"Analytics organizations don’t exist to write SQL. We are here to problem solve."
Problem
- data-driven = we make our decisions using data
- -> it doesn’t recognize the hard work of data scientists/analysts as the focus is on the data, not the analyses
- data-driven vs analytics-driven:
- analysts fetch data vs analysts find answers.
- hire more and more analysts/DS as “hands” vs invest in infrastructure, tooling, and education.
- “Can you pull these numbers…?” vs “Can you help me think about…?”
- Finds data that justifies management decisions vs generate insights that tell a compelling story management can act on
- As a data scientist or analyst, you are the person most familiar with data, so naturally data-related requests will come to you. My default response has always been to drop a query/dashboard on stakeholders ASAP, which I’d promptly forget about. But then I’d have to repeat the work the next time I was asked. Plus, this sort of ad-hoc response just reinforces the perception that your relationship with decision-makers is purely transactional.
Solution
- Stakeholders need to get in the habit of asking business-level questions of analytics, not having data requests.
- Make your job masterful and reproducible, ask the big questions (if not requested by the leadership)
- Document everything (analyses, transformations, tables)
- "Doing high-quality well-documented work"