Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
erikbern.com
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#2TLDR, refine your thoughts.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#3"This is basically a (somewhat cynical) depiction of things that may happen at a lot of companies early in the data maturity stage"
I don't think this is very cynical at all! Feels pretty accurate to me.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#4This is an incredibly valuable writeup. Great job.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#5> MBA types
I chuckled. Then cried, because at least his MBA types can use SQL. My MBA types use Excel.
OT: Good article. Like and agree with the push for centralizing data first, then building outwards so external teams can move towards self-service.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#6> MBA types I chuckled. Then cried, because at least his MBA types can use SQL. My MBA types use Excel. OT: Good article. Like and agree with the push for centralizing data first, then building outwards so external teams can move towards self-service.
Building a good process into your company to receive a query, execute it against a read-only database, and shovel the results back to the user as a CSV file will pay dividends and is, honestly, pretty trivial in most cases.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#7Done well (like here), The Goal like storytelling, is both educational and interesting.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#8Great article. The confusion about what team does what is priceless...yet so common!
To provide some sympathy for the folks already working there: you always replace systems well after you've overrun them.
When the ad hoc system works (consider that google spreadsheet at a time when there were three support people and perhaps a dozen customers) you're not going to decide to replace it with something more complicated. Then you're busy growing so you just keep the system going through sheer force of will. You only replace it when the effort is unbearable; at that point you say, frustratedly, "I wish we'd done this sooner."
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#9What would be the name of the position/profile of someone in charge of building the data warehousing architecture/ETL pipelines?
I my view, they need make sure the warehouse model is a correct representation of the business and that it can be leveraged to answer basic or not-so-basic questions using SQL. They also need to promote it's usage internally by ensuring it is accessible and easy to use and guide other team to a more data oriented mindset.
I feel that this is a specialised position not exactly similar to a developer, but every time I look for "data scientist" I get guys that want to do machine learning prediction models, which is not exactly the same stuff either.
Re: Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
#10> MBA types I chuckled. Then cried, because at least his MBA types can use SQL. My MBA types use Excel. OT: Good article. Like and agree with the push for centralizing data first, then building outwards so external teams can move towards self-service.
I'm an MBA type that studied math and computer science, and for a living programs distributed database solutions.
I chuckled too.