Alumni Stories Asking the Right Questions

Before the San Francisco 49ers began their second season in a glitzy new $1.3 billion stadium, Moon Javaid, vice president of strategy and analytics for the team, took a hard look at concessions.

Working with a team of analysts to leverage data in making industry decisions, Moon scoured sales figures from past seasons. The research spawned one crucial change to the design of the concession stands. He redirected the queues so that they snake around stanchions, like an airport security line, at 75 points around the stadium. The move increased sales by one transaction a minute—per line. The change significantly increased revenue at the concession stands.

While Javaid was able to accurately measure these revenue increases in real-time, he recognized that he needed to enhance his ability to measure fan sentiment in the same fashion. In recent years, Javaid and his team have evolved 49ers data analytics so that, for instance, concession results that used to come in on Tuesdays after a Sunday game are now monitored second-by-second; they can also monitor fan satisfaction on their game day experience in near real-time. “We are really pioneers in this space,” Moon says. “We’re blazing the path.”

He worked as a financial analyst before attending the Full-Time Program at Booth. “Anyone can have large amounts of data—I think about only 1 percent of data that is actually collected is used,” Moon says. “What is important is actually having the right people in place to ask the right questions.” Moon’s Booth experience taught him how to ask the right questions of the data, and more broadly, of where he wants to go on his career path.

“One thing that really stuck out in particular was a sign near the stairs to classes that says, ‘Why are you here and not somewhere else?’” Moon recalls. “My tour guide asked me to reflect on that. I thought that it would be a great question to ask myself at all times. That was a really profound moment for me.”