Your Data Team doesn't need to be fancy

Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

This Reddit post was getting a lot of attention last month:

My immediate response was “Oh noooo! This poster has 0 idea how much they just branded themselves as quite junior 😬”. And I know that because these very same words could have come out of my mouth ~10 years ago, condescension and all.

Data scientists spend time learning the how: “how to cluster your data”, “how to deploy a model”, “how to make dates look and act like dates”. These are all skills which allow us to complete a task or project. This is hopefully not controversial. The controversy comes in as soon as it is time to do something with the task or project.

To be blunt: no one except other data scientists care about how you did something.

Arguing that a dashboard took time to build and has “tons of calculated fields and crazy logic” (as the poster does above) does not matter to a VP! What matters is that your work helps her make a decision. What the Data Scientist above did not hear is that Tableau is preventing the VP from making a decision. The VP just doesn’t have the time. Why? First, have you ever used Tableau? I wouldn’t make time for it either! But secondly, see the tweet below:

If you hear an exec telling you that something is too hard to use/they don’t have time for it, their “laziness” is your opportunity. In this case, it’s an opportunity to make a small app that sets up a cron job to scrape a (Tableau) dashboard and sends a .pdf in an email to a decision maker. That sounds like fun to me! (I’ll share how to do this using Python next week.)

This approach is not for everyone. For the Redditor above, it clearly broke a mental model of which data science work is valuable. But my bet is that if you start thinking about your job as empowering decision makers and unblocking them, you’ll start seeing all sorts of opportunities materialize and pretty quickly make yourself invaluable. You will also learn a ton of new skills along the way.

If you’re leading a team and want to stay relevant, you’ve got to hire people who aren’t just “how” people. Of course you need to hire people with a baseline of skills, but they also need the empathy to understand and anticipate where decision-makers and leaders will face blockers, and find ways around them. This is how your team becomes essential.