The Data Team Playbook: 50+ Resources For High-Performing Data Teams
Resources on culture, data infrastructure and more
Whether you’re an IC, manager, or director everyone plays a role in running a successful data team. But it can feel overwhelming learning all the skills required to keep a data team on track.
You can try to learn everything on the fly and by yourself but the more you can learn from others whether it be mentors, videos, books, articles, etc.
But there is still likely one problem.
🤔 Where To Start?
One of the problems we face in the world today isn’t a lack of information but too much information. So below I put together a list of books, articles, and videos that you should read or watch.
Now, there are still a lot of articles and pieces of content here. But I view this as more of the page of resources that you can return to when you have specific problems. Thus, I have broken this resource list down by problems vs by type of resources. Also, if you are looking for a community of other data leaders I have started one you can join today. It’s invite only so please fill out this form if you’d like to join.
Legend
Below the content is a mix of books, articles and videos and I wanted to give a legend to notify the reader which was which. The emojis listed below are said legend.
📚 Book
📝 Article
🎥 Video
New Manager - Making The Switch From IC
When you’re making the switch from IC to manager there are so many new challenges you’ll need to take on. That’s why this section contains mostly books because I believe there is a lot to cover and most of it can’t just be covered in a 1500 word article.
📚 The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by
📚 Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart
🎥 The Engineer to Manager Transition, by Former Twitter Director of Engineering David Loftesness
How To Help Your Team Grow In Their Career
One of the goals as a manager is to help the ICs you manage grow. Luckily, there is a ton of great content you can share with them. Below is a great list of mostly articles focused on helping individuals grow.
📝 How To Fast Track Your Career As An Engineer by
📝 Becoming A Better Data Engineer - Tips On Translating Business Requirements
📝 How to grow from a mid-level to senior Data Engineer by
📚 The Unspoken Truths for Career Success: Navigating Pay, Promotions, and Power at Work
Project Management
Now whether you’re the one managing the project or you just need a sense of how to help your team keep projects flowing, here are a few great pieces of content you can look through to improve your project management and estimations.
📝 Demystifying Project Estimation by
and
📝How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum by
Culture
I ended splitting culture and team organization and management(the section below) because they did feel different in terms of how they can impact your team. One is how the team is generally organized and the other is how the team feels and is driven.
📝 Inside Stripe’s Engineering Culture - Part 1
📝 Elevating Your Data Team: From Service Providers to Strategic Partners
📚 Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
📚 Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Team Organization
How teams are organized impact the way we communicate and operate. Below are several pieces of content that review the ways you can organize your teams.
📝 How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products
🎥 How To Manage Data Teams Successfully - Asking A Director Of Data Architecture And Governance
Talent Acquisition And Retention
Hiring and retaining talent is an important aspect of being a manager. You need to be able to assess candidates with varying skills and backgrounds as well as create an environment that makes employees want to stay.
📝 Retaining Software Engineers and Engineering Managers
📝 Hiring ONLY seniors is the worst policy in the software industry by
📝 Hiring an Engineering Manager
📝 Good Attrition, Bad Attrition for Software Engineers
🎥 Confessions from a Big Tech Hiring Manager: Tips for Software Engineering Interviews
Onboarding
When you do hire someone or when you start a new role its great to have a smooth onboarding process as well as a plan for your first 90 days. That’s why I picked the articles below that both review onboarding as well provide content for the employee who is just starting.
📝 How To Onboard by
📝 Onboarding to a New Company by
📝 Navigating Your First 90 Days in a Data Job: A Comprehensive Guide
Communication
It goes without saying that communication is a very valuable skill in any role. Even if you’re the most technical person, if you can’t communicate the goal of your work or help get other people on board your project will likely move slower or perhaps never even get started.
📝 How to make your team read your mind by
📝 Engineers' Guide to Feedback by
📝 If You Can Code, You Can Write! by
Influence
There are several great writers on
that focus heavily on influence. The reason is whether you’re an IC or a manager the ability to get buy-in from other teams or work with them to ensure that your project goes the right way is crucial. It can be the difference between your project and team moving forward or continuing to be stuck for the next 6 months.📝 Why Influence Without Authority Is a Vital Skill for Anyone
📝 Lesson #26: How to lead without being in management by
📚 Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
Templates And Guides
I’d actually love some more templates, so if you have any feel free to send them over!
Data Infrastructure
📝 Which cloud provider should be used when building a big data solution? by
📝 Optimizing Your Data Infrastructure Costs: How To Approach It And Common Issues
📝 Netflix Tech Stack by
📝 Tech Stack Evolution at Levels.fyi
📚 Fundamentals of Data Engineering: Plan and Build Robust Data Systems by
and📚 Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications by
🎥 Walking Through Data Infrastructure Migrations - With Real-Life Examples
🎥 What is Data Pipeline | How to design Data Pipeline ? - ETL vs Data pipeline
Other
This last section is a mix of articles that range from focusing on how to calculate productivity or perhaps how not to, as well as some other pieces of content I didn’t feel like had a specific category.
📝 Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey by
📝 The Trap of Tying Your Identity to Your Job Title. by
🎥 How To Drive Value With Data Science - Managing Data Science Teams In Healthcare
🎥 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 with
🎥 Structuring Data Teams And Self Serve Analytics With Ethan Aaron
What Now?
Ok, that was a lot of content!
And in no way do I think you need all of it…right now. But I believe you’ll likely need this article in the future. So bookmark it and when you have one of these problems come back and find the article or video that could help you through it.
Also, I’d love to grow this list with more valuable content. So if you think there is another category that should be included or content I missed, then feel free to comment below!
Thanks for reading!
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Join My Data Engineering And Data Science Discord
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Articles Worth Reading
There are 20,000 new articles posted on Medium daily and that’s just Medium! I have spent a lot of time sifting through some of these articles as well as TechCrunch and companies tech blog and wanted to share some of my favorites!
Idempotency Keys: How PayPal and Stripe Prevent Duplicate Payment
Have you ever tried to make a failed payment again and suspected that you payed twice? Payment Service providers such as PayPal or Stripe use a method to handle multiple requests for same payment: Idempotency Keys. Let’s increase our domain knowledge by examining this method together!
How I Left Facebook to Forge My Path in Data Consulting
Hi, fellow data practitioners, directors, scientists, and all-around amazing readers 👋 ! The Seattle Data Guy here! Today’s article will focus on talking about what it takes to start your own independent consulting company. If you are considering starting your own consulting company soon and you’d like even more guidance, then you can check out the
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There's nothing wrong with wanting to make friends and do great work, but recognizing these tendencies and setting appropriate boundaries will help you be a better colleague and leader.
Thanks for sharing.
Wonderful list. Thanks a lot.