Leading with Data

As a CDO, showing leadership the impact your work has on the business is critical. Data-driven business outcomes are essential to the future of your role, as well as the future of the company.

So, it’s best to demonstrate your effectiveness right off the bat. To do that, though, takes a few insights.

In this episode, Shwetank Kumar — CDO at Freedom Financial Network and Founder of Bayesian — shares expert tips for data leaders demonstrating their impact on businesses. Plus, we talk about…

- Best hiring practices for a data team

- How Shwetank’s academic past informs his role in business

- The challenges of experimentation at companies with a lot of red tape

- The future of AI and open source technologies

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

Data alone can’t do anything.

It’s up to you to ask questions, make judgements, and have a human approach to make creative, data-informed decisions.

Elissa Fink, Former CMO of Tableau, joins Leading with Data on this episode to break down data-informed decision making and help listeners understand how to grow this powerful skill. In this episode, we discuss:

-How to make data more human and accessible

-Translating data into creative decision making

-Changing behaviors and habits around data

-How she used data-informed decisions to grow Tableau from millions to billions in revenue

For more information, check out Leading with Data or connect with us on LinkedIn.

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to Leading with Data on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

As AI & machine learning software continues to get smarter, the field of personalized recommendations is only going to continue to grow.

But just how far will it go? If you think of a nine-inning baseball game, we’re likely somewhere in the third inning, meaning there is still a lot of game left to play.

So what advancements are coming, and how do we navigate the world of data?

In this episode of Leading With Data, Michael Schrage, Research Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, talks all about the future of recommendation, as well as his new book, Recommendation Engines.

In addition to his role at MIT, Michael is also a visiting fellow at the Imperial College Business School of Innovation & Leadership, as well as an author of multiple books, including his most recent publication, Recommendation Engines.

In this episode, we discuss:

-The motivation behind Michael’s latest book, Recommendation Engines

-The future of data aggregation and why we’re just getting started with advanced recommendation analytics

-The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and why that is more important than any sale you can make in the short term

-What causes most businesses to fail when it comes to digital transformation

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

It’s no secret that traditional media outlets are undergoing an evolution.

And with advertising revenue streams shifting from print to digital…

With no shortage of opportunities to spend digital ad dollars, advertisers need access to performance data otherwise they may go somewhere else.

That’s one of the reasons why behind every news story, there’s a data story.

In this episode of Leading With Data, Stephen Weis, Executive Vice President of Digital Revenue and Talent Development at the Houston Chronicle, shares the many ways their team uses data storytelling to drive revenue in a shifting media landscape.

Stephen is a Digital Media executive with 20 years of experience leading digital content, marketing, and sales teams.

He’s had significant leadership roles with several media organizations spearheading the digital transformation of traditional media organizations.

In this episode, we discuss:

-Why traditional media relies on data more than ever to generate revenue

-The role data plays in communicating the value of digital advertising, especially to smaller partners

-How to create consistency in data storytelling across a large organization

-Why the most valuable technologies are the ones that save you time

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

Is your marketing team data-driven?

They have data. They have the software.

Yet, most marketing teams tend to focus on vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are more about justification than truth.

It’s our job as data leaders to empower them with the metrics that matter.

That’s just one of the many insights Kam Lee, drawing upon a wealth of experience as Chief Marketing Data Scientist at Finetooth Analytics, shares in the latest Leading With Data Podcast.

Over the course of his 14-year career, Kam Lee has built scalable systems that synthesized complex data into actionable, highly-personalized customer journeys.

By employing marketing intelligence, he powers optimization at scale to discover the best-case scenarios that lead to winning sales opportunities.

In this episode, Kam explains:

-The role of a Chief Marketing Data Scientist

-The difference between your ideal customer and your actual buyer based on data

-Customer segmentation informed my machine learning (ML)

-The problem with vanity metrics

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

You may think you need to be an analyst to tell a great story through data.

But, the truth is: Everyone can author a compelling data story.

As data leaders, it’s our job to empower our stakeholders to do so.

And that’s exactly what Maggie Remynse, Assistant Vice President - Enterprise Data Consultant II at M&T Bank, does by training her whole organization in the basics of data storytelling.

In this episode, Maggie walks us through:

- The benefits of being a “data translator”

- The key distinction between a report and analytics

- How M&T Bank is gamifying data storytelling through training

Maggie Remysnse brings the same drive that helped her become a world-renowned pickleball player to her work as a “data person”.

She is passionate about bringing companies to their next phase with the newest emerging technologies.

In her current role at M&T Bank, she has been a part of many different projects that all have one thing in common: bring people together with data.

Fun fact: She is currently ranked top 15 in the world by pickleball global.

Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

Pickleball Instagram

Find Maggie on LinkedIn

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

If you want to create a data-informed culture at your company, you need 3 things:

(1) Diversity of thought and a diverse team.

(2) Democratized knowledge of the data and how to act on it.

(3) And everyone aligned to a stake in the outcome.

That’s what Juan Riojas has learned in his career and in his current role as CDO at Rackspace. As Chief Data Officer at Rackspace, Juan is responsible for enterprise-wide data strategy, management, and analytics to meet the need of the business through time to insight.

Prior to Rackspace, Juan worked for Informatica building their inaugural Data Office and has held various executive leadership roles at Gogo, Dell, and Accenture.

This week he joins Cassidy to discuss:

- How building a diverse team led to a stronger data culture at Rackspace and the framework behind how you can do the same thing

- Why everyone knowing the data is the only way to compete on customer experience

- Why everyone needs a stake in the outcome

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

The bigger the business, the bigger the data challenges.

In order to be the top data consultant at an international healthcare enterprise, it helps to take a tool agnostic approach. That’s what Nandu Patil, Sr. Analytics Consultant at CVS Health, does.

Nandu joins us on the show today to discuss…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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

Being interviewed by your boss on a podcast?!

That’s exactly what happened when Brent Silberman, Revenue Operations Manager at Narrative Science, joined Cassidy on this week’s episode of Leading with Data.

Also known as the “Data Poet”, learn from Brent’s experience as a one-man data team presenting analytics to everyone across our organization - from the go-to-market and product teams all the way up to our executive leadership.

We discuss:

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

How can data inform rapid growth?

Last week, Cassidy sat down to talk about this exact topic with Jeremy von Halle and Jessica Watts, co founders of Mud City, a sales and operations agency.

Prior to starting Mud City, they worked together as go-to-market VPs at a fast-growing company called Jellyvision.

And like Cassidy mentioned in their episode intro, due to their time at Jellyvision and it's impressive growth trajectory they're considered "celebrities" here in Chicago.

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