Learn From My Mistakes

7 things I would tell my younger self

I have had a good and long career with data. I was a computer science major in college (specializing in databases and I have worked in several large financial institutions and been a well-respected analyst who could be counted on to produce timely reporting and deliver meaningful insights. Still, I do not feel that I have matriculated to where I should have. Over past few years I have really tried to identify why this is and here are some of the things that I would tell my younger self starting out in an analytics career.

1: Quantify your projects.

This is something I really did not understand starting out. I would strive to make great reporting and create visually pleasing dashboards (even before they were called dashboards), but I failed to quantify the results. At the end of the day your project needs to be able to tie back to one of these areas:

• Revenue: How much revenue was impacted as a result of your project.
• Savings: How much cost savings were you able to realize as a result of your project.
• Regulatory impact: Outside of revenue or savings, many organizations are affected by government regulations and as such need to demonstrate compliance.

Everything you do, should be able to tie to one of those three either directly or indirectly. For revenue or savings, you need to have a dollar amount attached to it.

“Dashboard 231-B made the Midwest sales team more effective”. Who cares. The summary that will get noticed is:

“Dashboard 231-B enabled the Midwest sales team to exceed sales goals by 15%, generating an additional 1.5 million in revenue by identifying gaps in key markets.”

2: Your manager is your manager.

The more you move around, the more you will be exposed to a menagerie of managers each with their own unique style. Some you will gel with and some you won’t. Some will be exceedingly knowledgeable about the work you do and enjoy being hands on, others will be more strategic and not concerned with the everyday minutia. Just as the manager is different, so are you. There will be styles that you gravitate towards and some that are challenging for you to work with. While the manager has a responsibility to set some direction and have a pulse on the team, it is on YOU to discover what success looks like to your manager and to work towards that end.

Too often in my early days if I did not think my manager’s vision was ‘good’ for the company, I would try to do the right thing for our business partners. Even though my ideas may have been good and helped move the business forward, if I was not aligned with my manager, it rarely led to praise.

Nobody is perfect and some managers may not make the right decisions. When faced with these situations, all you can do is identify a risk, but then you must align with your manager and try to make their vision succeed. 

3: Engage business partners early and often.

As I have the benefit of having 20 years of experience, I have seen, and participated in many projects. Unfortunately, I have seen many fail, and others underperform expectations. In some cases the final deliverable is flawed, but that is usually not why they fail. Most fail because the benefactors of the project were generally not involved in its creation.

Granted, many times leadership outlined some of the goals they are hoping to achieve and some of the gaps they are trying to fill, but typically none of the actual consumers are involved.

Many of us in analytics are smart, and we think we’re smart. We feel that if we build something great, everyone will embrace it with open arms and we will be heroes. So we go off on our own and build these fantastic, real time dashboards, interactive systems, and self-service platforms (don’t get me started on those). Then what usually happens is that the day the project is rolled out, is usually the first time any of the target audience sees the project. People will get extremely defensive and feel their opinion was not considered or valued. What is worse is that what is easy intuitive to you, as a data professional, may not be intuitive to a customer service representative. In that case, people will do what they are forced to do with the new tool, but continue to rely on what they did before (typically a home grown spreadsheet, but they trust it)

Early on it is important to engage several SME’s that are leaders in their groups to be a part of the project team for the entire process. Not only will you have a better outcome, but the SME’s will be champions of the project on their teams. People will be excited about the ‘shiny new toy’ instead of dreading it.

4: Always keep the outcome in mind.

Remember that the outcome is what matters, not necessarily how you get there. As an analyst, everyone has a style, a favorite toolset, and a way to approach building a project that works for them. It’s really important to understand the spirit and purpose of the initiative and what a successful outcome may be. Then be open to the best way to get there.

