Happy New Year! In the blank slate of January, many of us are thinking about what’s next. Maybe you need a road map for the projects your team will tackle this year, or maybe you need a road map for yourself. What should you focus on this year to get yourself to the next level? How do you help your team do the same? A career ladder is one effective tool to help answer those questions – and on top of that, a good ladder can help mitigate bias and eliminate glue work. This post is the fir...| Locally Optimistic
A blog about data organizations| Locally Optimistic
I'm a scientist, engineer, and data-geek that loves pulling data from every corner possible and discovering meaningful insights hidden in the numbers.| Locally Optimistic
Project Execution Skills Build Your Reputation for Delivering Value| Locally Optimistic
Or: How perspective changes when you’re the one asking the questions Four years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at myself. Hard. Back then, on the data team, I had strong opinions about the right way to access data. Product managers who wanted to query the production database replica instead of using our carefully crafted data warehouse? They were wrong. They were bypassing all the work we’d done to clean, validate, and structure the data. They were missing the forest for the trees, aski...| Locally Optimistic
This post steps through the challenges that make it so difficult to create a winning strategy, and explains why our cleanest datasets and most rigorous statistics can't solve them on their own.| Locally Optimistic
Learn how to stand out in the data job market with networking tips, resume strategies, and interview prep to land your next role| Locally Optimistic
In 1931, S. R. Ranganathan established five laws of librarianship that any modern data leader would be wise to embrace.| Locally Optimistic
Executive Summary We want our work to be impactful and used by stakeholders; we keep hearing that developing data products is the answer. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get there. Successful data products help our collaborators decide how to improve the company’s health. To do so, before any development starts, we first need to have a shared understanding of the context around: why something needs to happen (e.g., our objective), what specifically needs to happen (e.g., our outcome...| Locally Optimistic
As you progress in your career, your focus shifts from completing discrete tasks assigned to you, to owning larger projects. Being able to execute complex projects with limited support expands your potential impact on your organization. And as you take ownership of bigger initiatives, you’ll need strong project execution skills to see them through smoothly. Project execution is both an obvious and unappreciated need for senior data practitioners. Work settings often don’t clearly teach ...| Locally Optimistic
The LO Admin team is very excited to announce our very first cohort of Locally Optimistic Fellows. Fellow contribute to a one-year commitment of helping support the growing community and events. We are proud to have a group of active community members as fellows and look forward to their contributions over the next year. The Community Fellows for this year are Josh Devlin, Paul Hallaste, and Juanita Palomar. Community Fellows actively participate in Slack, monitoring Slack channels and respon...| Locally Optimistic
Join Locally Optimistic's growing Slack community where analytics leaders share lessons and challenges from their experience working with data.| Locally Optimistic
Mature data practitioners leverage their technical skills to maximize impact. Learn to work smarter, not harder.| Locally Optimistic
From 2019-2022, I was the data product manager of the business intelligence team at Unite, a sizeable European B2B procurement platform, where I guided our transformation from a “service team” to a “product team.” We went from implementing long lists of dashboards and reports for sales, customer services, and management to turning analytics inside the company upside down. When I left, we had just finished implementing a multi-year vision for the future of the company’s data platform...| Locally Optimistic
Learning is key for career development. Picking up new skills will make you more effective, while teaching others will multiply your impact.| Locally Optimistic
Accelerate your data career growth through a structured approach to developing soft skills. Leverage feedback to become more effective.| Locally Optimistic
Data analysts wear a lot of hats, and the first ones to join a team may wear some extra ones. In doing so, they’ll have soaked up a remarkable amount of information by the time the team grows. We’re lucky to have such excellent foundations of knowledge, but at what point does all that siloed knowledge become a liability? A hypothetical to demonstrate why: what happens if they win the lottery next week and resign? We may find ourselves scrambling trying to interpret their work, unprepared ...| Locally Optimistic
The changing landscape of data and analytics has created the need for a new role on the data team - the “analytics engineer”. This role sits at the intersection of data science, analysis, and data engineering.| Locally Optimistic
Data teams aim to help the people in their organization make better decisions. Many data teams aren’t doing this as well as they could and are missing out on a huge opportunity, both for the organization and the team. This gap is due to teams not being set up for success, which undermines trust in the data and the insights the team generates. There is a better way to build and run a data organization: run it as if you were building a Data Product and all of your colleagues are your customer...| Locally Optimistic