The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: If You Were Building a Data Team What Would Your First Hire Be?

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Emilie Schario from Amplify Partners.

Welcome to the Data Sack Show prequel. We just had an amazing conversation with Emily. She was at Netlify. Before that, she was at GitLab. And she knows a thing or two about building data teams. This is a bit of an unfair question because we just listened to this episode. But if you can entertain me, before we listen to this episode, if I'd asked you the question, what's the first data hire you would make in a company you were starting? What would your answer have been? That's a good question because I had to do that and I made many mistakes. I would try to hire someone. First of all, I would probably, I mean, if the company is big enough, let's say, knows what's going on with the business, and at the same time, knows enough to go and set up a very basic, but functional and clean, let's say, data infrastructure.

But it can be just a Google Sheets at the end. It doesn't matter, right? Because you're still at the stage when you're like early on that you don't really know like which direction the company will go and what the needs will be. And I think it's like something that we, both of us have seen many times with like all the companies that we had like to work at. So having someone from within the company helps with at least not having to figure

out how to communicate the business context, which is very important. And when it's very early, it's really, really hard to do that. So at an early stage, I would definitely try to keep that internally if possible and have someone from within the team take this responsibility until things become more clear, we figure out which function at the beginning at least needs more data support, maybe marketing, for example. Right? But okay, if you're like a sales-driven organization for large enterprise, for all this, not marketing, that's like so much data, it might be something else.

I don't know. So until these things are like figured out, I think that, and as Emily said, like pretty much everyone should be like a data person inside the company, right? So I would keep it like inside the initial team, but make it very clear that someone is taking care of that. And that's just like a chore and is left out there at the end without like maintaining or taking care of it. As always, very sage wisdom, Kostas, which I think is appropriate because we

learned so much from Emily, both from her experience at GitLab. And in particular, it's interesting, the data team there started under findings. They were an enterprise-focused organization. But she also talked about the different places that data can originate from and then the different paths that they generally take from there, which was fascinating. She gave us probably some of the best advice I've ever heard about building a data team and then structuring a data team. And then we also got advice from her about sort of managing a Dunkin' Donuts and how that influences the way that you think about hiring.

And so listen all the way to the end of the episode for that, because it was probably one of the best parts of the episode right at the very end. So you're definitely going to want to check this one out. Such a great episode. Also, Kostas, we have to mention, we have a newsletter now, which is super exciting. Rooks is coordinate all of that. We pull, you know, different things from the show notes into it and it's really good.

So definitely head to datastackshow.com and subscribe to that. And we will catch you on the next one with Emily and have a great day.