From Company Vision to Data Stand Up
How do you and your data team generate value for your organization through analytics? How do you make sure that what you and your team are working on is the most important thing for the organization? If you manage a data team or work within one, you’re probably used to these questions in some shape or form. They may be asked like “How do you prioritise work?”, “what value has that dashboard delivered?”. They sound like simple questions but due to how data teams are often set up in a business and the expectations they come with, sometimes they are not.
This blog post talks about why it’s important to have a steel thread from overall company strategy right through to your daily work and ensure everything you and your team works on is tied to the company goals and therefore adding value. I call this, From Vision to Stand Up.
From Vision to Stand-up: Why is it important?
The first reason is that it should be Motivating. It’s important that people can feel pride in what they are building and understand the impact it can have on the business. People need to feel and understand that their contribution matters. The more clearly people can see how their model, their dashboard, their piece of analysis can impact the business and help it meet its mission statement the more value and purpose people and teams will feel. It should also help people with their careers – if you can clearly link your work back to the company mission and demonstrate its value then you should be rewarded for it whether that’s through promotions, pay rises or the often forgotten “thank you” or “great work”. This loops back round to driving motivation across an ambitious team.
Secondly, it helps ensure Clarity in day to day decisions – understanding the company mission helps everyone ensure that they and their team are taking the most valuable tickets into sprints and prioritizing them accordingly. Your sprint should be prioritized based on the highest value work and not who shouts the loudest. The greater clarity everyone has the easier it is to have conversations with stakeholders and colleagues on prioritizing work into a data sprint. Perhaps you have a Product Owner or a Manager who decides this.. I’m sure they’d appreciate the input and support.
Finally, it supports the idea of allowing everyone in Thinking bigger – it enables strategic thinking from the top right to the bottom of the organisation. How does my work fit in with X project or objective? Would it makes sense of we added Y feature to the dashboard because that could add more value? If we really care about Z, why don’t we build a model to predict when customers are most likely interested in A? By enabling your teams to think bigger you should start to generate new use cases from across your team not just from management, leadership or execs… these people are also likely to take into account things like feasibility too.
From Vision to Stand-up: What is it?
As above, I see this Vision to Stand up as a steel thread. It must be clear, explicit and easy to follow for everyone in the organization. It my experience it looks something like the below:
1. Company Mission
2. Specific Business functions strategy (e.g. IT strategy, Marketing Strategy, Operations strategy, Data Strategy)
3. Team strategy and goals (E.g. Data Science team goals, Campaign analytics team goals, etc.)
4. Sprint Planning and retros if working in SCRUM
5. Daily Stand Up
Each step should link one to the other. A Business functions strategy needs to align to the overall mission of the firm, and a teams goals need to link back up to their business functions strategy, each sprint planning needs to take a team closer to its goals and each stand up is an opportunity to discuss very practically how we can get there. This is the steel thread and it may sound obvious but ask yourself how long it would take to see and access all 5 of these at your organisation, how interlinked they are and what % of your team could talk you through the whole thread?
To help with this I like to build artefacts for each step. These are what mine look like and how they link to each step.
1. Company Mission: This is a simple link to your companies website but it can also be something you print out and have in your area of the office or at the top of your confluence/ documentation pages. They are likely to be very short, succinct statements. The goal here is to make it accessible.
2. Specific Business functions strategy (e.g. IT strategy, Marketing Strategy, Operations strategy): This is most likely in some form of PowerPoint from your leadership team. Making this available to the team on Confluence or a sharepoint is important.. taking 30 minutes to talk your function through the slides at the start of the year is unlikely to stick in the memory.. people need to be able to easily revisit. Also, your strategy may flex through the year and these updates should be shared.
3. Team strategy and goals (E.g. Data Science team goals, Campaign analytics team goals, etc.): This level should be the most practical so far in the thread. Whereas the above may have things like “Cloud First” or “Data at the heart” your team need to see really practically what that means so when they are in sprint planning they can make sure it happens. Artefacts I like at this stage are:
a. Team goals – What does success look like? Tell your team. Is it an ML model in production, is it a % increase in conversion, is it data migrated to the cloud? The more they know they more they can help!
b. Development roadmap – When do you plan to do what? This isn’t an attempt to make this a waterfall project rather a show of intent on when we plan or expect to be working on certain goals. Mine tend to be clear for the quarter ahead and then far looser for the following quarters.. its not something set in stone but its something your team can look at and say.. “we don’t have any of X in the next sprint.. is that right?!”
c. North stars and Big Hairy Goals – What’s the big ambition? What should the team aspire to? Help your team see what excellence can look like.. inspire and motivate.
4. Sprint Planning and retros if working in SCRUM: There are many approaches to sprint planning but to keep this simple and to illustrate the Vision to Stand up point.. my view is that if you have the above artefacts then your team can one go into sprint planning with their own views on what should be in sprint and they can reflect on what the team commit to at the end of sprint planning and ask if that feels right and takes the team closer to its goals? (and therefore, the company to its mission) Sprint planning is usually captured in a tool like Jira or Trello.
5. Daily Stand Up: Talk about your sprint, keep it relevant and make sure you don’t look at each ticket as a .. ticket. If the above can help anything, its seeing the ticket as an enabler to your teams goals and the company mission. It’s so important you don’t let your team get to the stage where a ticket just feels like the next one coming off the conveyor belt. Graduate data engineer.. you’re not just landing data from Salesforce to the data lake, you’re helping connect our sales teams work to the rest of our organisation. Data scientist, you’re not building a XGBoost model to determine feature importance, you’re helping your marketing team identify the right people to speak to about a new product. By having these things in mind you’ll change the thought process from “robot must get X done” to “I need to think about how to solve this problem and does that feature really make sense built like this even though technically and statistically it does?”
And that’s it. A simple Vision to Stand up framework that can help everyone from Grads to Execs see how work rolls up to meet the company mission. For an Exec it can help demonstrate that you and your team are focussing on the right challenges and opportunities, for team members you are ensuring they think about the challenge and opportunity and not just the ticket or task. This is motivating and should lead to a successful analytics team building impactful analytics products.
