Career Advice

👁 Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Introduction

Are you tired of Analytics & Data Science feeling like a support function with little to no recognition of the value your team drives?

Do you constantly feel under-appreciated for all the work you and your team puts in?

Do you want to learn tools that help advocate and evangelize your team’s contributions?

In this blog post we will discuss the 3 most effective ways to get you and your teams the recognition they deserve.

Promoting your work

The days of ‘the work will speak for itself’ are long gone. Being able to communicate the value you are driving is important in any job but it is crucial in Analytics because in many cases you are enabling other functions to do their job effectively. For e.g. you partnered with Product Manager on initial strategy for a product feature launch. After 3 months the feature was launched and while you had contributed heavily during the ideation phase, with lesser interaction closer to launch, the PM misses mentioning you when doling out credit for the launch. This is just one scenario, but there are several such scenarios that add up and lead to missed opportunities for recognition.

Being able to promote your work is extremely important in Analytics – without this skill, it is easy for the impact you are driving to go unnoticed.

As a shy, nerdy and self conscious child, I have been terrible at self-promotion well into my early 30’s. However as I grew as a leader, I had to specially pay attention and learn this skill -not just for my sake but also for the sake of the teams I was leading.

Here are 3 of the most effective strategies I learnt and used to promote Analytics and DS teams and demonstrate the impact of the work being done –

1. Announcement emails

While working at a tech startup, not long ago, my team and I thought we were doing a good job of broadcasting our work. But then something happened that turned our perception on its head. We had worked very hard to create a new Customer Retention Dashboard – creating new data pipelines, defining metrics that helped surface crucial insights, and iterating to eventually achieve great visualizations. I sent out an email sharing the dashboard with a small group of audience and we got a decent response as expected.

‘This looks great! Thanks.’

‘Very helpful – thanks for sharing.’

Then our VP of Marketing stepped in and blew us away with what can be achieved with the right packaging. She sent out another communication ‘announcing’ (not just sharing) the dashboard to a broader audience. The response was spectacular! She generated far more engagement and excitement around the dashboard than we did with our comms.

‘This is incredible. Thank you 🙌 ‘

‘What a masterpiece. 🔥 This level of analytical rigor will be instrumental for unlocking future growth! I’d like to put a request in for a lunch-n-learn dashboard demo ;)’

‘Love, love, love – amazing work!!’

In the end, this was one of the most bookmarked dashboards and obviously created a lot of brand equity for the authors and the team.

It made me realize the enormous opportunity for packaging our announcement or distribution emails better. Here are some tips that I have learnt along the way :

• Use catchy subject lines – e.g. ‘Retention Dashboard is here!’ or ‘Introducing Retention Dashboard’
• In addition to stating what the dashboard contains, tie it to key insights, recommendations and next steps
• Use icons & visuals – Adding relevant icons and visuals makes the email easier to consume and provides a nice break from all the heavy text. Caution: Do not overuse!

John, Ramya and Kevin have been developing a fantastic one-stop-shop for consolidating trends in customer sentiment into a centralized Customer Feedback Dashboard. This will be our primary resource to support the company’s focus on Know Your Customer that could unlock many levers of growth for us. 🚀

Within this dashboard you will find –

• Customer sentiment by business line: 💡 XXX has the highest negative sentiment while YYY has the lowest negative sentiment across all customer cohort
• Sentiment breakdown over time:💡 Customer sentiment has been worsening in the last 6 months with sharp uptick during the winter storm a few weeks back

Recommendations & Next Steps –

• Conduct user study to dig deep into opportunities to improve Customer Service

I highly encourage you all to bookmark this resource, share with your teams, and leverage the great work the team has driven to surface customer insights using previously untapped data sources. Be on a lookout for a demo on how to use this dashboard. Until then feel free to reach out on #Customer-Insights slack channel with any questions.

👁 Source: Author

2. Readouts

For those of you who may not have heard the term – ‘readout’ is another term for an analysis that is packaged in a way that is easy to read through. Typically I have seen readouts done by teams when they do a one-time analysis – be it a deep dive into a topic e.g. what drives customer retention or root cause analysis e.g. why did top of funnel conversion decline or analyzing an experiment / launch / campaign performance.

