Armin Kakas

Revenue Growth Analytics advisor to executives in charge of growing Net Revenue, Gross Profit, and Sales Productivity | Posts and articles about Revenue Management + Machine Learning insights, methods, and processes.

As the founder of Revology Analytics, I have the privilege of offering mid-market businesses unparalleled expertise in advanced Revenue Growth Analytics & Management, focusing on three core advisory areas: Pricing & Revenue Management, Sales & Marketing Enablement and Commercial Analytics Transformation efforts. 

Beyond my advisory work, I am the creator of the Revology Analytics Insider, a bi-weekly newsletter offering readers unique insights into the world of Revenue Growth Analytics. You can catch the latest issues on LinkedIn and our website, revologyanalytics.com/articles-insights.

To learn more, please visit revologyanalytics.com

Founder | Managing Partner

Revology Analytics is a Revenue Growth Analytics consultancy for middle-market companies in the Manufacturing, Retail, and Distribution industries.

We are an impact- and execution-oriented advisory firm founded on Outcome-Based Analytics™, with focused specializations in AI/ML-enabled Margin Analytics & Optimization, Sales & Customer Growth Analytics and Promotion Effectiveness & Optimization.

Open to a New Role

Currently seeking a transformational leadership role.   I have lead various data, analytics and AI teams for the last 12 years which include leading product managers, engineers, data scientists, decision scientists, analysts and UX.  I help companies engage with customers and move ahead rapidly.  I have worked in tech, retail, finance, logistics and distribution, CPG's and manufacturing in enterprise, startups and Saas.

Some of my accomplishments:

Development of global data strategy for various Fortune 500 companies and start ups.  Helping to lead to 400% improvements in customer engagement.

Helped a company go IPO on the strength of my data strategy.

Generated a billion in new revenue in less than 4 years.

Drove new data driven product growth to increase conversion rates by 300%.

Improved customer engagement by driving conversion rates from 3% to 11% in retail.

Developed new AI products around LLMs in the past year.

Currently working on multi generative agent projects.  Taking the power of multiple agents to develop products and analytics.  As well as improving data strategy and personalization strategies for enterprise and Saas companies. 

Tools used:  
LLMs: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta, Llama
Agent Tools:  N8N, Phi Data, CrewAI, Flowise
Copilots: Replit, Bolt, Windsurf

I am open to work and happy to discuss a new role.

Chief / VP Data, Product, AI

Shipwell

Transformed data analytics at fast-growing SaaS startup by building high-impact team and modernizing tech stack. Reporting to CEO, led team of engineers, data scientists, and analysts to establish analytics as a strategic asset driving customer success and product innovation.

Mentored team members leading to several promotions and raises for those on my team.  Had one of the best ENPS scored for a department.

Cover all aspects of analytics, including marketing, account management, sales, ops and product.

Stakeholder management including internal and external.  Regular updates to our VC funders on a monthly basis.  

Overhauled data infrastructure, slashing load times from minutes to seconds for thousands of reports and analyses. Enabled expansion into mid-market by eliminating performance barriers.

Spearheaded adoption of modern tech like document imaging, optimization algorithms, and LLMs. 

Pioneered industry-specific LLM, reducing training costs and human errors for logistics workflows.

Partnered with product and engineering to integrate advanced AI into platform. Unlocked new functionality like automated document analysis for customers.

Collaborated closely with customer success to quantify platform ROI. Created analytics reporting that demonstrated hard-dollar savings, operational efficiency gains, and sustainability impact.

Leveraged retail analytics experience to unlock value for CPG customers. Established analytics team as trusted advisor through weekly engagements.

Instilled analytical rigor, skill development, and confidence in previously inexperienced team. Empowered team to drive insights and impact where uncertainty previously stalled progress.

Senior Director/VP of Data and Analytics  AI, Data Engineering, Data Science and Data Products

Hired as the first analytics leader to help this Saas food delivery company go through their IPO process.  After 7 years, Olo was ready to go IPO but needed to improve their analytics and data management.  Reported to the COO.

Developed the entire data strategy and execution of getting an engineering company to be more data driven and customer centric.

Stakeholder management including investors and internal leadership.

Had to revamp analytics as reports could easily take 2 hours to complete.  Got that down to 5 minutes or less.  But to do that had to do a data audit which revealed a lot of data issues that required an outside group to help clean up which I brought in.

Created a customer data platform concept focus on helping restaurants understand their customers better and drive more frequent visits with data driven products such as:  
1.	 Development of the pre-order app concept:  For times when you have a lunch meeting you can tell the restaurant what you want and when you will arrive.  When you arrive you scan your app and get seated.  Then the staff just brings your order and then you pay via the app.  Saving you time during a busy lunch period.  This would increase conversion for the restaurant.

2.	 Customization of menus.  Most restaurants don’t customize the menu, but via the app, someone who is vegan, keto, doesn’t like nuts, etc…  can customize the menu to only what they like.  This improves customer engagement and frequency of visits by making the ordering process easier.

