Hi there! We’re Sergo Medin, TeamLead of Sales Analytics at Avito Real Estate, and Diana Shevyakova, Senior Analyst on Avito’s Sales Effectiveness team. We work in different areas, but we have one thing in common: if there’s a way to improve a process and deliver real value to the business, we’ll do it — even if it goes beyond the boundaries of our formal roles.
In this article, we’ll share our experience: why it’s worth stepping outside your area of responsibility, how it benefits the business, and how it helps analysts grow — in skills, career, and job satisfaction. By the end, you’ll be able to apply this approach yourself: identify an area that interests you, find an initiative, build a simple solution, and see how it can impact the processes around you.
How Responsibility Grows with Your Level
The role of an analyst is evolving — it’s no longer just about delivering accurate reports. Today, analysts are expected to drive business impact: spot problems, propose solutions, and see them through to results — even if it goes beyond their formal job description.
Why does this matter? Because these are the steps that create the most value. An analyst becomes a driver of change, helping the business make faster decisions and remove bottlenecks in its processes. This benefits the company and gives the analyst visibility, growth, development — and, not least, satisfaction from their work.
Let’s look at how an analyst’s tasks and responsibilities evolve with each level — and when it makes sense to take that first step beyond your usual role.
- Junior analysts are typically given clear tasks and follow instructions.
- Mid-level analysts choose methods themselves and can suggest multiple approaches.
- Senior analysts define the problems, build a plan, and carry it through.
At higher levels, growth is not only about digging deeper into your core tasks — it’s also about expanding beyond standard expectations. That means noticing problems outside your immediate area of responsibility — across adjacent teams — and launching initiatives that make colleagues' work easier and business operations more effective.
This approach takes initiative, flexibility, and a willingness to dive into unfamiliar contexts. But it’s exactly what sets apart an analyst who just “does their job well” from one who transforms the processes around them.
These kinds of analysts are more likely to get noticed by leadership, advance faster in their careers, and stand out in the market — because they don’t just analyze data, they create systemic improvements. In the next section, we’ll share our own experience and show where analysts can bring value beyond their core responsibilities.
What It Means to Go Beyond Your Role
Reports, dashboards, and A/B tests are a solid foundation — but real exponential growth happens in areas full of analytical opportunities that no one is tackling yet. That’s exactly where proactive analysts should step in.
For example, our work isn’t directly related to HR or PR. But knowing these teams have limited analytical support, we looked into their challenges:
- HR teams may lack the resources to automate routine tasks. An analyst can help reduce time-to-hire by analyzing the recruitment funnel and identifying bottlenecks. They could, for instance, set up auto-responses for applications or build a system to track candidate status.
- PR specialists might spend hours manually monitoring countless Telegram channels to catch brand mentions. An analyst can automate that process: collect data, filter for relevant mentions, and even set up notifications. This saves dozens of hours and helps the team respond faster to media opportunities.
And let’s not forget that in many teams, tasks are still done manually in Excel. Even basic automation or scripting can significantly reduce time spent and ease the burden on colleagues.
In our experience, a good initiative solves a clear pain point, delivers measurable results, and adds minimal overhead for the team. The fewer extra steps your colleagues have to take, the more likely your improvement will stick — and bring real value to the business.
In the next section, we’ll explore the benefits teams and the company gain when analysts take on more than what’s formally expected of them.
What the Business Gains
When an analyst takes initiative beyond their core responsibilities, the company sees real benefits:
Reduced costs. Automating repetitive tasks saves the team time and allows them to focus on higher-priority work.
Faster decision-making. An analyst can build an MVP faster than it would take for the task to reach the dev team. In just a few days, you can build a simple solution and test a hypothesis on real data.
Unexpected growth opportunities. When analysts step into areas previously untouched by data — like HR, PR, or L&D — new ideas emerge that dramatically improve efficiency and optimize “blind spot” processes.
But there’s another side to this, which is important to acknowledge:
The risk of a “zoo” of solutions. If everyone builds their own dashboards or scripts, it can result in scattered tools that are hard to maintain. The solution? Align on a common tech stack, regularly review what’s still relevant, and stay in sync with colleagues.
Prototype quality ≠ production quality. An analyst’s MVP might work but often won’t cover all edge cases — and that’s okay. What matters is being clear from the start: the goal is to test a hypothesis, and the dev team will later turn it into a full production solution.
Bottom line: the benefits of analyst-led initiatives are real and fast, and the risks are manageable. The key is to stay connected with engineering, use safe and maintainable tools, document your solutions, and keep improving them as you go.
And don’t forget: these initiatives don’t just benefit the company — they often kickstart an analyst’s own growth. Next, let’s look at what analysts themselves gain by going beyond their defined roles.
What Analysts Gain
We’ve seen it time and again: being proactive benefits not just the company, but the analyst as well.
Stronger motivation. Some are driven by tackling non-standard tasks, others by the prospect of career or financial growth. Either way, stepping beyond your formal role brings those goals closer.
Choosing your own project turns a task from “just another ticket” into a personal challenge: you identify a problem, define the goal, build an MVP, align with stakeholders, plan the scaling, and hand off the solution for support. This kind of initiative builds your skills as a product thinker, engineer, and consultant all at once — a powerful combination that’s highly valued in the market.
