Elevating Your Data Team: From Service Providers to Strategic Partners

It’s that time of year again.

When CEOs, directors, and data teams start looking to plan out the following year.

It’s time to start putting together your data roadmap.

But where do you start?

How do you create a data strategy roadmap that focuses on what your team should be doing? 

Especially if you’re data team has found itself stuck in the data service trap. Simply providing data and dashboards when asked and never really becoming a strategic partner.

Now for some companies this is all that is needed. A service arm that provides some reports and numbers when asked. But if you’re team is either planning their current strategic data roadmap or wants to become a strategic partner, then now is the time to plan.

Over the past few weeks, I have been discussing the topic with several data leaders both on my Youtube Lives and in private, much of which has reinforced the methods I have picked up over the past decade.

Thus, I wanted to provide some tips to help those either in leadership positions or who want to break into these positions plan out their data roadmap for 2024.

Talk To People - Figure Out What They Need

In order to understand what is important to your end-users and business partners, you need to talk to people. I know, it's not everyone’s favorite thing to do in the tech world.

But when I talked with Ethan Aaron from Portable, he discussed how there wasn't a central data team when the company he had worked for got acquired. So suddenly, his new role was Head of BI. The first thing he found out as he went out and talked to teams to figure out what needed to be done was that marketing already had its own data tools, as did sales and operations. But the departments rarely shared data with each other, missing out on massive opportunities.

So one of the first major goals he realized needed to occur was centralizing the data to help allow users to have access to multiple data sets, reduce duplicate costs and work when it came to dashboards and reporting, and create a better alignment with data and the business.

All of which started with talking.

When I worked at Facebook, we’d spend time at the end of every half talking with our stakeholders to understand a few points:

• What problems they were dealing with

• What projects they were taking on

• What projects they’d be interested in our team taking on

But we didn’t just ask questions; we also would put together a deck to cover some of our past projects as well as what we had already thought about in terms of projects we could take on.

This provided a tool for everyone to review and be inspired by. You shouldn’t just go asking for work, but also, sometimes, your stakeholders might need some help crystalizing the work they should be taking on.

In the end, this whole process should get you a clear set of pain points and projects that teams want solved.

Find The Pain Points