My parents think I write paystubs, and my friends think I know every job’s pay range like a Magic 8 Ball. So, what do I really do?

As a Senior Compensation Business Partner at Snowflake, I work directly with managers across the company to make data-driven compensation decisions that are equitable and market competitive for their teams. It’s likely most employees at Snowflake don’t even know I exist, and that’s by design! As odd as that sounds, it means managers are fully owning the performance and rewards trajectory of their team, not some random person in HR.

I also consult with the business on new hire offers, employee transfers, and other compensation activities. To do that, I need the latest and greatest compensation data at my fingertips! This is what set me on a journey to launch SnowComp–an automated, internal tool used to provide managers with ranges, job details, and more, wrapped up with a user-friendly bow. Who doesn’t love user-friendly bows?

SnowComp is Snowflake’s first Snowflake-on-Snowflake application built using Streamlit and started as a pipe dream over two years ago. Working at a cutting-edge data company while operating in the stone ages of Excel spreadsheets, downloaded reports, and parsed out data delivered via email felt archaic. It was a time-suck for us and a version control nightmare for managers and recruiters.

After envisioning a world absent of spreadsheets clogging up download folders, I brought my team into that world with me. We were met with widespread support from the leadership team and embarked on what would become quite the journey (I should’ve prepared a snack).

We kicked the project off with a different visual analytics platform. That didn’t go so well. I even started believing that the stone age Excel version was better than what I was creating. That’s when I was introduced to our Streamlit platform that Snowflake recently acquired. This was the same platform on which a college student developed GPTZero, the ChatGPT anti-plagiarism application. We all thought this was exactly what we needed to take our project to the next level, and if a college student could do it, so could our best-in-class IT enterprise applications team partnered with an HR org with big dreams.

With Streamlit, we were able to greatly improve the overall design and latency of SnowComp. Our once four-person tiger team turned into a whole village of helping hands amounting to over 100 Snowflakes, and as more time passed, folks from across the company were chomping at the bit. So, we gave the people what they wanted and soft-launched the platform across HR, IT, and Streamlit-acquired leaders, to test the app and provide the invaluable feedback that has shaped SnowComp into what it is today.

All of this work paid off in a big way. SnowComp is now officially available to all managers at Snowflake, and this is just the beginning. Say goodbye to spreadsheets and stale data, and hello to a fully integrated Workday, Snowhouse, and Streamlit experience.

No longer are we in the stone ages, we have finally seized the data!

Snowflake Compensation Team (left to right: Justin Truong, Renee Gardner, Lisa Scuzzo, Julie Xiao, Hieu Bui, Tommy Ngo)