Increased visibility. You collaborate with HR, marketers, product managers, share progress updates, and measure impact together. Each of these interactions strengthens your internal network, and before long, people across the company know who you are. Leaders are more likely to trust you with new projects or greater responsibilities — because they’ve seen you take ownership and deliver results.
A stronger personal brand. Consistent proactivity is its foundation. You can present your initiative at an internal meetup, write an article about it, or use it as a case study when moving to a new team or company. Going beyond your role isn’t about taking on extra work — it’s a deliberate strategy: doing what excites you, benefits the business, and helps you grow as a professional.
How to Choose an Initiative and See It Through: Our Experience
Now let’s share our own experience — how we went from an idea to real impact by automating HR processes.
We remembered that the HR team had mentioned the tedious manual processing of responses after events. The task caught our attention, and we knew solving it would bring real value — hiring speed is critical for Avito.
Tip: Don’t wait for a perfect brief.
In teams without dedicated analysts, stakeholders rarely have a fully detailed request. Build and show a live prototype, clarify needs, and improve iteratively. Document everything you create — it’ll make handover and reuse easier. And once the impact is clear, tell the story: in the team chat, at an internal meetup, or in a blog post. That way, your initiative helps the business and boosts your own profile.
We ran a few short interviews with recruiters, mapped out the process, and prioritized the pain points. At the same time, we checked with the dev team — they acknowledged the problem but couldn’t fit a fix into the next sprint. That meant we weren’t duplicating anyone’s work — the path was clear.
The first step: scripts layered over the existing interface.
We addressed the biggest pain point with JavaScript-based Tampermonkey scripts. These scripts added new controls to Huntflow’s interface, letting HRs export up to 120 candidate cards in one click (instead of one by one), bulk-update statuses, and tag profiles.
All HR had to do was follow a link to the repository. Tampermonkey automatically checks for updates, so ongoing maintenance was minimal.
Want the details?
Full technical implementation, code examples, screenshots, and setup instructions for similar scripts tailored to your case — available in this article.
We continued exploring other pain points in HR. Once recruiters saw how much faster candidate data export had become, they asked us to automate the import of Excel files after large-scale events like weekend offer campaigns — which can generate thousands of applications.
We decided to build a standalone web service. Here are some technical details:
- Backend: Python + FastAPI — handles file uploads, validates rows, calls the Huntflow API, and logs all actions.
- Frontend: TypeScript + React — supports drag-and-drop for Excel files, shows progress clearly, and offers an interactive column-matching interface so any Excel format can be used.
- Quality: Unit tests cover all key logic.
- Deployment: The repository is easy to spin up — the solution can be deployed to another department in just a few minutes.
The result: instead of uploading one candidate at a time manually, HRs can now upload an entire Excel file with hundreds of entries to Huntflow in just 60 seconds. The outcome for the company? Several workdays are saved for HR specialists every month after major hiring events — all thanks to the efforts of just two analysts, without having to wait in line for development resources.
How to Know If an Idea Is Worth the Effort
Here’s our quick checklist — five questions we ask ourselves before starting to make sure an initiative is truly worth pursuing:
✓ Interest + value: It excites you personally and solves a clear pain point for the team.
✓ No duplication: You’ve checked the dev backlog and nearby initiatives — no one else is already doing it.
✓ Fast prototype: You can build a demo using available APIs or scripts.
✓ Measurable impact: For example, the “minutes per candidate” metric dropped by 60x.
✓ Scalability: The solution can be rolled out to other Avito business units.
What Could Go Wrong and What to Watch Out For
Even a great initiative can run into hidden pitfalls. Here are three common situations to be aware of:
No clear hand-off of responsibility.
If you’ve built a useful tool, it’s crucial to agree in advance on who will maintain it. Otherwise, you may end up stuck in a tech support role. It’s better to involve the process owner early and hand over the solution for ongoing management.
Overlooking security requirements.
Storing logins, passwords, or tokens directly in code or on external servers is a common mistake. This kind of data must be securely protected, and all company security policies should be followed.
Overlapping with other teams.
An analyst’s initiative might touch on areas owned by product or development teams. If someone else is already working on a similar solution, it can lead to duplication or conflict. That’s why it’s important to check early who’s working on what and align responsibilities. This helps avoid misunderstandings and amplifies the impact of the initiative.
Conclusion: How to Start Taking Action
If you want to try stepping outside your immediate area of responsibility, start small. Pick one task per quarter that can be simplified or sped up using data, automation, or just common sense. It doesn’t have to be perfect — an MVP is enough to demonstrate the idea in action.
Build the solution yourself or gather a small team. Measure the impact: how much time, effort, or mistakes you’ve helped reduce. Document the result, create a short guide or write-up. Share it with your team, leadership, or professional community.
Even one successful initiative can make a big difference: make your colleagues’ lives easier, save resources, boost your visibility, and accelerate your career. And if you keep taking initiative regularly, it’s no longer just a good habit — it becomes a real investment in your professional growth.
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