Hitchhiker Spotlight: Brad Naumann

How long have you been on the Hitchhikers team?

Officially started HH training on Monday May 4th, 2020.

What projects have you worked on since joining the Hitchhikers team?

Tracfone (Total Wireless), Luxottica (LensCrafters & Target Optical), Justice, Pieology, Sleep Number, Victaulic

What is your proudest accomplishment since joining the Hitchhikers team?

I'm definitely most proud of the Luxottica experience that I'm currently building for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, two of their entity types are fairly uncommon ones (brands & promotions), so it'll be nice to see what type of value those drive for future AFT's. Secondly, since I'm building for both LensCrafters and Target Optical brands, I've essentially had to build two different experiences with two different front ends, but leveraging the same, unified Knowledge Graph. Overall, it's just a unique build that I'm proud to be working on.

How has becoming an administrator/Hitchhiker affected your career?

Being a Yext Hitchhiker has certainly made me a lot more knowledgeable about the Answers product itself. Originally, I thought I had a strong understanding of the software until going through Hitchhiker training - now, I feel extremely confident about being an expert in all things Answers and can more confidently speak to topics like product capabilities, implementation process specifics, etc. As a result, I believe that I have been a lot more effective and polished when talking about Answers to our customers and prospects.

What is one thing people might not know about being an administrator?

Being a Yext Administrator is not just about learning the product, but is also about contributing to the product. What I mean by that is: every build comes with its own set of unique challenges and use cases. With this in mind, as a Hitchhiker, I'm forced to think about leveraging the software as a compelling solution to different types of problems, as opposed to conceptualizing Answers as just another digital marketing tool with an intrinsic set of limitations. These unique customer scenarios force administrators to challenge the status quo and generate new ways to define internal processes, make pointed observations to better inform our product roadmap, and ultimately build the future of Answers.

What is the toughest challenge you have had to overcome on a project?

While it's difficult for me to pinpoint the toughest challenge that I've faced so far, I have run into a very unique (and somewhat humorous) scenario that was difficult for me to debug at first. Justice (clothing retailer for "Tweens") is one of my assigned accounts for AFTs, and the intended entity types for their specific experience were "Locations" and "FAQs" to start. When QA'ing my experience, I noticed some interesting results for a couple of top-priority queries. Whenever I performed a branded search for "Justice," I noticed that their Chicago locations would populate the map results, even though I'm physically located in California. Likewise, I ran a search for "How do I apply a coupon," and the first result that surfaced was a seemingly random location in Pennsylvania. Eventually, I took a deeper look at the API responses for those queries, I came to realize that "Justice, IL" and "Coupon, PA" were the names of two cities for which our experience was matching "relevant" results. As a solution, we blacklisted the names of those two cities from the experience, but this was certainly one of the more uncommon scenarios I had run into with a client build.