Shaping Navan's data team into a central, product-facing resource

Navan — TripActions at the time — is a corporate travel and expense company. When I joined in 2019, its data-science function was young and still finding its shape: capable people, but not yet the practices or product focus to ship reliably at the pace the business needed.

The opportunity wasn't a single model. It was building that group into a central, product-facing resource — a team that could spot product opportunities and ship production-grade systems across several product lines at once, without waiting for a roadmap to tell it what to build.

Together with my manager, I helped build the team into that resource — hiring, best practices, and an operating rhythm — and took my first real steps into leadership, eventually leading squads of two to four data scientists across multiple product lines at once. It's where I learned to work in a Shape Up-style cadence and a radical-candor culture; a lot of how I work today took shape here.

We worked directly with PMs and C-level to scope opportunities and turn them into production systems, rather than waiting for a backlog. I stayed hands-on across a range of them:

• Search personalization and content recommendation for Flights & Hotels — the one I'm proudest of.
• NLP-based receipt itemization for the Liquid expense product.
• Revenue and yield optimization for Hotels.
• Geospatial clustering and a lot of internal tooling to make the team itself faster.

I put particular energy into the internal tooling — the unglamorous work that compounds, letting a small team ship far more than its size suggests.

The search personalization work had the most visible user impact: it cut content-discovery time from 30+ seconds to under 10 — roughly a 3× speed-up in how quickly travellers found the right flight or hotel.

More durably, the function itself grew up — from a young team into a central, product-facing resource trusted to find and ship its own work alongside PMs and leadership. It's also where I first learned to lead, which set up everything I did next.