There was a project we worked on a few years ago where we needed data from a group (lets say marketing data). Most of us on the team (myself included) immediately suggested that we get a ‘reporting ID’. For those that don’t know, a reporting ID is a special windows account that does NOT require a password or password renewal. Typically it is only aloud for data automation purposes. This group had some highly sensitive data and it was their policy not to allow reporting ID’s to connect to their database. They offered to build us extracts. Several on the team (myself NOT included) were really incensed about this. Thought it was silly and that we had a legitimate business purpose (we did). But I took a step back. It occurred to me that our true outcome was getting the data. If that group could provide us extracts that met the data need, that would satisfy our outcome. It took a little convincing, but I got others on board.

In the end, it worked fine and satisfied our data requirements even if it wasn’t in the way we originally requested.

And always remember, just because YOU don’t know how to do something, doesn’t mean it can’t be done..

5: Set expectations

This one is REALLY important and one that I struggled with in the early years of my career. There are two facets to this.

Early in your career (and maybe even later) there is a tendency and a drive to want to please everyone. I recall meeting nearly every request with an enthusiastic ‘yes I can’. In many cases the requestor would ask if they could have it tomorrow or in just a few hours. Again, ‘yes I can!!’. Then spend long extra hour stressing because it turned out to be much more work than expected (usually understanding/cleaning the data).

What I found as I got older is that, MOST people do not mind something taking the right amount of time. Be that an hour, a day, week, or even several weeks. If you however, do not set that expectation up front, they will always ask if they can have it ‘tomorrow’. They don’t know how busy you are or what else is on your plate or if you are already in the middle of something important. So the point of this is that it is up to you, as the analyst, to set a realistic expectation. Sometimes they will push back a little, this is again because they don’t know what your workload is. When they do, you can discuss the higher priority items on your plate and see if something can be moved. Which leads me to the second point.

Once you set a realistic date, you either HAVE to hit it, OR alert your business partner the minute you realize it may be late. I used to put off having this tough conversation and just hoping that I would figure it out by the deadline. Trust me when I say, people don’t like to find out on the day it’s due that it will be two more weeks. While there may be some disappointment in pushing a project out, if you give everyone notice so they can adjust things downstream, moving a date does not have to be a ruinous event.

6: Know when to stay, and when to walk away.

This one is tricky. Sometimes it is easy if you are getting a strong promotion or are in a highly toxic environment where you are not being utilized. Other times are tougher. You may get bored in a role or get moved as a result of a reorganization (**I personally hate this one). Sometimes if you stick it out, opportunities will arise for those that just keep showing up. Other times, it can lead to complacency. Just be sure to always try and objectively evaluate the situation and act accordingly.

7: ALWAYS negotiate salary coming in.

Most people I know, hate this part. In my younger years, I often found myself so happy I got the job that I just took what they offered. Inevitably, if you don’t get at least a fair offer, that will start to impact your attitude several months down the road. Just keep these things in mind:

• With an offer, the company choose you! They want you and asking for a reasonable amount more, should not impact that. If it does, congratulations, you just dodged a bullet.
• Nobody, NOBODY comes to the table with their best offer first. No matter how the negotiator tries to convince you, their first offer is not their last. Companies expect a negotiation. Typically, salary negotiations are done by HR recruiters, NOT your hiring manager. The recruiters job is to get you in the seat, but at the lowest cost possible.
• You can negotiate things other than salary, bonus, time off, stock options etc.

In the companies I have been in, and many in corporate America, they have kind of a fixed performance program where they grade on a curve and want about 80% of the people to come in as a ‘meets expectations’ which is also accompanied by a very predictable, and very consistent raise. So at least for me, I try to start a new opportunity at a level I will be comfortable at for a couple years.

That’s it! Those are the 7 things I would tell my 22 year old self coming out of college. A few of them I learned and incorporated early on, but some, I am still learning or refining. Good work product is never going to hurt you, but in my experience, moving ahead takes more than that. I can play back several times in my career where I probably missed a promotion because I was not doing one or more of these items effectively. I sincerely hope that those of you starting out can benefit from some of my life lessons!