Why Your Data Team Doesn't Have A Seat At The Table

And How To Fix It

Hi, fellow future and current Data Leaders; Ben here 👋

I recently had some great conversations with some data leaders who all started to discuss having a seat at the table. Some referenced how they watched prior leaders they worked for try to take the seat without earning it and how much of a disaster that was. So, I wanted to write about what I’ve learned and seen as data teams try to gain a strategic foothold inside the business.

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!

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Intro

A lot of data teams want a seat at the table without doing the work to earn it.

They want to be seen as strategic partners. They want influence. But they don’t always understand what actually drives the business.

If you can’t explain how your company makes money, what levers move the needle, or even give a basic overview of its history and context, why should leadership see you as anything more than a task taking organization?

We’ve spent years talking about how business leaders need to become more data-fluent. But not enough people are saying the quiet part out loud: data professionals need to become business-fluent.

How?

By putting in the effort. That means talking to stakeholders, learning how your industry works, understanding your company’s position in the market, and figuring out how data can push it forward. Someone has to bridge the gap between technical execution and business outcomes, and if you lead a data team, that someone is probably you.

The best data engineers, analysts, and scientists I’ve worked with didn’t wait around for executive approval.

They didn’t need permission to drive impact, they found the problems, solved them, and made sure the right people noticed.

It’s not easy. And it’s especially hard to connect the technical work we do with the business outcomes leadership actually cares about.

Ask Yourself - Could The Business Run Without You?

Here’s an important reality: any business that can afford to hire 3–6 people to run a data team and spend six figures on tooling is already doing well. That budget could easily be redirected to any number of initiatives with a clear ROI.

So why did they invest in you?

Seriously…pause and think about that.

Ideally, it’s because they believe data can help amplify what’s already working. That with the right insights, they can move faster, make smarter decisions, and outperform the competition.

But sometimes, the reason is a lot less flattering.

Sometimes, leadership hired a data team because everyone else was doing it. They read a LinkedIn post about being “data-driven,” and boom…now you’re here. In those cases, they don’t necessarily see you as a strategic partner. They see you as back-office support, like accounting.

Can you change that perception? Yes.

Will it be easy? Definitely not.

You’re working with an executive team whose default mindset is cost control, not finding new ways to loop data into strategy. You’ll need consistent wins. Over and over again. Only then will they start to see your team differently.

Now, let’s assume you do work for a company that wants your data team to succeed. A company that sees the potential.

Why, then, are you still struggling to get a seat at the table?

1) You Don’t Know How To Get Buy-In

It doesn’t matter what kind of leadership you have, whether they want you to be a strategic partner or they’re just going through the motions, you’re still the one who has to secure buy-in for your team’s work.

But leadership doesn’t greenlight every idea. You have to earn their attention. And that starts with understanding what they actually care about.

You might be obsessed with fixing the dbt repo, migrating to Iceberg, or optimizing your ETL.

But your CFO doesn’t care.

Your COO doesn’t care.

Your CEO definitely doesn’t care.

They care about:

• Hitting revenue targets

• Improving margins

• Reducing churn

• Launching faster

• Beating competitors

If your data project doesn’t clearly tie to one of those outcomes, it won’t get the attention, or funding, you’re hoping for.

So how do you get buy-in?

Sell the Outcome, Not the Architecture

If you want buy-in, stop leading with your tech stack.

Instead of pitching like this:

🚫 “We want to rebuild the pipeline using XYZ tech to improve freshness and observability.”

Say this instead:

✅ “Right now, the sales team is flying blind for six hours every day waiting on customer lists that are manually created. Not to mention, last week they told us they lost a deal because of this(tie into real things that happened). We can fix that in two weeks. It’ll make the daily forecasting meeting more accurate and reduce the time spent manually reconciling reports.”

Yes, your data team loves the idea of using the newest tools and building their own orchestration tool. But it’s not what is on the businesses mind.

Understand the Business - A Level Deeper

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating:

If you don’t understand the business, you can’t play a strategic role. And if you’re not playing a strategic role, why would you ever get a seat at the table?

At best, you’re a high-level IC. Maybe a people manager. But you’re not shaping direction—you’re reacting to it.

Want to know what “understanding the business” actually looks like?

When I talk to highly skilled data leaders, I’m always impressed by how quickly they can shift from technical details to the full context of their business. I recently spoke with a Data VP at a major telecom company, not only could they speak fluently about data, but they also had deep knowledge of:

• The history of telecom, including major turning points and key players

• How the underlying tech works, modems, networks, and signal types

• Their competitors and how their product positioning stacks up

That’s what I mean when I say to understand the business. Literally all of it.

