3 big learnings from a data leader in a start-up environment across all career levels.

Hi there, I am Max (people call me Mox) and I have been with Honeypot for the last 2.5 years, leading the data efforts for most of the time. Honeypot is Europes “Developer Focussed Job Platform”. With over 200k users and 2000+ clients, we already helped thousands of developers to find a job they love! 

I started as Honeypot’s first Data Scientist, became Team Lead and for the last year the Head of Data. When I joined we were 28 people bunched up in a little apartment in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. We peaked at 120 employees only a year and a half later and our founders Emma Tracey and Kaya Taner exited successfully. I am proud to say that I had my part in Honeypots success story. I have built up an amazing team, we did lots of meaningful work, and we learned so much on the way! In this short article, I want to highlight the biggest challenges about the three stages of my career at Honeypot, I hope that you can get something out of it.

TL;DR:

For data newbies: Don’t show off - provide value instead!

For aspiring leaders: Leading is not a reward, it’s a change of career!

For managers: Enabling others is not enough - make it actionable and align!

Don’t show off - provide value instead!

2.5 years ago I was the only data professional in the vicinity. I was hired to “build a world-class matching algorithm in the first month of employment”. Spoiler: 2.5 years later with 10 people in the team and we are not even pretending to be close to that goal! I realized that this project is way beyond my skills and expertise and because of it, and the fact that I was scared as f**k, I decided to focus on where I could provide value immediately. So I ended up building the reporting landscape in the company and enabled every single team to do their job X-fold more efficient. I did the right thing out of the wrong reason. I realized it soon and over the years my mindset got even more and more extreme: My team won’t work on something which does not provide value. An obvious thing to say, right? But a tremendously imposing and almost impossible doctrine to live by.

But I want to make a point about newbies. In the short time, I onboarded a dozen of highly skilled professionals, chosen from the thousands of CVs I have screened and the countless interviews I have conducted and for all of those lovely dozen I told them in the interviewing process and again in their first days: “I don’t need you to show off! I would much more prefer you taking the first weeks to get to know the setup and the data instead of wasting time solving problems we don’t have!”

Leading is not a reward, it’s a change of career

When around the beginning of 2019 my Head of Data Tabea Müller got promoted to VP Technology it opened up the leadership position of the team. Back then we were 3 people: A junior Data Scientist (me), a senior Data Scientist and a junior Analyst. At that point, I was already very used to managing stakeholders across all teams, understanding requirements and expectations and delivering on them. Tabea just had to tell me which of all the projects I should focus on to align with her vision. So when the chance arose I was fairly confident that leading the team was a valid option. So I would apply. Officially! Both other team members had the chance to veto me but instead, they voiced their trust in me. I thought I could just continue doing my job and extend it to also make the decisions that were done by Tabea before. 

Well, that was where I was wrong. Even leading a team of 2 back then was time-consuming. Writing tickets, weekly 1-1s, preparing standups and other meetings. That was a good chunk of time investment which was fairly visible and I was aware of. But soon after I found myself in around 17-25h of meetings, job interviews, performance reviews, 360s and other calendar-blocking events. And as much as I love it, it allowed only a little time to focus on data science or analytical work. In fact, I coded very little afterwards and I could feel my skills deteriorate. It was heartbreaking, as I love coding very much. But here is the thing: I wanted and embraced this change of career. Leadership should never be a reward for great performance on the job! If your leader is the best individual contributor of the team, s/he might be in the wrong position! 

Enabling others is not enough - make it actionable and align!

There is a fallacy in data teams and that's that we see ourselves as enablers of other teams. I learned it the hard way and it took me 9 OKR cycles to realize it: Enabling others is not enough! We spend so much of our time ultimately wasting time on data products, analysis and reports which at the end collected more dust than my Lego Millenium Falcon. And the metaphor stands! You invest 200 bugs (pun intended) into building something utterly complex only to realise afterwards that it’s way too big and you can’t really do anything with it. 

Let’s not build Falcons anymore! After years of building great things and often realizing that the team and purpose it was dedicated to was not impacted by it at all, it became clear a few months back. 

• Your team is thinking about how it can help others... 
• Builds things… 
• No one is using your solution...
• You get more frustrated… 
• Repeat…

Break the cycle by aligning your a** off! It’s not enough to build things and hope others will use it!

You have to make it work! It’s your responsibility to make sure that what you build is also what is needed. Not just that, you need to make it actionable! Grab your peers from other teams and ensure the following:

• You identified the right problem to work on together.
• It’s the right time to work on it. (make sure our work is not becoming redundant in 2 months)
• You clarified the other teams' expectations and you used your domain-knowledge to help them set those expectations! (How would they know what is possible for your team to do?)
• You aligned on how to deliver any of the results.
• You set deadlines.

And most important:

• You help the other team to come up with an agreed-on action plan which is put in place as soon as you deliver!
• There are people from all involved teams set responsible to put that plan to action

Those are the top 3 out of numerous learnings on 2.5 really intense years! I hope that maybe one or the other aspect of it helps you as well!