Leading with Data

Are you a runner if you spend a ton on running gear, only to run 10 miles at the end of every quarter?

Probably not, right?

So, why do so many companies claim to be data-driven, when they do the exact same thing with their data?

We need to improve our data cultures — and we do it with storytelling.

In this episode, the tables are turned as Kate Strachnyi, Founder of DATAcated, interviews our very own Nate Nichols, Chief Scientist, and Cassidy Shield, VP of Marketing at Narrative Science, about how to get a real data culture going in your organization.

What we talked about:

-The 3 components of data storytelling

-Why stories are how our species understands insights

-Why today’s technology leaves too much room for interpretation

-How we create a stronger, data-driven culture

-How to tell a data story to a business executive

-How Lexio works and its use cases

Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

Let Your People Be People

Lexio Interactive Demo

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

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How do you make transformation a career?

By taking risks and seizing opportunities.

Just ask Franklin Ortiz, Finance & Transformation Manager at Airbus, who has grabbed hold of every opportunity to propel his career forward — from joining academia to leading an employee resource group.

Franklin is an innovative and dependable leader who focuses on implementing finance and project management principles to align with organizational strategic objectives.

Franklin is skilled in financial controlling, inclusion & diversity, employee engagement, program and project management, business transformation, mergers & acquisitions (M&A), infrastructure project management and international government contracting.

What we talked about:

-Franklin’s career trajectory

-Why taking risks is the only route to success

-How academia can make you a more well-rounded leader

-Why generalists succeed in transformation careers

-The challenge and reward of leading an employee resource group

-Why transparency makes a great leader

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

Most companies start off as innovative, because they invent and implement something novel and disruptive.

Over time, although innovation typically continues, it gets harder to disruptively innovate, which is dangerous, because if you’re not disrupting your industry, someone else eventually will.

It’s something Marcus Weldon works on day in and day out as CTO at Nokia and President of Bell Labs.

He joins Cassidy in the latest episode of Leading with Data to share everything you need to know to be on the winning side of the disruptive innovation game.

What we talked about:

-What disruptive innovation is

-Why your company should aim to disrupt

-Why innovation is not just about invention but also implementation

-Why a disruptive innovation needs to be 10x better than the incumbent solution

-Why you should aim to spend 1% of your revenue on innovation

-Why buy-in matters for innovation

-How diversity of everything leads to the most disruptive innovation

-The power of storytelling to shape innovation

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

Gut instinct and data-driven approaches are often seen in opposition to one another.

But if you want to succeed in your business, you need to marry them.

And analytics is one of the best ways to do it.

In this episode, Cassidy speaks with Wendy Zajack, Faculty Director & Assistant Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies, about how to use analytics to get the best of both worlds — data and instinct — and increase your marketing success.

Wendy is a seasoned marketing professional turned educator, bringing knowledge, creativity, and strategic thinking to life in the classroom to change the marketing and communications industry for the better. She is interested in finding ways to infuse technology to enhance learning and comprehension, leveling the playing field between geographies and genders.

She is currently overseeing the development and strategy behind the program curriculum, hiring and recruiting of faculty for two masters of professional studies programs at Georgetown University — Integrated Marketing Communications and the Design Management Communications program.

What we talked about:

-How COVID is leading to innovation

-Why you need to find your customer where they live

-How analytics lets you prove your gut with data

-The advantages of a multi-generational marketing team

-The value of viewpoint diversity

-How to hire more diverse employees

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

Most business leaders want certainty — you spend X amount of dollars on marketing, you get X in profit.

Often, however, the best results come not from certainty, but experimentation.

Maybe we should think a little more like scientists.

That’s something Talin Koutnouyan, Vice President of Research & Analytics at Influential, has learned in her career. She joins Cassidy in the latest episode to share the secrets to building a culture of experimentation.

They discuss:

-Why all organizations, big and small, are similar in their pursuit of growth (and mindshare)

-Why experimentation is so important in business and marketing

-How to cultivate an experimentation culture

-The timeless business and marketing principles that don’t require testing

-The 4 skills needed to lead an experimentation culture

-Why you need to focus on value, not your product

-How to be more intentional about your experimentation

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

This is a story about more people having access to more data.

It's also a story about a man who was at the right place at the right time to spot an opportunity from the outside. He saw a handful of visionary entrepreneurs who changed the way analytics was done. Back then, it looked terrible. Today, it's his superpower.

That man is Tristan Handy, and he's the founder and CEO of Fishtown Analytics. Tristan joined us on the podcast today to talk about the modern data stack, what it looks like, and how to implement it.

In this episode, we discuss:

-What the modern data stack is and how it replaced the old-school, less-scalable environment

-Where the transform happens in the modern data stack

-Why this type of change is so tough on companies

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

So many claim they’re data-driven these days, the word has lost its meaning.

