My goals for 2022

My goal for January was to come up with what I would like to achieve in 2022 professionally. I asked myself how can I further help emplifi data teams to grow, deliver great results while maintaining a good work-life balance. I truly believe that as a leader you need to take good care of your team as only then the teams will deliver great work and the customers will be happy. So here are 3 specific things I would like to focus on in 2022:

Goal 1: Further improve our people development activities

The projects my teams work on cover various areas - data science, BI, data engineering etc. I know some of those areas reasonably well (data engineering) and some of not so much (data science/ML). From a technical perspective, I cannot really offer much to my teams. I surrounded myself with great people, whose technical competence is higher (often much higher) than my own. Me telling them how to solve a specific problem is pointless. So I have to ask myself how can I bring value to my teams. One area which I have identified is to help them grow and develop their skills. This is no easy task - no one really told me how to do it, so I have read extensively and also learned by trial and error. We have already deployed quite a few development activities in the emplifi data teams. This year I would like to take it a bit further.?

We have carried out 360 feedback reviews for all our team leaders. Once we had the results we kicked off discussions on how to interpret the data. These discussions should help us identify 2-3 areas of development and these will be an input to what we call a development plan. This is a document that defines the development goals for the next 6 months (example: “I would like to get better at presenting.”). It also lists some activities that need to be done in order to fulfill that goal (example: “Present on a technical meetup or a conference”). The 360 identifies not just areas of development but also one’s strengths (example: “Martin scored very high on planning and execution of projects.”). Why not take these strengths and teach others how to excel in that particular competency? So the idea is to have knowledge transfer activities part of the aforementioned development plan. This way our leaders perfect skills they are already very good at and help others to grow as well! I believe that the process described above could help us develop our team leaders in a holistic way.?

Goal 2: Carry on building a feedback-driven culture

Feedback is very important. In my opinion, there are two reasons why. 1) it helps you get better and 2) it helps you stay motivated. If you take feedback seriously and learn from it, it should help you get better. Feedback, however, can also help you stay motivated. How? Well, feedback basically tells you that someone is using stuff you built. Knowing that stuff you built is being used is highly motivational (example: “The automated report Martin built saves 5 hours a week of Becky’s work in Excel. And Becky hates Excel.”). So last year we have scaled our feedback collection activities significantly and we want to carry on this year.?

Currently, we have the following feedback activities in place. After finishing a major project, we collect feedback on the delivery after 3 months the code is in production. We also monitor the usage of our applications and platforms. Then we collect feedback on the performance of the whole team. With stakeholders, we discuss the work the team delivered in the last 12 months. During those discussions, we focus mainly on the relationships and the service provided rather than the specific projects. On an individual level, as mentioned above, we have carried out 360s for the whole data team leadership. Going forward I would like to run a survey that would help my leadership team to understand how the teams are doing.?

Regardless of what kind of feedback we are collecting there is one major challenge - how to make sure people actually provide feedback that is actionable. We know that questionnaires do not really work, but personal 1-2-1 meetings do not scale. Then there is another aspect - people will provide feedback if they see the feedback is used. The link between providing feedback and something being changed to reflect that feedback needs to be tangible. In big organizations, this is difficult to achieve. For us, these are still unsolved problems but last year, we laid the foundations of the feedback-driven culture and in 2022 we need to build on top of that.

?Goal 3: Drive improvements of our data platform

At emplifi, we process quite a bit of data each day. Our data lake contains is 750 TB in size. There are 6 teams directly involved in the development of what we call data platform - from data acquisition, data enrichment all the way to data storage and retrieval. While I do have some data engineering knowledge and I enjoy technical discussions, I do not contribute to the final solution too much. As stated above, I cannot really compete with the technical knowledge of my teams. What I do focus on is to make sure that all those great ideas are executed well. 6 teams and their stakeholders, that is quite a few people working on a single thing and all that work needs to be coordinated and communicated.

There are two major (non-technical) challenges we face when we want to enhance our data platform. One is that the data platform is pure technical work and that is a hard sell to the product team. The product team loves user-facing features which I fully understand. Platform work enables great features to be delivered but it cannot be considered a product/feature you can sell. My team needs to be able to explain the value of the data platform work and justify the investments.

Emplifi consists of Socialbakers, Astute, iPerceptions, and Go InStore and each of these companies had its own way of processing data. Going forward we would like to have a unified approach to data acquisition, enrichment, and storage. Simply put, we would like to have a single data platform that would be accessible to all the teams working on product features. We made some great progress and have a single data lake in a place, however, that is just one thing that needs to be done. This integration process is not really a technical problem. It is much more about explaining to people what benefits one platform has and making sure that the developers have time to work on the integration efforts. People were busy before we merged into one company and the integration work cannot be on top of what they have been doing so far. Some work needs to be deprioritized and building a unified data platform will be done instead.

?Conclusion

So that’s it, these are my 3 goals for 2022. Priority 1 is to make sure people have opportunities to grow. The 360s we carried out can help a lot with defining the goals of the growth and I need to make sure people can achieve those goals. Then I would like to further improve our feedback processes which we have deployed during the past year. And finally, I will participate in the development of a single data platform. The biggest challenge there is to make sure that the value of such work is well communicated and developers have time to work on integration efforts. And a request to you - do you have any tips for me? How do you collect feedback in your companies? Do you face the same challenges as us? How do you grow people? Do you carry out 360s regularly? Please let me know, always happy to learn!