How can you develop a strategic mindset as a data engineer?

Strategy can be build if when we have a vision . This vision could be a business goal or it could be others. Having a vision and understanding the goal and its requirements give a developer scope to plan the path to achieve it more precisely by breaking the whole process into smaller chunks of task. This is where understanding of business goal or organisational goal helps a developer to get more aligned and prepare the delivery path more agile and strategic.

Developing a strategic mindset as a data engineer involves combining technical skills with a broader understanding of business goals, industry trends, and organizational needs. Gain a deep understanding of your organization's overall business objectives. Know how data can contribute to achieving these goals. Engage with business stakeholders to understand their challenges and requirements. This will help you align your data engineering efforts with the broader organizational strategy. Stay informed about industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies in data engineering. Understand how these trends can impact your organization and its competitive position. Attend conferences, webinars, and workshops related to data engineering.

Communication is the key for any field, be ut Data engineering or Software development or anything. Unless there a a complete information exchange with end user / business user, no application or solution can be work smoothly and fulfil its purpose.

?? In communication with data users; talk about how your strategic plan requires the help of them to achieve and what artifacts and capacities will receive in progress: each collaboration with them how their participation in activities is part of strategic plan and impact it in process.

Its is observed that all the new technology come with some specific focus on problem solving. If we consider distributed data systems , its come to solve big data issue, similarly new technologies has a great potential scope to provide easy solutions to an existing greater problem. Learning is the key to make any solution better by adapting the correct tech stack by enhancing it time to time.

More optimisation and automation , less the cost and manual input resulting a faster solution. Where ever possible, we should try to automate the existing processes using modern platforms and technologies.

Have a knowledge about what things are required to automate and optimize all data pipelines, some points are: ??What data pipelines will be automatic. ??How integrate with metadata to automatic data convertion or mapping. ??What criterios are used to scale in processing servers. ??How integrate consensts of users to extract data.

Reaching goal is easy, but the path we choose is what really makes the difference. In data engineering world, best path can only be traveled by doing lots of experiments and POC.

?? Remember that your current design decision about data pipelines or other components don't affect the evolution of these components: Define what things data team must do to go from current decision to wanted status for each component in future. ?Data team members must understand that is better work early in base features that develop it after and problems around it.

It's definitely possible for data engineer to develop his strategic mindset and be seen as an advisor in data engineering space. A lot of great suggestion and comment above. I think another thing to consider while developing a strategic mindset, I would suggest to lean into the consulting mentality/thinking process, such as walk in their shoe, bring your point of view...etc . It will help you to learn strategic mindset and contribute at the same time and propel you to the next level