Enhancing Business Value: Data’s Power — Tip #9
Follow the #8 data team should work as a product team — 30 Tips to be Data Practitioners, here I want to discuss how a data team should be valued.
Tristan writes Two ways of measuring data team value to make the point. Then, I realized I always want my team to be valued based on ROI.
Create Value to the Business
We build data products for our data customers to solve their problems. Most of our data customers are our colleagues working to make better products and businesses. Our job as the data team is to help them make data-informed decisions, and the results we expect are better products and businesses.
This mindset impacts how we think, how we collaborate with others, how we are organized in the company, and how we perceive our own value. It’s the foundation of building a data team.
How to Decide
The leaders, primarily the founders, have the power to decide how to value the data team. However, as a member of the data team, we can strive to understand how this decision is made. Here are some considerations:
The problems that the data team aims to resolve.
- Reduce time spent on preparing reports?
- Increase data literacy company-wide?
The complexity of the data pipeline.
- Databases on the ground and in the cloud. Are there multiple types of databases and solutions?
- Is there only one cloud data warehouse?
The abilities of the data team members.
- Engineers with backgrounds extending to building data pipelines.
- Data customers who want to answer their business questions.
In my experience with small startups, I built the data team to answer product or business questions from a data customer perspective. Source data comes from our production server and a few 3rd-party integrations. Considering all these factors, I definitely want the data team to support the business.
I’m aware of large enterprises that construct data teams with 40+ people to support a complex global finance team. Such data teams should be valued by G&A. That’s the purpose of that data team.
Work Closer to Business Instead of Engineering
I advocate that the data team should contribute to the business. It should be organized within the business unit instead of as an engineering function. Work closely and collaborate more with the business personnel. Understand how they operate the business, why they examine these numbers, and how they interpret them.
This echoes #1 Start with curiosity 🐣 — 30 Tips to be Data Practitioners and #8 data team should work as a product team — 30 Tips to be Data Practitioners. If you remain curious about the company you work for, and the users who view your data as a product, you should observe and discover how you can assist your data customers.
Coming Next
Next, I’ll discuss the organization of a data team within a company. There are multiple ways to approach this, so I’ll delve into how to evaluate the options.
🤩 I’m happy to hear how you handle product development process? what tool do you use? Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn Karen Hsieh or Twitter @ijac_wei.
🙋🙋♀️ Welcome to Ask Me Anything.
