Why Data Teams Fail and Succeed with Shachar Meir

So a couple of things first.

So shout out to Donna Raj here saying, yeah, also started as a DBA.

This is an interesting comment.

I agree with this one.

You can point at a new system after 18 months and say, we migrated to this.

Show them the same old dashboards after 18 months.

Say, yeah, we made this faster, more robust, accurate.

People can't see the difference.

So I think, again, that's an idea of the whole issue about staying on the technology.

Back to Donna Raj, a good question here.

Any thoughts on how to kickstart this thought process for teams?

Yeah.

So again, it goes back to the incentive structure.

And I think that if you are a data leader right now, you need to create the incentive for your team members to do that.

So I remember I was having a conversation with a data engineer on my team they started as an intern and they worked in the team, but they were fairly junior.

And they were just building things that it wasn't clear to me why we're spending so much time on this.

And I remember I had a one-to-one with that person and I asked them, can you show me what you're working on? So they showed me this dashboard and it had all sorts of different features.

And I said, okay, why are you building this? And they said, because my PM asked me to.

And I said, yeah, OK, fine.

But what are they going to do with this? And they were like, I don't know.

I said, OK, can we find out? I understand you don't know right now.

It's not a test.

You're not fired yet.

But can we please have another meeting next week where you explain to me how are they actually going to use it and what is the problem that this thing is trying to solve? And I think that by asking your team this question, you're signaling to them that these are the things you care about.

If you only ask them, show me how you're building it, what technologies, what's the architecture and all of that, what you're signaling to them is I only care about this.