Using the ikigai to find your data purpose
Tiankai Feng explains using ikigai-inspired Venn diagrams to align data projects with business goals, ensuring ethical, feasible, and exciting outcomes.

Transcript
Data purpose is basically a Venn diagram that was inspired by the ikigai. And for those who don't know what the ikigai is, right, that's like a diagram of finding your own purpose in your profession. Right? It's like what you're good at versus what the world needs versus what you can get paid for and what you're allowed to do. Right? Basically, all of these things together. And I basically adapted, and I thought about if you want to drive data and use data for the right things, then there's a similar Venn diagram too, which in my case means what is exciting to do, what is aligned with your business objectives, what is allowed to do, and what is feasible to do. Right? And excitement, always, we all have excitement. Right? Oh, we could do all these cool things with data. Let's do that. That needs to be then guided by what helps our business. Right? It cannot just be a random data use case, but something that actually helps what we wanna do as a business. What is allowed to do is, like, all of the ethical and compliance related requirements that are coming. We should not do something that's illegal or could hurt people. Right? And what's feasible to do is your own technological maturity. Right? Are we even able to pull this off with the technology we have, and do we have the right skill sets to be able to run this kind of advanced method? And it also implies that if you run through these four aspects, you cannot decide alone again. Right? You have to bring actually the right people in to help you justify and understand that this is possible or not. Does it fulfill that criteria or not? So when you then finally end up in the middle to say, we have now a use case that fulfills all the four aspects, the good thing is you already have talked to all of the stakeholders that are relevant for it. So it's also not gonna fail on its way. Right? You can run this, and it will most likely get to the end. And everyone will acknowledge the value of it because it was discussed before. It didn't catch anyone by surprise negatively.