Driven by Data | The Newsletter, Edition 12

Hello everyone! We hope all our UK community members enjoyed the last bank holiday for May. We can't quite believe we're almost entering June this week. It's been a great month, and June is shaping up to be just as exciting.

Let's dive in!

Driven by Data | The Podcast

In Episode 30 of Season 3, of Driven By Data: The Podcast Kyle Winterbottom was joined by Bethany Lyons , Chief Product Officer at KAWA Analytics .

In this episode, they discuss the current data product landscape and what actually constitutes a data product.

Within the conversation they cover, the fascinating story of Kawa and the problems it solves, delivering Data Products versus Data Projects & the differences between product management principles applied to data and data products. Listen now!

Driven by Data | The Mentorship

We're launching the next cohort of the Driven by Data, Mentorship program towards the end of June. We've had a huge mass of people register to join our program, which we're super excited by!

However, we're slightly biased! We have a lot of brilliant mentees, and we're in need of a few more excellent mentors to match the demand.

If you're a senior leader in the data & analytics space, and you want to give back to the community and help lift the next generation of leaders - please register your interest today! In addition to elevating your peers, you'll enjoy the opportunity of networking with other mentors from around the world, building your community & thought leadership.

How can I reduce my new job stress?

May saw us celebrate Mental Health Awareness Week. Natalia Kurasinski & Catherine King sat down to talk about the anxiety of starting a new job, and how to reduce it. Watch the conversation today.

Data Leadership, the Reality - Weekly Talent Insight

This week's talent insight comes from a snippet of Kyle Winterbottom 's coverage in Tech-Exec Magazine.

The data leadership market is in disarray. A point I’ve been making for a good 18 months now. In the UK right now, there are circa 48,000 people that span Head of, Director, VP and CDO job titles. Yet, there are only a little over 700 live adverts for those titles.?

That’s in stark comparison to some of the more technical markets, such as (modern stack) data engineering, with a little over 63,000 people, but close to 62,000 live adverts for those skill sets. Now factor in that even the smaller organisations have more than one Data Engineer, and simple maths tells you that something doesn’t add up.?

The unfortunate reality of this situation can largely be boiled down to one challenge: most data & analytics initiatives begin as a major technological initiative, a challenge that the data & analytics community has been speaking about for years now. Yet, unfortunately, things aren’t really changing, nor at the speed we need them to.

TECHNOLOGY VS. PEOPLE

Sure, technology is a supercritical component to data transformation, but it’s not the only component and, arguably, it’s possibly the least important.?

First of all, it’s worth noting that whether they realise it or not, most organisations are in the midst of a data transformation. There’s been a lot of press about the lack of value that most data & analytics initiatives generate when stacked up against the expectation of what was promised.?

Ask anyone in the data & analytics community and most will tell you that you need to start with the business strategy and work backwards from there. Yet, that very rarely happens. Most data initiatives start with the building of ‘stuff’ (technology) – platforms, lakes, warehouses, models, dashboards, etc.

Despite the fact we know better, why does this continue to happen? Put simply, technology changes can be seen, felt, and used, whereas the other components of data transformation – people, process, and maybe even data, are often invisible and intangible.?

More to come on Thursday's Insights blog! Make sure you follow our LinkedIn page for more.

That's everything for this week, so time for everyone's favourite segment

Weekly Data Joke!

Why did the data scientist take up gardening?

Nothing beats the joy of growing decision trees!

Thanks!

Orbition Content Team