Why balancing managing a team with demanding stakeholders and still being hands-on is no easy task — Working in data has never been harder. The data stack is growing more complex and expectations are higher than ever before. However, one data role has it harder than most: The Data Lead. People in data middle-management roles often go by the name of Data Lead or Data Manager and…

How a few data heroes make the wheels spin at high growth companies and why you can’t afford to lose them — There’s a good reason why many of the best data people want to work at high growth technology companies. The learning curve is steep, you can progress quickly, the company’s mission is exciting, and you get to work with the latest technologies. But working at high growth companies also means…

On the relationship between data team size and complexity — Data teams at high-growth companies are getting larger and some of the best tech companies are approaching a data-to-engineers ratio of 1:2. More data people means more analysis, more insights, more machine learning models, and more data-informed decisions. …

One thing trumps everything else for the happiness and success in an analyst role; the relationship with your closest stakeholders. Tristan, CEO of dbt, wrote an article a few weeks ago where he had the realisation that he’s now a stakeholder to the data team. …

How to do more of the work that matters and less of the work that doesn’t — When I was at Google and started building machine learning models, one of the first things I was shown was the image below. It highlighted that writing the actual machine learning code is only a fraction of the total work I’d be doing. This turned out to be true.

Data about data quality. It doesn’t get more meta than this. Measuring data is likely a better title than measuring data quality and I suggest combining quality with productivity and engagement metrics. At its core, measuring data can be boiled down to: Key data metrics = data quality + productivity…

The broken windows theory can be traced back to criminology and suggests that if you leave a window broken in a compound everything else starts to fall apart. If residents start seeing that things are falling apart they stop caring about other things as well. We can draw the same…

It seems like everyone is working out how to structure data teams in their own ways. When I talk to data leaders I frequently hear mentions of the following topics Should my data team operate centralised or embedded? What technical implications does this have? What’s the right data team constellation? …

Salary is a sensitive topic. Should it be? There are a lot of good reasons why salaries should be transparent. It helps candidates to not waste time on opportunities that pay less than they want. It shines light on pay gaps between genders and other groups. And it helps employees…