3.	A customer signaling platform.  This would help restaurants better understand what was driving customers to a specific location at the local level.  Providing better understanding for fluctuations in sales from week to week and location to location.

These were the ideas that the investor community loved and allowed the company to go IPO.

Sr Director of Data Science and Business Intelligence

Cyberian Data

Data consultant and fractional Chief Data Officer.
Took my talents to helping mid to small size companies.  I had wanted to see what consulting was like and this opportunity came along and I took it.

Data, Experience Science and Customer Experience leader evolving the digital and data transformation strategy and thought leadership around customer experiences, data science and analytic architectures including data lakes, industry wide enterprise data models, and data management and governance programs for various client companies in a variety of industries. I typically work both in the trenches and at the senior levels providing leadership through innovative thinking, solid experience in lots of industries, team building skills, and cutting edge transformation and design with skills on the implementation side.

• Personalization: Created Customer-360 data set to capture and display relevant customer data. Started migration of Data Warehouse from SQLServer to Redshift. Implemented Airflow for workflows, moved Hadoop implementation from on-prem to cloud (AWS and Azure), re-architecture log data flow and enabled self-serve analytics for marketing and product teams. 

• Data Governance: Oversee and implement data governance and data management capabilities. Support development, refinement, and implementation of the data governance framework. Lead execution and measurement of data governance policies, standards, and guidelines.

• Data Science and AI: Created several customer facing, in-product personalization, recommendation and analytics features. Implemented propensity to buy as well as churn prediction models to drive sales, marketing and customer success.

• Machine Learning Engineering: Created architecture and environment to productize predictive models (data flow, response time and continuous learning). Implemented testing and automated re-training environment for data science models.

Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Head of Data Products

C.H. Robinson

Brought in for a transformation leadership role.  I signed up for a 1 year contract on this role.

Data leadership for the largest logistics company in the US on a global scale. Started a new team of Data Scientist and Engineers to transform the company from an out of date to a cutting-edge logistics company. Champion for data management, governance, and quality across the enterprise. 

Trained and mentored a growing team of engineers and data scientists across the organization.  Many of them were promoted to more senior roles.  

Managed stakeholders with monthly updates to senior leadership on various projects.  These projects also created cross department collaboration which was non-existent before.  Leading to faster releases and better branding by collaborating with marketing.

Pricing:  They spent 2 years on a model that didn’t work.  In 4 months, we had a working model that went from 30 plus minutes with inaccurate results to 5 minutes to produce results with 90% plus accuracy.  

Created a predictive model that allowed customers to see if a shipment would be late and recommend what to do to correct that.  This was so desired by the market that customers ended up funding it to speed up delivery.  It was hailed as one of the early artificial intelligence (AI) tools in logistics as seen as the future of logistics.

Transformed the way CH did their analytics.  With various teams, I pulled them together to work as a team instead of against each other.  This allowed for faster development and reduction of duplication of work and fostered a better working environment.

Improved the ecommerce site to be customer focused and streamlined with proper analytics to improve performance over time.

Was happy that I helped inspire a lot of employees to step up and share their ideas and play a bigger role in the development of the company and projects.

Head of Data Science, Data Engineering and Data Products

Target

Hired on to be the global digital marketing leader for the marketing innovation team.  Focused on helping Target get past the massive data breach they just had and to catch up to competitors.  Data strategy and governance leadership for online/offline data sourcing, valuation & curation; new data generation, data sharing, partnerships & alliances, databases & cloud platforms, new data product creation & monetization, advanced analytics & artificial intelligence (AI), omni-channel marketing, MarTech/AdTech, and multi-sided platform business models.
My team and I:

- Designed + built a Digital Media personalization solution on a Hadoop/Cassandra stack using Spark to enhance the ROI along with a wide collection of 1st and 3rd party data.  We were able to identify customers with a fraction of the data vendors needed while maintain a 90% accuracy.  The vendors were at 30%.

- Integrator of on and offline customer data to enable Mobile and Digital marketing, all the while cleaning up massive undocumented sources of data to create a data map for the organization.  This reduced the amount of possible data issues the company had, reducing risk.

- Developed artificial intelligence for internal use, some of the first in the company.  An easy way to match customers with various services, ads and product groups.  This helped to reduce ad spend waste.

- Improved the personalization platform with enhanced social science and bias elimination.  The personalization platform was under-performing.  By removing the incorrect biases and bringing in the right ones, we were able to improve the conversion rate while reducing costs.

- Built an innovative product to better engage customer across digital properties. Saw an increase of 400% increase in customer engagement in less than 6 months.

- Governance leadership working with various regulatory agencies and bodies on the future of privacy.

Digital and Marketing Product Innovation Leader

Best Buy

Omnichannel Leader for the newly formed omnichannel team which made Best Buy one of the top 5 performing stocks in 2013. Scaled the future retail with the future of fulfillment, ship from store and international shipping products. Responsible for preparing CEO, CFO and CMO on pricing topics for analyst and board conversations as well as emerging technology topics.

- Leader for Best Buy teams around personalization, data science, AI and data product development. Not just online but leading the way at developing the strategy for a true combine online and offline approach to business.

