Hello! 👋

Welcome to Bites of Data!

After working with a variety of data teams in different capacities, I’ve noticed a common goal across industries and teams: People want to spend less time working on their data and more time working with their data.

What do I mean by that? Less time working to make sure the data is right and more time finding ways to leverage it effectively.

Each article will help you find ways to build new workflows and ensure that you spend your valuable time deriving insights from your data.

How I got here

My name is Colin, I’ve been around the world of data for quite some time now, and I quickly learned that the world is awash with data everyone is trying to harness. Throughout the years, I have been an analyst, architect, engineer, strategist, and even worked on the sales side for a while.

I started learning to code at night in 2016, which led me to switch from my job as an engineer to a role as a data analyst at an energy tech startup. While there, I learned that many other roles in data and that every group inside a business has unique data needs requiring wrangling assistance.

Data Needs by Role

• Product Managers need high-quality data to facilitate feature development.

• Customer Success needs to understand how users are using the product to ensure satisfaction with their purchases.

• Sales needs to understand how customers are using the product to improve their strategies.

• Marketing needs better data to engage with existing and potential customers effectively.

• Finance needs data to analyze revenue streams and control costs.

From here, I shifted into consulting for almost 5 years. Consulting is a great place to see numerous different types of businesses and work on a variety of problems. For me it was a great experience, not only from the technical side as I worked on challenging projects with a variety of technologies (AWS, Snowflake, dbt, Tableau, etc.), but also from the business side, as it as eye-opening to understand the real needs of business and data leaders, which were often vastly different from my initial pereception.

Working with these leaders gave me insights into various industries. Learning how data and analytics teams impact their respective businesses was fascinating. Regardless of the industry, teams still face the same issue; delivering reliable, trustworthy datasets The data needs to provide direct value to the team’s objectives and ensure business trust in the results. From experience, trying to help a data team regain trust within the business is a very difficult task.

With this experience, I’ve arrived at today. I transitioned out of consulting to help build a data team at a growing startup. Startups bring all sorts of challenges, yet are also a great opportunity to build as platform the right way as you are earlier on in the data maturity lafndscape.

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