How Data Leaders Can Drive Alignment

So I don't think there's a perfect answer to driving alignment and collaboration across teams, but there are definitely tactics that can help produce misunderstandings and help people work better together. I generally find the best place to start is with a shared understanding of the company's strategic goals and how each team's work connects to the company's growth model. So if different teams are measuring success in different ways, your collaboration is gonna fall apart. And as a data leader, you're uniquely positioned to help visualize those goals and drive that connection between teams. The second piece is around context. So sharing data without knowing how it's going to be used or even what it's going to be used for just leads to a thousand dashboards that nobody touches. And when you combine the context with the insights you can actually craft a story that brings people into alignment with the goals that you set initially. And lastly, getting an agreement on the path forward. So that means clarity on who's doing what, what does success look like, and how we're going to measure progress together. And sometimes you've just got to follow Amazon's principle of disagree and commit. Your sanity is worth way more than going in circles with someone who needs to see for themselves what you already know to be true.