Weekly Round-Up - July 30, 2023
Articles, podcasts, and videos that give me cool insights into data and problem solving.
I consume A LOT of media during the week, and while not all of it is directly about data and analytics, a lot of it is thought provoking and gives me ideas about data, analytics, and technology. I want to share out what I am reading for other people to dig into if interested.
This may not be every week because some weeks are busier than others, but will certainly be posted periodically.
Insightful Content
How Do You Build a High Impact Analytics Team? Jamie’s Team Knows
https://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/how-do-you-build-a-high-impact-analytics-team-jamie-knows
Zach Gemignani of Juice Analytics shared a profile with me that he wrote on Jamie Beason, Sr. Director of Business Intelligence at JLL. This article outlines Jamie’s “Data Fluency” strategy to help address the last mile gap between fully developed data products and getting people to actually use them.
An insight that connected with me was:
“Until we understand the business, we’ll only ever be ticket-takers who build whichever dashboards or automations we’re asked to. My goal is to up-skill BI professionals with the business-specific basics… so that we can connect dots our customers would have never thought to ask for.”
Driving value with data is all about understanding how decisionmakers view the world and using data to learn new things or make interesting predictions. Until you understand their worldview, the best you can do is be reactive to questions they ask.
Future of Femalehood Podcast: AI Biologist, Russell Foltz-Smith
https://player.fm/series/the-future-of-femalehood/ai-biologist-russell-foltz-smith
Amanda Ducach, CEO of the Ema App, interviews Russell Foltz-Smith on The Future of Femalehood podcast about the future of AI. Russell is easily one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever spoken to, and he did not disappoint dropping pearl after pearl of wisdom within a very short hour.
Russell argues that “all technology is emancipatory” and says that instead of replacing humans, AI will allow us to truly choose what is worth our time and energy to focus on. In that way, AI will allow us to be more human.
“View AI not as a that will technically save your company, but as a way for you to define what you choose to care about and what you choose to do. It does not get to define you. You get to define it.”
How Analytics Drives Operational Excellence
I’m always really excited every time I see Ergest post something new. I love his outlook on analytics and it often gives me lots of ideas that help shape my overall view of the data world. This article is no different.
I believe the true purpose of analytics is to drive operational excellence… operational excellence is about fine tuning the system in such a way that it achieves goals consistently.
Analytics is one of the best tools we have available to understand the relationships amongst the elements of a business system.
Why Your Music Is Still Boring
While this isn’t explicitly about data, Cameron explicates a quote from the creators of South Park about telling interesting stories and compares it to the creation of music.
But we can take the beats, which are basically the beats of your outline, and if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats, you’re 🦆ed basically. You’ve got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you’ve written down is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’
Communicating your insights with your stakeholders is just as much storytelling as creating music or writing comedy. The same narrative principles that make art entertaining make your data storytelling engaging and action-provoking to your stakeholders.
Modeling Ragged Time-Varying Hierarchies
https://docs.getdbt.com/blog/modeling-ragged-time-varying-hierarchies
I love how Sterling Paramore created a hierarchy diagram dissecting the parts of a bike. This is a great visual tool for translating abstract concepts into discrete data models and describing the relationships between objects and observations. This visual will absolutely be appearing in a future blog post.
The Science of Timing Your Sales Questions
Like the Venus Theory music video above, this one isn’t explicitly about data — it’s actually about applying neuroscience to sales techniques. However, the best sales is just relationship-building so I think this is still relevant both for getting better insights during data product user interviews and for “selling” data products to your stakeholders.
Carmen Simon talks about two frameworks for sales pitches: the Data-Insight-Question approach (DIQ) and the Question-Insight-Data approach (QID). She found that opening sales conversations with data (evidence) and explaining the significance of the insight leads to people being more receptive to questions and recommendations. I’m going to try this out next time I do a data product user interview and see if it is as applicable for data as it is for sales.
5 Rules I Learned at Stanford: Design Thinking
I’ve always been a big fan of Vicky Zhao’s content. She is also really interested in systems thinking, mental models, and finding new insights. This video she did on design thinking has a lot of really interesting gems in it that strike me as really applicable for building data products.
"Don't plan... act. Act first and let that guide your thinking. Let that guide your planning... Let's find out what's the actual problem before solving any of it."
"Don't judge the idea, judge the process."
"[People] don't want to give feedback... Something that's too perfect doesn't invite participation."
It’s really easy to get too far down the road on your plan for the perfect solution, but collaborating with stakeholders and earning their trust is more important than doing it perfectly. Vicky recommends focusing hard on really defining the problem before acting, giving feedback/judgment based on process instead of ideas themselves, and use really bad prototypes to invite people to build the framework together. This seems like really good advice for managing your own ego when it comes to building data products (or any product really!)
Useful Technology
LinkOff
LinkOff is a browser extension that helps you filter your LinkedIn feed. My network has been growing like crazy since I started publishing content last month, so I’ve needed help managing the inflow of new updates so that I can still find substantive opportunities to interact with the community. This extension gives you a lot of opportunities to filter specific kinds of content out that you don’t want to see AND also give LinkedIn a dark mode!
What I Am Reading
I am currently working on:
Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life
Tempo: Timing, Tactics, and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making
New Music
After 20 years Peter Gabriel is finally putting out a new album. Road to Joy has been my favorite single so far. Looking forward to the full album release later this year.