Webinar Highlights: Using Data to Drive Impact

What we've landed on at Symmetric Tree of Late, you'll kind of see it kind of some examples of of how stakeholders will come in and and, you know, be able to decide for themselves or see for themselves what's going wrong and then obviously also help us as data scientists dive into things. So I I wanna reclaim my ownership. I'm gonna reclaim my place. You know? If I wanna sit at the table, I wanna influence. I wanna I wanna maximize my impact. I wanna maximize my team's impact. That's all on me. We're the ones who are sort of like, okay. You want us to own this? We'll own it. We'll own it end to end, and this is how we're gonna drive things forward. This needs to align to our organizational structure, metric ownership, and the way we go about doing implementation of change. The first instance of building this tree is for the company, but it was meant to be operational for the data team. And so that's also why we made a conscious choice to choose metrics that were very easily understandable. But, of course, what that means practically to different people around the business is a very different thing. It was hard. You know? It's just sort of, like, on a day to day basis. You're being pulled as leader in this much on data, but everywhere. You can be looking at a thousand things and really not be looking at anything at the same time. We'd kind of hacked together some nice looking dashboards, but, ultimately, we didn't have much visibility into many things. We quickly ballooned into this phase where we had almost too much data. Sometimes, you know, being data people, our instinct is sort of like, let's ignore that feeling and look at the numbers. But I think in this particular case, we really do need to just lean into the feeling and be like, if this feels not great, then it's probably not great. There's something wrong. Data has typically been a sort of sub team or a support team that people go to, and then their expectation is that they the data team just answers. And that is extremely problematic because, actually, all the knowledge sits on the data team. And so you're asking the data team to simply be servants in some sense. That I remember early in my career, that was exactly what it felt like. Yeah. The problem with not having that structure, and we're not giving ourselves that structure. And for myself, this is exactly right as leader as well as, I know that Matt had this experience on the ground. Right? As a leader, I don't want my people to burn out, one. Two, I don't want myself to burn out. How can I give myself focus? How can I give my team focus? And how can we therefore also give the business focus? If the data team doesn't know what's going on in business, then how can anyone ask?