The Art of Execution: Making Things Happen as a Data Leader

If you’ve just been put in charge of a data team, you’ll be given some time to understand the lay of the land.

However, eventually, you need to start to make things happen.

And when it comes to leading data teams, progress doesn’t just happen. Usable data insights in whatever format doesn’t just happen.

Don’t get me wrong, you can spend weeks if not months doing tasks. However, no progress or impact can be made.

So when I say making things happen, I mean driving meaningful change in the business that benefits the business.

This is obviously something that generalizes beyond just data leaders, but I really wanted to dig into how to make things happen as a data leader.

In my experience, these leaders don’t yell, they don’t rule in fear, and, in fact, most will lead by example and happily get things done if that’s what it means to move the business forward.

There is an art to just getting things done. Not spending so much time planning and trying to figure out the perfect path forward that the actual thing that needs to get done never happens. 

In this article, I wanted to talk about some traits I have seen from data leaders who actually get things done.

Focus on Fewer But Better Ideas

If you’ve ever led or just been part of a data team, you know there are always far more ideas of what to do with data than your team has time to even get started with.

You just had a new director who thinks it’ll be easy to integrate AI into ten different workflows.

The CEO wants to use a new tool built by their friend and you have endless ad-hoc requests being demanded of you.

At the end of the day, you can only do so much. Your team only has certain skills and so much time in a day. 

In my experience, data teams (and let’s be clear, individuals) get more done by focusing on a few key projects vs. constantly context-switching. 

On top of focusing on fewer ideas, your goal should also be to find better and better ideas. Ones that can have a large impact on your company.

Shachar Meir an ex-Director Of Data Engineering at Facebook recently shared a story from his experience when he was working closely with Vish Agashe who at the time was the VP of Data Engineering(He his now the SVP Of Data at Atlassian).

After Shachar presented several initiatives to Vish, he got this response:

"Shachar, these are all good ideas, but they are 10% ideas. They will give us small incremental improvements over the current state. That's nice, but I want you to give me 10x ideas – things that will be complete game-changers for our teams" - Vish Agashe

As you grow as a data leader and especially as you move up the corporate chain, you’ll continually have to re-learn what driving impact means. You’ll have to constantly look for more and more valuable projects that increase in scope and impact a wider range of people.

All that being said, even once you find a list of projects you now need to make it easy for others to actually complete them.

Create Clarity Out Of Chaos

There is rarely clarity around what projects should be done first and how they should be done.

This can come in the form of the business not knowing exactly what would be most valuable for the data team to take on or perhaps teams just not having a clear next step.

And of course the dreaded “the business wants everything now” factor. But it’s your job to figure out what is actually valuable for the team to take on. 

Here are some points to consider as you are trying to provide your leadership and data team with clarity.