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I've heard this happen in a lot of places — companies want to be "data-driven", but then leadership simply ignores the data. I think being data-driven is someth

I've heard this happen in a lot of places — companies want to be "data-driven", but then leadership simply ignores the data. I think being data-driven is something that is built into company culture, or otherwise it's too easy to just ignore the results and ship. The place I currently work is data-driven (perhaps to a fault). Every change is wrapped behind an experiment and analyzed. Engineers play a major role in this process (responsible for analysis of simple experiments), whereas the data org owns more thorough, long-term analysis. This means there are a significant number of people invested in making numbers go up. It also means we're very good at finding local maxima, but struggle greatly shipping larger changes that land somewhere else on the graph. Some of the best advice I've heard related to this is for leadership to be honest about the "why". Sometimes we just want to ship a redesign to eventually find a new maximum, even through we know it will hurt metrics for a while.

mumblemumble 6y ago
Imagine what it must be like for the senior leadership of an established company to actually become data-driven. All of a sudden the leadership is going to consent to having all of their strategic and tactical decision-making be questioned by a bunch of relatively new hires from way down the org chart, whose entire basis for questioning all that expertise and business acumen is that they know how to fiddle around with numbers in some program called R? And all the while, they're constantly whining that this same data is junk and unreliable and we need to upend a whole bunch of IT systems just so they can rock the boat even harder? Pffft.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  I expect data driven leaders to be good at analyzing data. The rest are bullshitters.
- wokwokwok 6y ago
  That just reads as leaders who are high on cognitive bias. ...probably true to some extent, but not all leaders are self important ass hats who refuse to acknowledge they are simply “making decisions” not “making good decisions”. Most leaders are doing the best they can (often even very well) with the insights available to them. I don’t think most data teams are really at fault; they’re just doing what they’re told. The problem imo lies with the analysts who fail to do anything useful with the data they’re given, and demand constant changes from the data team because they want to deliver silver bullet results to the leadership level. That’s the problem layer; people who want to be important but have nothing to offer, whipping their data team to produce rubbish and then blaming them for either a) not producing anything fast enough or b) not making the numbers big enough.
- zonethundery 6y ago
  I've seen this happen in private industry and government, and is most of the reason analytics feels like a dead-end career if it is not the primary product of the firm. "Data science"/analytics groups are a cost center telling management things they do not want to hear, and disrupting management narrative (with receipts). There's no point to it; either you deliver "moneyball"-like opportunities that are ignored, or torture the data to fit existing narratives. In both cases, you eventually get stabbed by an experienced bureaucratic knife fighter.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
You give them tons of data and then all you hear is "I'm gonna have to go with mah gut on this one"
mistasteve 6y ago
Goodhart's law is a thing...

mumblemumble 6y ago

Imagine what it must be like for the senior leadership of an established company to actually become data-driven. All of a sudden the leadership is going to consent to having all of their strategic and tactical decision-making be questioned by a bunch of relatively new hires from way down the org chart, whose entire basis for questioning all that expertise and business acumen is that they know how to fiddle around with numbers in some program called R? And all the while, they're constantly whining that this same data is junk and unreliable and we need to upend a whole bunch of IT systems just so they can rock the boat even harder? Pffft.

lallysingh 6y ago
I expect data driven leaders to be good at analyzing data. The rest are bullshitters.
wokwokwok 6y ago
That just reads as leaders who are high on cognitive bias. ...probably true to some extent, but not all leaders are self important ass hats who refuse to acknowledge they are simply “making decisions” not “making good decisions”. Most leaders are doing the best they can (often even very well) with the insights available to them. I don’t think most data teams are really at fault; they’re just doing what they’re told. The problem imo lies with the analysts who fail to do anything useful with the data they’re given, and demand constant changes from the data team because they want to deliver silver bullet results to the leadership level. That’s the problem layer; people who want to be important but have nothing to offer, whipping their data team to produce rubbish and then blaming them for either a) not producing anything fast enough or b) not making the numbers big enough.
zonethundery 6y ago
I've seen this happen in private industry and government, and is most of the reason analytics feels like a dead-end career if it is not the primary product of the firm. "Data science"/analytics groups are a cost center telling management things they do not want to hear, and disrupting management narrative (with receipts). There's no point to it; either you deliver "moneyball"-like opportunities that are ignored, or torture the data to fit existing narratives. In both cases, you eventually get stabbed by an experienced bureaucratic knife fighter.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

You give them tons of data and then all you hear is "I'm gonna have to go with mah gut on this one"

mistasteve 6y ago

Goodhart's law is a thing...