- Continued to drive artificial intelligence (AI), data science and personalization teams to an omnichannel system to great a program worth $1B. This included analyst, data scientist, engineers, product managers and designers.

- Used omni data to create the international shipping program, worth $300M

- Ship from store went from 50 stores to 1400+ stores. The team had struggled for over a year before I revamped the tools and concepts helping to bring $2 billion in inventory to market that otherwise was trapped in the supply chain. Helped to move at risk inventory more rapidly and decrease out of stock issues, which where plague Best Buy at the time which resulted in 20% growth YoY.
Improved customers NPS score by allowing for same day pickup.  In 20 minutes which was faster than anyone in the market at that time.

Managed a $22 million budget out of a total $65 million technology spend at Best Buy.

Sr Leader - Omnichannel & Innovation - Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Data Products

Built the first big data and data science group from scratch at Best Buy.  I built a team of product managers, data scientists, data engineers, architects, analysts, and designers.  We built the first unstructured database and data science tools making Best Buy the 3rd highest scaling ecommerce site and top 10 ecommerce site globally. I was responsible for the strategy, algorithms, and architecture of the group. Growing from a team of 2 to a few hundred. 

 My team and I built the data backbone of the company.  In less than 60 days we had the infastructure built and our first year run cost was $1.5 million. Vendors said it would have cost them $20-30M and 18-24 months to build the same.  Our team processed more data than the entire rest of Best Buy combined.  The hadoop stack we built was one of the first in retail and is copied by many retailers today. This platform helped to increase revenue by 150% in ecommerce and was powered by over 20 web services my team built.  It was the first artificial intelligence (AI) platform at Best Buy and the Midwest.

Developed the overall data strategy and team operational approach which became a pillar for the turnaround strategy for Best Buy.

Built and led from scratch a fully customized, modulated and easily scalable personalization platform that saw 15X conversion rates over the norm. I came up with the idea, built the team using tools and helped Best Buy rack in billions.

Sr. Strategy and Product Lead of Emerging Technologies - Digital Experiences, Data Science AI

WHIZard Academy

Conceived and created the digital marketing concepts for the company.  Developed the online personalization engine.

Management of SEO/SEM.

Social media marketing programs development.

Merging traditional print and TV media with digital.

Grew customer base by 800%.


TEAM
Responsible for all aspects of Engineering, Product, Strategy, User Experience, Program Management, Content and Evangelism.

Director of Marketing

GE Capital

Product manager overseeing various blended products of physical and digital experiences.  

Products included:
Telematics:  combing big data, data science and IoT to ensure proper fleet management and get an great overview of what all assets were doing at anytime.  One of the first of it's type in the market.  Compared to the old paper and phone method, this new platform saved $300 million annually for customers.


Remarketing:  Managed a portfolio with $4B in assets for customers.  These included their entire fleets of vehicles.  It also included the development of all the technology needed to easily manage the fleet for repairs and DOT compliance.


Fleet Finance:  Rebuilt the fleet finance software system, making payment processing software systems, 75% more efficient than before.

Development of RFID sensor systems inside trucks, early IoT devices.

Development of sensor to telematics device reading systems, early IoT devices.
Developed some of the early social media campaigns used at GE.

Product Manager

Created the competitive and market intelligence program for a billion dollar division.

PRODUCT
Created the groups market intelligence program with forecasting capabilities which always exceeded an 85% accuracy in predicting competitive moves.

Created in store category captain programs helping to bring 3M products to the forefront in many markets by working with distribution partners to enhance sales.

Channel Manager

Know where your data and AI can take your business ✈️| Follow for data models delivering results | Data-Driven Growth Navigator 100+ Data Products Launched | $1B+ revenue, $100M+ savings driven by data and AI

Proud that a number of people who have been on my teams went on to VP or C Suite roles, I help to build leaders.  Often having one of the highest team morale scores in companies I have worked.

Stakeholder management:  Both internally and externally, I help to sell the data and analytics vision.  Worked with VC's, Wall Street investors and private equity.  Internally, teams from all corners of the organization to help get data working for their success.

Build billion dollar data products.  

I create value and build businesses and I use data and AI to help do that.  I am a data business leader who worked in areas of marketing, sales, ops, product and customer engagement.  

I have worked in Europe and the Americas with global markets responsibilities.  Growing businesses from nothing to a billion plus in revenue.  Leading and growing teams from a team of one to 300 plus.  All the while adding new markets, products, and customer bases to the mix to driven future growth.

I take a unique approach to data and analytics, I treat it as a business tool, not a tech tool.  Business tools grow businesses.

I'm here to grow businesses, not build models looking for a purpose.  Where most teams consist of analytics, data science and sometimes data engineering, I bring in, CX, UX, decision science, design, marketing, legal and product to the mix.  This approach allows the team take a holistic approach to achieving business outcomes.  

If you data and analytics are not functioning as they should, I can get them where they need to be with my approach.  

If you have a business that is data centric or would like to be, I can get it to where it needs to be.

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Armin Kakas

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