Technical and Leadership Articles

During a recent visit to the grocery store I stood in the checkout line, placing my items onto the conveyor belts as fast as the cashier could scan my items.  As I watched her scan one of my items and type into the keyboard, I bit down on my lip. I was holding back my unsolicited feedback, as I anti...

Throughout my career leading analytics teams at eBay, Amazon, GameStop, and a handful of other companies, I’ve seen a lot of data analysts overlook potential performance issues. Whether through SQL written directly against the database or through derived SQL from Tableau and Power BI dashboards, que...

Stakeholders frequently ask for data from analysts without providing context. Worse, with the increase in self-service tools, stakeholders are drawing their own conclusions with data, even though they lack the proper understanding and training to use the data. These conclusions are then used to make...

Most analytics leaders put self-service analytics at the top of their list of items on their annual roadmap, but they never seem to talk the potentially disastrous implications of creating self-service tools. Enabling self-service analytics sounds straight forward where data engineering teams wor...

Early in my career in the analytics field I started to become inundated with task request from stakeholders.  I felt overwhelmed and confused at times by what my stakeholders were asking for.  There were already countless dashboards and metrics, yet I was receiving more request to produce additional...

If you’re like most people in the world, you probably want to grow and improve your skills.  And somewhere along your journey, someone has probably suggested having a mentorship to help you improve. 

What typically occurs is that you’ll be introduced to another co-worker, put a meeting on the calen...

In this post I’m going to share some best practices for formatting SQL that I’ve learned and used over the last 20 years. Many of these tips are things that I’ve collected along the way out of frustration with inheriting code, needing to perform updates, chasing down bugs, and performing code review...

Welcome back to Part 7 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. In parts 1–5, we covered a number of challenges that analytics organizations face and in part 6, we covered a comprehensive solution. In this part, we’ll discuss how to implement the solutions within your organization. But for this ...

Welcome to Part 6 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. So far, we’ve discussed:

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the specific problems that individuals an...

Welcome to Part 5 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this part, we’ll be covering a few issues surrounding the usage of tables and views.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common ...

We’ve arrived at Part 4 of Building a Better Analytics organization and in this part, we’re going to cover issues around visualizations within applications such as Power BI and Tableau since those are the two most common applications. In this article, We will highlight the complexity of working w...

If you’ve been following along, this is Part 3 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization — Code Challenges.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the sp...

Welcome back to my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the specific problems that individuals and teams face
Part ...

Welcome to Part 1 of my 7-part series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this series we’ll be discussing how to create a connected analytics world to help you move faster, with fewer bugs, and less headaches. In this article, I’ll cover a background of the analytics landscape and common...

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been consistently working in the tech space and I’ve worked as an individual contributor and a manager with 6 different companies. I started out in software quality assurance engineering, wrote various applications, and later moved into analytics roles. At each of tho...

Over the last 10 years dashboards have become a crucial asset in the analytics space. Stakeholders want dashboards built for limitless reasons, analysts and managers rely on them for daily insights, and the dashboard vendors (such Tableau and PowerBI) assert the power, ability, and potential of thes...

Throughout my career I’ve seen a number of different analytics teams and as you might expect, there are a handful of similarities and a handful of differences in how each team operates. But one thing that has consistently stuck out is how analysts are frequently hired, viewed, and utilized within an...

Recently I was mentoring an individual (early in his career) and he asked me a question: “What makes an analytics project a good project?” I thought that this was a really good question and worth talking about because the answer impacts individuals that are working on existing projects as well as in...

With the Super Bowl just days away and Tom Brady’s retirement announcement being made public, I felt that this would be a good time to discuss how teams and individuals are built. Leveraging of course, some stories from Tom Brady, his career, and football teams.

I have a question for you. Does a ba...