Metadata
- Author: David Jayatillake
- Full Title:: Dear Stakeholder
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: data culture, Data culture,
- URL:: Dear Stakeholder - by David Jayatillake - davidj.substack
- Finished date:: 2023-08-20
Highlights
No work without knowing why (improve ROI)
When you ask us for help, tell us what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t just say “I need this piece of data”… tell us that you’re trying to achieve this higher level goal that you believe will be enhanced or achieved by X outcome, where you could use data to make a more optimal decision or enrich your product. Treating us like data monkeys will make us look for somewhere we will be treated like data people, or will dehumanise us so we behave as we are treated. (View Highlight)
Not every data person knows the business like you do - they have to know a lot of other things. Some Data Analysts and Analytics Engineers may know some parts of the business very well, perhaps as well as you, but it’s rare for any data person to know their whole business to a great degree of detail. Data folks are trying to align the world in the data systems AND the actual world, this is rarely (read never) straightforward. (View Highlight)
Question whether the work you are asking for is worth the total cost (View Highlight)
If our team has taken the time to make it possible to self-serve, do try to do this (View Highlight)
There are also scenarios where you can try to self-serve too much and you end up building Frankenstein’s monster of a dashboard, with 107 merged queries etc (View Highlight)
What is clearly wrong to you is not always so to data folks. (View Highlight)
Particularly because there is usually a lot of tribal knowledge:
Involve us in strategy. If data can be used in making decisions/strategy, then we should be involved, end of. Yes, we should be enabling others to use data for this purpose, but there are nuances and expanding circumstances that people who are not data professionals will likely miss. This is why you include Finance, Product and Marketing folks in these discussions - you don’t understand their fields as well as they do. You don’t understand the data field as well as data folks do (View Highlight)
Expecting data people to succeed in isolation is unreasonable (View Highlight)