happened to me and during the years of getting to know my team members, the matching became also easier. In a company such as Sanoma Media Finland, there is a great variety of different organization cultures. You can imagine the difference yourself by comparing the traditional news services to modern and youthful video streaming services.  During these years I learned that even in a single company, you can't take the "match" for granted. Therefore I did quite much of coaching and enabled flexible job rotation, trying to find the best analysts or data scientists for each team and unit. I also learned that the "magic" was as much matching the skills and competencies as it was ensuring that the personality and working style fits into the unit and it's unique culture. One thing was common for all the "magical" cases. The closer the analyst or the data scientist was working for the business, the better the results.

Thinking back at my history as a team lead in internal position and after working for one company for so long, I know that I won't be having the same amount of time to get to know my customer's company culture or freelancer personality and working style. But successful matchmaking is still my superpower, what makes me tick. And also a key success factor for AI Roots.

The first discussions with out future customers and our network members have made me quite confident that it can be done. We are looking forward to building long-term relationship with our customers and network members, getting to know their working style, values, needs and challenges better all the time. But we also need to innovate new ways how to on-board a new network member to our community or get to know the new customer so that we can be confident about the matchmaking quality. This is also in the very core of AI Roots, helping companies find the right data professionals and helping professionals find roles or projects that really spark them. 

With this thought, I could not be more excited and proud to start this journey! Let me know if I could help you experience the magic of successful matchmaking.