Building more than a product: My seven years of growth at StellarAlgo 

Blog

Jan 20, 2025

StellarAlgo

By: Jason Holmgren

Joining the StellarAlgo team seven years ago was the best career decision I’ve ever made. After being a contractor for 20 years, I started at StellarAlgo as the second full-time employee.

The original, or OG group of six as we call ourselves, are all still here today and we’ve grown as people, as a product, and as a company together. 

How our product and company grows from ideas to reality

I took a lot of pride in building our product from scratch on the data side. In the early days I did all the data development for our product which formed our data foundation.

Although the product and data infrastructure has changed significantly since then, a lot of the concepts, theory, and original foundation are being leveraged today. It’s amazing to see how the platform, architecture, and infrastructure have changed and evolved with our growing team and product. 

Seeing our product and company grow from ideas to reality has been super rewarding for me.  When I first joined and there were six of us, we did almost everything together from brainstorming and planning to participating in client calls. Now that we’re so much larger, it’s not realistic or efficient to all work together like that but it means I get to help create that same culture within my smaller team. I enjoyed being a manager in those early years to many new staff that we brought on, supporting them in growing their careers here and encouraging them to contribute new ideas and solutions.  Nothing is sacred and we are always open to new ideas and concepts, as evidenced by the many changes over the years.

When new team members join StellarAlgo there will always be the duties of maintaining existing code and production support but we are always expanding and improving our products. They can expect to be involved not only in working on new functionality but also working on contributing ideas and suggestions to what the next functionality or product improvement should be.  

Myself (left) and team members Megan and Joey.

Working with data we can relate to as sports fans 

Most of my work before StellarAlgo, was working with Canadian Pacific Railway (now CPKC) and in the oil and gas industry. The data I was working with could be difficult to relate to. 

At StellarAlgo, it’s exciting that we’re working with data we can all relate to as sports fans. Whether it’s buying tickets to our favourite team, buying a jersey, interacting with their email marketing system, or buying a hot dog through concessions—these are all data points we deal with daily. Many of us will query our own fan data as a fan out of curiosity to confirm how the data flows. 

Joseph, Lee and I at Tropicana Field in Tampa (Tampa Rays venue).

For clients, we’re bridging the gap between data technology and their everyday jobs. 

I love seeing how many of our long term clients (teams) benefit from our product growth over the years. For example, the NBA Portland Trail Blazers have been with us since the early days. When we started with them we were sourcing all their fan data from their internal data warehouse. We later migrated to sourcing them directly from their source systems such as Ticketmaster. This then evolved into us becoming their new data warehouse vendor. 

More recently we’ve added real time attendance reporting on home game nights and are in the process of migrating them to our latest data warehouse architecture solution. Through all of this they have also been with us along the full journey of our Customer Data Platform product that they use to segment fans based off their unique business use cases. It’s strong relationships with clients like the Trail Blazers that have helped StellarAlgo grow to where we are today.

It’s more than a job — I’m emotionally invested in what we’re building 

At this year’s ProBowl event in Banff where the whole company gets together, it was an honour to win the Long Game Award. It’s given to a veteran team member who has been making a Stellar impact over many years. 

At the ProBowl event in June 2024, award winners won bobbleheads of ourselves!

Before StellarAlgo, I was a contractor for years with multiple clients so I’d never had that long-term attachment to a product. Now I am both professionally and emotionally invested in our product and what we’re building. There’s an emotional satisfaction I get through my career here that goes beyond a job. I’ve seen how our product has evolved over the years and I feel motivated to keep building and improving our offerings to clients. 

I see the impact of our product on clients and get to work with a very talented team that I’m always learning from. 

Seven years later, I know joining StellarAlgo was the best career decision I’ve made. The team has the best, most talented, and trustworthy people I’ve ever worked with. Both when I started when we were six people, to today being 58 staff. I have profound trust in everyone in the company. 

Being an agile and adaptable team  

We need to be agile to adapt to the changing market and teams. When StellarAlgo first started, the field of competition was small. We are now in a more competitive marketplace as more players have entered the industry. Fan analytics has become more important and integral to the sports landscape. 

My role has changed a lot from a technical perspective over the years and every long time employee at StellarAlgo has a similar story. It’s not the place to work if you want to do the same repetitive tasks month after month. You need to be adaptable and expect to be part of a changing, growing company. 

See our current job opportunities at StellarAlgo here

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