Hello, is this thing on?
Hello, is this thing on?
Why we're throwing yet another data newsletter into the mix (and a preview of what's to come)
We are not short on content written about data. I counted 300 ‘data’ publications on Substack and another 315 on Medium before I got tired of counting. There are hundreds of vendor blogs (of which I am responsible for one), even more LinkedIn and Twitter personalities, and truly innumerable Slack and community messages with advice flying around at any given moment.
We are not short of material. Right?
The overwhelming majority of that content boils down into three categories:
Technical advice (how to get your models working, how to start with SQL, etc.)
SEO-able listicles (10 ways to do X that probably don’t really help you do X all that much)
High-level thought leadership pieces (e.g. Dashboards are dead 🤷♀️)
What’s missing?
A few years ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who runs a data team in Stockholm and she was telling me about these quarterly meetings she does with the whole company in which they all review what the data team will be doing that quarter. It is her way of communicating the value of the data team, and simultaneously, connecting the other business units to one another by sharing what they are all working on:
“It makes it clear what we’re about to work on, so everyone has the same expectations of us. And they don’t think we’re doing nothing when we aren’t working with them. We get to show them everything we’re doing so they understand how hard we’re working. It just shifts the conversations.”
It’s a simple idea, one she shared off-handedly, not realizing that no other data leader I had spoken to in the last 5 years had mentioned something like that. And yet they all had mentioned the pains that it would have alleviated.
It is things like this that fall through the cracks of the content we have today. It is not technical, it is not something a vendor could possibly know about, and it is not high-level thought leadership. It is a real, tangible thing that could help a lot of data teams. If only they knew about it.
More to the point, the people with this great advice are far too busy actually doing these things to sit down and write about it. So we are trying to lower the barrier for them to share their great ideas, and therefore making it easier for all of us to learn from them.
And so here is another data newsletter
So yes, this is why we’re creating yet another data newsletter. We want to find ways to showcase practical, non-technical, advice coming from data practitioners themselves. We want to uncover what truly separates the good data teams from the great ones and share that with whoever wants to join us.
How it works
Over the last few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of data leaders trying to glean as much wisdom as I can from them. I’m consolidating their thoughts and advice into weekly posts here. Topics covered included:
The purpose and roles of a data team
How to know when a data team is succeeding?
Best practices around how to handle ad-hoc requests
Tradeoffs between different data team structures
How to hire a great team
Who was your first data hire?
When did you know it was time for dbt? for self-service?
How to stay connected as a data team?
Lessons learned in becoming a great data leader
How to know if your stakeholders are really happy?
…and many more!
👀 A sneak peek
Next week we’ll be sharing our first article on the purpose and roles of a data team. You’ll be hearing from the following leaders:
And to whet your appetite, here are a few of my favorite clips from my interviews with these folks:
What now?
Now, just stay tuned for next week’s post! Let me know if you have any topics you’d like to see me cover in these interviews and articles, or if you have someone great you think we should speak to!