Using tech to transform how businesses run

Tech Advanced Professional Degree

January 30, 2023I received my degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in applied mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s in business administration from Stockholm University.

That led me to join another consultant company for about eight months, but when a McKinsey recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, I was intrigued. McKinsey seemed like the ideal place for me and aligned with the aspirations I had for my professional career. The firm would enable me to work with international teams, travel around the world, and experience different cultures. I would work with highly intelligent people at the top of their fields and constantly learn from them. Additionally, I could work with any industry, given the firm’s large portfolio of clients. So, I joined McKinsey about two years ago as a data scientist specialist.

My role at McKinsey

Every day is different at the firm, and my role can vary widely depending on the type of project I am working on. Mostly, my daily work consists of extracting and interpreting insights, building advanced analytical models, and turning both into actionable plans to help clients solve their business challenges.

We are doing highly innovative data science here at the firm, but I think of myself as a technical consultant, which goes beyond the traditional technical roles, like data scientist, engineer, or developer. As a technical consultant, my responsibility and scope of work are much broader and include client interaction, relationship building, and translating technical topics into business language.

In my role, I work with a variety of colleagues, including data engineers, front-end developers, lawyers, integrative consultants, and partners. Teams change depending on the project, and collaborating with so many great minds at all levels of the organization is a definite perk. I also work directly with clients, and that is rewarding because I learn so much about their organizations and industries, while working to come up with real-world solutions.

Meaningful projects across industries

In the two years since I joined McKinsey, I have done a variety of projects, with several focusing on improving the customer experience. For example, a consumer client in the Middle East brought us on to improve their customer value management end-to-end process, including marketing strategy, personalization, and marketing automation.

We used advanced analytics, such as recommendation engines, and state-of-the-art models, to better target customers on an individual level and enable personalization at scale. Furthermore, we combined these algorithms to create smarter campaigns driven by business use cases. That project was meaningful for me because we were able to show analytics and automation can bring great value, without taking ages to implement. As for results, we were able to reduce the time it took to send out campaigns from four weeks to just a couple of days.

I also worked with a governmental health agency in Europe that wanted to digitalize and become more data driven. We built several dashboards which would leverage their internal data and generate insights that will inform the day-to-day operations. We extracted different models to significantly reduce manual work, and more important, to capture issues not obvious to the human eye.

In both cases, it was incredible to switch these organizations into a data-driven way of working and integrate automation, which has and will continue to improve how they work and serve people.

Being a technologist at McKinsey

What I value most about being a technologist at McKinsey is we are building amazing technology, but we’re not doing it “just” to build something “cool.” The products we build solve concrete, real-world problems and create far-reaching impact for our clients.

I also cannot say enough about the incredible learning opportunities I have here. I’m learning solutions, such as Kedro and CustomerOne, which were developed by my QuantumBlack colleagues, along with other tools, such as Python, SQL, PySpark, PowerBi, and others.

Plus, I have access to brilliant colleagues—and what feels like their endless knowledge—who are committed to mentoring me and helping me build my technical and business skills, as well as grow in my career. Because we have a huge network and global reach—and the freedom to explore industries and practices—this is the ideal place to grow.

More about me

I come from a family of five, and I am the youngest of three kids. Both of my parents are from China, but I was born and raised in Rio De Janeiro until we moved to Sweden when I was eight. I currently live in Stockholm with my fiancé. Outside of work, I am a huge basketball fan, but I enjoy playing all types of sports and activities, including hiking, snowboarding, and dancing. I love to travel and have a personal goal to travel to at least three new countries every year (which McKinsey helps to make possible!). I also participate in the Digital and Data Science networking community at McKinsey.