Why taking ownership of the analyst-stakeholder interface can instantly make your life better and your work more impactful — You’ve just started a new role as an analyst. You’re excited to get insider access to data about, say, cat furniture — an industry you’re deeply passionate about. Your first request comes in: an executive wants to know how many kinds of litter boxes they carry. Eager to please, you…

Why we should move to a world where analyses are the default first step — It’s been nearly 2 years since Seth Rosen’s trashboard tweet, and yet the trashboard epidemic is still quite real. We still encounter companies that are curiously happy with having thousands of dashboards, their analysts left to spelunk deep caverns of ad hoc requests with naught but an IDE. There are…

How an over-emphasis on technical work has been disastrous for analytics — Feedback loops are powerful things. Positive feedback can produce highly leveraged effects, while negative feedback can subdue change. Moreover, these patterns can be extremely resistant to disruption. If you don’t address the root driving mechanism, feedback loops will labor on. After all, you can’t throw water on the sun.

Why I hate the IDE — at least, for analytics work. — Article originally published in Win With Data — subscribe for regular updates! Before I condemn the IDE, I want to say that I do look back fondly on my days writing in SQL IDEs. The process was spare and brutally technical in a way that nourished my obsession with Unix…

Great product teams are user-centric and proactive. Great data teams would benefit from doing the same. — Last year, Emilie Schario and Taylor Murphy proposed this wonderful idea of “running your data team like a product team”. The key premise of the article was this: product teams have a lot of great practices that data teams would benefit from adopting. But somewhere along the way, we lost…

Before your next SQL dumpster dive: ask why and document everything — When I was a data scientist at Airbnb, the most common question I got was: “Do you know how many people clicked on this button?” But the curious thing about this question: it was rarely the question that the stakeholder actually wanted answered. Ad hoc questions like this are an…

Relegating all data consumption to self-service is not as effective as we’d hoped — There was a period in the 80s-90s in the U.S. where the world collectively dreamt of building increasingly complex car dashboards. …

We’re data vending machines, and our tools aren’t helping. Hyperquery can help. — When I was a data scientist at Airbnb, I once received an ad-hoc request to identify Olympians that had accounts on Airbnb. No context given, just a colorless request in Slack. …

Let’s take a breath and rethink how we work. — When the automobile went mainstream in the U.S. during the 1920s, the nation re-built roads, wrote new laws, and erected signs and signals to control the flow of traffic. Without these process improvements and infrastructural overhauls, the advent of the automobile would’ve been untenable. …