In addition to one-time readouts, what will earn you a lot of credit is to do recurring readouts on topics important to your stakeholders. Depending on business needs, you can choose a weekly or monthly cadence.

Recurring readouts from dashboards

How often have you heard the need for ‘More insight and less dashboards’? I have seen many Analytics teams get flustered with this one – you NEED dashboards to create insights, they would counter. While that may be true, what ends up happening is without a continual stream of insights from those dashboards, they are just seen as another source of data. Actively sharing summarized findings from these dashboards to the stakeholders will change this perception.

We need more insights and less dashboards

Monthly or Quarterly Business Reviews

These are another great way of maintaining a recurring flow of information to your stakeholders. Business Reviews are presentations where you review health of business based on trends in key metrics. These give a chance for senior leadership to step back from the day today humdrum and look at the business performance month over month or quarter rover quarter.

Analytics teams are best positioned to present business reviews for multiple reasons – 1) They are the experts on the source of truth data and metrics 2) They are more likely to take an analytically rigorous and hypothesis driven approach 3) They are impartial

Customer’s perspective

At the end of the day, your business partners are in some sense your customers so let’s step into their shoes and think about their needs. Imagine doing your day-to-day job as a Marketer, Product Manager or Operations Manager and then also having to dig into and stitch together information from dashboards. This is a big time sink for them and frankly not what they are best at. If you can push this information to them instead of them coming to you constantly, not only will this alleviate the pain point for them, they will also start seeing you as a trusted partner. Realigning this push-pull dynamic will also help you be more in control of your time and work priorities.

We need to change the dynamic such that the team is pushing insights to Execs versus them asking for it

~ CFO of a tech startup on Analytics & DS teams

3. Newsletter

This is an easy one and yet so effective. You don’t need to get a lot of cross-functional alignment for this one in terms of prep or set up. You can simply start publishing the newsletter to the intended audience expressing your goal and iterate based on feedback. The trick here is to highlight goals for ongoing work-streams and outcomes for those completed, always connecting to business outcomes or stakeholder needs. Here is a sample layout that will earn you many brownie points:

• Summary – Key Wins & What’s Coming
• Detailed updates by themes
• Newsletter FAQ’s –
• Goals: What is the goal of this newsletter. e.g. Providing visibility and aligning on prioritization
• Cadence: Weekly / Bi-weekly / Monthly
• Audience: Sr. Leadership of company
• Team members
• POC: Who should they reach out to if they have questions

Summary: The team was primarily focused on (1) a framework for customer sentiment analysis, (2) revising north star metrics definitions . Beyond that we’ve been investigating a new Experimentation Platform POC (A/B testing) and scoping churn modeling.

Next up: Finalizing north star metric definitions and pipelines, customer segmentation framework and goal setting sessions (in the next 1 month).

1. Customer Sentiment Dashboard:

Goal: Create a consolidated view to surface actionable insights for growth sr. leadership

• Developed framework approach, roadmap and executed on it
• Identified initial set of metrics and conducted feasibility study, stakeholder interviews
• Built new data pipelines to surface to Tableau and generated insights & recommendations

👁 Source: Author

Bonus Tip

After you have sent all this communication, look at the communication as the start of a dialogue and not the end of a conversation. The idea should not be "I have provided them with the tool and they will take it from there," but instead it should be a conversation starter. You should always have enough information in your communication on who they can reach out to for more questions and collaboration.

Conclusion

Think about a project you are working on or a team you are leading. Can you see yourself utilizing these tools to evangelize your work?

There are over a million job posts on LinkedIn for Analytics & Data Science roles. Most non-analytics roles also emphasize the importance of data driven skills. And yet, many Analytics & Data Science teams struggle to demonstrate the value they are driving. With added skills on effectively communicating your work, you will not just be good at your work but be recognized for it.

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Other resources from me to advance your career in Analytics & DS—

Complete Course on Product A/B Testing with Interview Guide (Use this link to avail discounted price)

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