So, how do you go beyond the buzzword and achieve a truly data-driven approach?

Even trickier: How can you take a data-driven approach before you even have the data?

These are questions Jaclyn Borgiel answers every day in her role as Group Product Manager here at Narrative Science. She joins Cassidy today to share her approach to answering them, and many others that arise, in the realm of product management.

Jaclyn is passionate about growing products and teams, and building their long-term strategies to reach full potential. She has had a diverse mix of experiences across B2B, B2C, high growth, and mature products, but is still an action-oriented problem solver at heart.

She has worked as a product leader, analyst, product marketer, and strategic and operational expert — following challenges and purposeful missions, while building great teams.

Jaclyn was drawn to Narrative Science’s mission to democratize data for all. After her training in tech at a Silicon Valley Strategy and Analytics rotational program, Narrative Science was the ideal next step on her quest to finally make data work for every business person and scale analytical teams across industries.

In this episode, we discuss:

-Jaclyn’s career trajectory that led to a passion for product management

-What product management is and why it matters

-How to make “data-driven” more than a buzzword

-How to move past vanity metrics and find success metrics

-How to bring a data-driven mindset from the outset, when you have no data

-Why intuition comes through experience and observation

-What excites Jaclyn about her work on Lexio at Narrative Science

-Why data storytelling should be simple and actionable

-What the future looks like for data storytelling and product management

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

Every company wants to make their products stronger and many understand how data storytelling can help them behind the scenes.

But great storytelling is compelling and human. So, often, sharing those insights with your customers is one of the best ways to improve your product.

And nowhere is that more true than in sports.

In this episode, Brendan Morley, Senior Technical Digital Product Manager at PGA Tour, breaks down how to use data storytelling behind closed doors as well as right out in the open.

Brendan is a talented and accomplished Technical Product Manager with progressive responsibility leading digital initiatives for the PGA TOUR's core group of products.

As a perceptive and innovative problem solver, Brendan has developed a number of V1 products.

He is able to see complex business needs and processes clearly and form solutions to intractable problems with customer-focused passion.

What we talked about:

-The growing popularity of golf

-The products PGA Tour offer and how data storytelling improves them

-The wide range of data use for PGA Tour

-The difference between data and data storytelling

-How data is shaping the future of the fan experience

-How PGA Tour sees scale from a technology perspective

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading with Data in your favorite podcast player.

The art of data storytelling isn’t just a nice-to-have function in your business.

Effectively communicating data can mean the difference between being honest with regulators and lying to them.

And it can even mean the difference between life and death.

That realization is one Stephen Harris, Corporate Vice President, Global Head of Data Science & Growth Analytics at Microsoft, learned the hard way as he contemplated whether he or others working on the data at the time could have prevented the Space Shuttle Columbia crash.

Data storytelling is your voice. And the right stories are how you get the outcomes you want.

Stephen’s 27 years of professional experience are filled with numerous successes. He also promotes transparency in his failures and mistakes as lessons learned and toolkits to accelerate growth.

He is an energetic and results-driven leader, able to navigate with precision to assimilate and influence a net positive change in any environment. His insatiable thirst to discover, build understanding, share and foster collaborative dialogue fuels his passion to identify and solve complex business issues.

Stephen brings a broad and deep set of strategic and tactical approaches built from his experiences with highly competitive multinational fortune 100/500/1000 corporations, management consulting, tech and public sector.

He has successfully led through local, national, and global crisis, (9/11, Space Shuttle Columbia, Katrina) including recent successes with the global COVID-19 pandemic and America’s corporate response and action plan to social injustice for the Black Community.

In this episode, we discuss:

-How Stephen’s personal life experience has informed and guided his professional experience

-Stephen’s experience with Space Shuttle Columbia

-The problems with obscure and fragmented data

-Tips for aspiring data leaders

-How to build a culture willing to receive change

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading With Data in your favorite podcast player.

Technology and data are powerful tools that allow your business to see into the future.

But prediction sets by themselves don’t solve business needs.

They need to get into the hands of the decision makers to be actionable.

That’s the number one motivator for Steve Griswold, Senior Data Scientist at US Foods, in his role as a full stack developer in a large enterprise.

Steve has a stellar background in programming and an amazing ability to understand complex and robust datasets by meticulously breaking down each portion of the project and returning a highly efficient program that achieves phenomenal results.

His successes include enabling a small, six-person team to review 200,000+ images in just a few weeks and automating 20 weekly tasks to allow more time for business analysis and solution enhancement.

In this episode, we discuss:

-Steve’s background, including how he found out he was already a data scientist

-Common misconceptions leaders have when it comes to data science

-The ins and outs of full stack development

-How US Foods approached, and structured, its data science program

-How a data scientist tests hypotheses

-Why leaders need to allow their data scientists time for learning and experimentation

If you want to hear more, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Leading With Data in your favorite podcast player.