7 Real-World Lessons from Data Leaders at LinkedIn, Dropbox & More
Hi, fellow future and current Data Leaders; Ben here 👋
A few weeks back, I hosted two weeks of webinars for data leaders. We covered topics like communication with the business, driving impact, and say no, etc. Below, you’ll find seven of the webinars with data leaders from companies like LinkedIn, Dropbox, and more!
Before we dive into the article, I’m also excited to share that I’ll be running the second cohort of the Data Leaders Playbook Accelerator. This six-week program is focused on helping data leaders drive more impact and play a larger strategic role in their company. If you’re interested, you can sign up for the program here.
With that out of the way, let’s jump into it!
Intro
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with dozens of data leaders who were recently promoted.
Many had to spend time honing an entirely new set of skills while juggling some level of delivering on technical projects.
Others were suddenly being asked to make decisions on technologies that would impact their companies for years to come, often without being able to ask anyone else for help. That’s why, over the past few weeks, I have been hosting webinars asking data leaders from companies like LinkedIn, Dropbox, Carhartt, and several consultants to share their experiences.
These webinars focused on frameworks for better communication and on understanding the business better. They also explored several technologies so you can make better decisions about what to use for your team.
So, let’s explore these seven webinars, which you should watch if you want to take your data team to the next level.
1) Frameworks Data Leader and ICs Should Know to Maximize Their Impact by Tessa Xie
Many data teams struggle to communicate clearly to the business, whether it be results from an analysis or requesting a budget for new tooling.
If you want to communicate information to business leaders or drive impact, having several frameworks underneath your tool belt will be helpful. That’s where
‘s webinar on four frameworks you can use as a data leader will be useful!She covers several methods you can use to better break down messaging and deliver results that will allow the business to get up to speed quickly.
2) Why Data Teams Fail By Shachar Meir
Last year I spoke with several business leaders who were frustrated with their data teams and felt they weren’t delivering the hoped-for value. They were failing. Shachar Meir has been leading data teams at companies like Facebook and PayPal and helping them turn around when they might be struggling.
This webinar will cover several methods you can use to help keep your data team from failing.
3) Saying No And Other Difficult Conversations For Data Leaders By Aaron Wilkerson
An important skill you’ll need to learn as a data leader is the ability to say no. This skill is hard for many data ICs and leaders to pick up. After all, it's far easier to just say yes right?
I asked
to share his thoughts on saying no and having other difficult conversations as a data leader.Because you can’t just say no, you need your business partners and stakeholders on the same page as you. They need to understand what the cost of you saying yes is and what the value of you protecting your teams time provides.
4) How To Balance Long Term Projects and Ad Hoc Work As A Data Leader By Lauren Lin
One of the challenges all data teams face is balancing ad-hoc data requests with long-term projects. After all, you have to ensure your leadership believes you can deliver and gets timely information, but you also need to build a lasting data infrastructure. Sometimes, these can be at odds.
The The Tension of Orthodoxy and Speed, as
put it.In this webinar Lauren Lin will share her methods for balancing ad-hoc requests and long term projects.
Picking Tools And Managing Your Data Stack
For the next few videos I wanted to focus more on tools and solutions data teams use.
Now tools and solutions do not solve problems on their own. But they can help make your day to day workflows considerably easier. That’s why I asked several of the speakers to talk on their experience with different tools like Snowflake, Databricks and dbt.
Let’s dive into the next three videos.
5) What You Need To Know Before You Use Snowflake By Jeff Skoldberg
Back in 2023 an article went viral in the data world titled “I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars”. The focus of the article was about how a data professional made a small adjustment to their Snowflake instance and saved 500k.
But there are many other adjustments you can make to reduce your Snowflake bill and just good practice to follow that you might not be told by your account executive. That’s where Jeff Skoldberg’s webinar comes in.
He’ll share his thoughts on what you should know before you use Snowflake.
6) What You Need To Know Before You Use Databricks By Josue Bogran
If you go on Linkedin, then perhaps you’ve seen content from Josue Bogran. He has spoken a lot about Databricks and other tools, so I asked him what people should know before they push play on Databricks.
So if you want to learn more about what to expect, you should check out this webinar.
7) dbt vs SQLMesh By Yuki Kakegawa
With all the movement in the data world, whether it be acquisitions, new funding rounds, and so forth, I wanted to have
share his experiences with dbt and SQLMesh.He has been working with a whole list of tools recently, and so I wanted him to share what he has found is the difference between dbt and SQLMesh.
Final Thoughts
As a data leader, you’ll need to learn many new skills. For example, you’ll need to learn how to plan your data roadmap, grow your team, or improve stakeholder relations. If these skills are new to you or you’re just looking to improve them, then I know the videos above were helpful.
Thank you to everyone who led these webinars, and as always, thanks for reading!
The Data Leader’s Playbook Accelerator: Build Trust, Navigate Vendors, and Deliver Impact
Over the past few years, I have led dozens of data team turnarounds, set up infrastructure for companies ranging from small start-ups to large billion-dollar organizations, and coached new data leaders on how to handle tough stakeholders.
Now, I wanted to condense all of that into a 6-week program that would help you be better prepared for dealing with issues such as:
Building trust with stakeholders
Picking the right tools while navigating aggressive sales tactics
Negotiating with vendors
Juggling ad-hoc business requests with long-term strategic planning
Dealing with a lot of hype around AI and real-time
Balancing their technical expertise while also having to lead
And more
Upcoming Member Events
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Here are the next three I have planned!
Breaking Into Data Consulting - From Marketing To Positioning - April 17th, 9 AM MT
Dimensional Data Modeling Fundamentals - April 24th, 9 AM MT
If you’d like to be invited, then consider supporting the newsletter below!
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Bufstream: Stream Kafka Messages to Iceberg Tables in Minutes
By
Fourteen years ago, a team led by Jay Kreps built Kafka to meet LinkedIn's growing log processing demands. Since its open-source release, Kafka has become the de facto standard for distributed messaging.
But here’s the catch: Kafka’s design isn’t optimized for the cloud era. Compute and storage can’t scale independently, cross-availability-zone transfer fees due to data replication, and other challenges persist whether you run Kafka locally or in the cloud.
Why Your Data Infrastructure Migration Project Will Fail (And How to Succeed)
If you work in tech long enough, you’ll inevitably find yourself in the middle of a migration project—probably more often than you’d like.
“We should all use Teradata!” Migrate.
“Actually, Snowflake is the future!” Migrate.
“Wait, let’s go all-in on Iceberg and Databricks!” Migrate.
It’s a never-ending cycle. In fact, migration is such a core part of the industry that Databricks recently acquired BladeBridge just to help them make migrations easier.
End Of Day 172
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Great collection of content! I really liked the third one about saying no. While we can master all the technical aspects, it's the business relationships that are really important IMO.