Because when there’s a big shift in the market or a new tech on the horizon, they need someone who can interpret what that data means in context and recommend a direction.

If you can’t do that, you’ll always be the person someone else hands tasks to.

Deliver Quick Wins With What You Have

I was recently speaking with Lindsay Murphy, who shared a story about when she first started leading data teams. She asked for budget approval for Looker. At the time, contracts started at around $30k.

That’s a rounding error for a large enterprise, but at a startup, which is where Lindsay was working, it was a no.

So she got scrappy. She used a free data visualization tool and focused on delivering value quickly. That decision paid off.

Why? Because eventually, leadership started to love what her team was delivering but hated how they had to do it.

They’d say things like:

“We love the weekly reports, but why can’t we pull in other datasets?”

“Why is it so hard to filter or drill down into this dashboard?”

Now, when you come back and say:

“You know how you’re frustrated with X? If we use tool Y, that problem goes away.”
—you’re not making a cold pitch. You’re offering a fix to a problem they already feel.

But this doesn’t happen overnight. You have to earn that moment by proving value first, using whatever tools you already have.

Once you’ve got buy-in, and you’re starting to collect wins, you can start pushing for bigger projects.

But how?

2) Build Champions, Not Just Stakeholders

A stakeholder is someone you work with. A champion is someone who fights for your work when you're not in the room.

If you want to shift how your team is perceived, you need champions, internal allies who believe in your value and actively advocate for your work.

One framework I heard recently captures this well is the Stakeholder Matrix:

It helps you map out who your stakeholders are, how much influence they have, and who has the potential to become a champion.

Because here’s the thing: in most organizations, decisions aren’t made because one person says, “Let's do X”, unless that person is the CEO.

So, how do you build champions?

Start by deeply understanding their goals:

• What metrics do they care about?

• What are they on the hook to deliver this quarter?

• What’s broken in their workflow that they’ve just come to accept?

And beyond that, get to know them as people.

What do they care about outside of work? What motivates them? We’re all human, and showing genuine interest builds trust.

Then, help them look good.

Don’t wait for a ticket. Offer a proactive solution. Run a back-of-the-napkin analysis. Send a weekly report that saves them an hour. If your work makes their life easier or helps them hit a goal, they’ll remember it, and they’ll talk about it.

These relationships compound over time. And eventually, you’ll start hearing things like:

“We should loop in the data team, they really helped us last time.”

That’s when you know you’re shifting from a service team to a strategic partner.

3) Build Your Internal Marketing Muscle

Many data professionals struggle with internal marketing. They don’t want to “sell” their work. They hate the idea of self-promotion. And honestly, I get it.

But here’s the problem…

If no one knows what your data team is doing, no one will think it’s strategic.

Too many teams do great work in silence, heads down, shipping dashboards and models, while the rest of the org forgets they exist. Then, they’re surprised when leadership questions their value.

You can’t afford to be invisible.

You have to market your impact internally. And yes, that’s your job.

Here’s how to start:

• Create a monthly internal update - Share it via Slack or email. Call it "What Data Delivered" or "Insights That Moved the Needle." Have fun with it and keep it short, clear, and focused on outcomes.

• Do quick demos at cross-functional or all-hands meetings - People quickly forget what dashboards exist and what models were deployed. A 5-minute demo, even of something old, can spark interest and re-engagement.

• Highlight team wins and user stories - “The support team used to spend four hours a day pulling reports manually. Now it takes 10 minutes.” These stories stick.

• Track and share impact metrics:

  • Hours saved

  • Revenue influenced

  • Costs avoided

  • Decisions accelerated

• Give your team credit, loudly and often - Especially if you’re a team lead, make sure leadership knows where the value is coming from.

Remember: visibility drives perception. Perception drives influence. If you want a seat at the table, people need to see you there.

Final Thoughts

Getting a seat at the table is hard. Keeping it is even harder.

I’ve seen plenty of teams grow fast, only to become the architect of their own collapse. The bigger they got, the harder it became to justify their existence. Value didn’t scale with size, and eventually, leadership pulled back.

So keep asking yourself (and your team):

• Are we aligned with top company priorities?

• Are we solving today’s problems or just optimizing old ones?

• Are we surfacing new insights that actually change how people operate?

And above all, remember: your tools, dashboards, and pipelines are just a means to an end.

The end is business impact.

As always, thanks for reading!

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In this blog post, we’ll highlight the unique challenges we faced migrating from Enzyme to RTL, how LLMs excel at solving this particular type of challenge, and how we structured our migration tooling to run an LLM-driven migration at scale.

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End Of Day 177

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