Places where data is the product are categorically different experiences to places where data is ancillary. Having a direct link to revenue or cost makes your t

Places where data is the product are categorically different experiences to places where data is ancillary. Having a direct link to revenue or cost makes your team and your work self justifying, which is good for meaning, for influencing decisions, and for job security. It doesn't even have to be the product of the whole company - a financial risk org is a good example. If you've been brought in as a Data Whizzkid to do Cool Data Stuff, then your job is Sales. Or you could call it consulting, but that's just Sales too. You have double the work because you need to constantly be identifying good problems to solve; solving the problems; AND convincing people that they should adjust what they're doing to use yoru work, which is always an uphill battle. My guess is that OP enjoys #2 but hasn't done enough of #1 or #3. Which is possibly not their fault: for reasons others have outlined, many businesses are set up to make #1 and #3 impossible. My anecdotal and situational advice: if you don't like doing the sales work, do everything you can to turn your job from Consulting DS to Product DS. Find the place where your insights are most valuable to sales or revenue, and productize it -- make it repeatable, build processes in other teams to operationalize it, automate those processes, measure the outcomes, repeat. If that's not possible then accept that you're in Sales, and that's ok, even if you need to spend way more of your time on sales than "the real work". Organizations are _hard_, arguably the hardest problem we face as humanity right now. We aren't entitled to them being perfect, we're all creators of friction as well as victims ("you are traffic"), and if changing processes and agitating is what's needed to make your work valuable then that's what you actually got hired to do - regardless of what your job description says. (Not trying to say it's possible or worth it in in all or even most situations like the ones OP describes, but it's worth a look before becoming resigned or quitting.)