The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Understanding Business Needs Before Building Data Solutions with Ethan Aaron and John Steinmetz

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show Prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. We have two guests today, Ethan Aaron of Portable and John Steinmetz of Gallo Mechanical. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for the conversation.

All right. Well, give us just a quick background. Ethan, why don't we start with you? Totally. So I'm Ethan Aaron. I'm the founder and CEO of Portable. I've been working in data for almost a decade at this point. I've been the head of data at a small startup, at a thousand person company. And now for the last five years,

I've been building data integrations so that data people don't have to worry about extracting data from systems and centralizing it into their warehouse. So we have 1500 different integrations. I've built hundreds of them, almost a thousand at this point. So I can speak to all the different nuances of this ecosystem. John. Yeah. John Steinmetz. Right now I'm a head of data over at Gallo. I've implemented three data teams from scratch for startups, led some of the bigger teams

over at Expedia, HomeAway, and Bizarre Voice. Started out as an engineer, worked my way up, decided to move to product. Now moved to a CTO role where I would be administrating over product data and engineering. And now primarily over the last five years, I've been working on startup data and focusing on that. Recently worked for Schiffke, a startup that eventually and is now probably about two and a half billion dollars close to that. And now I'm taking my talents, if you want to call them that, to Gallo Mechanical to try to change the construction industry because that is a very underserved data industry.

So yeah, that's me. So guys, in our wrap here a few minutes ago, we talked about data and engineering teams and some differences specifically around product. So I'm excited to dive into that, talking about data product people versus product people on the engineering side. What are some topics you guys are excited about? Talking about that problem in terms of the similarities and differences,

I think there are a lot of differences between data teams and product and engineering teams. And then also thinking about the nuance of that when you're at a one-person data team, when a company that can afford a one-person data team versus a company that can afford a 100-person data team because it changes. Just like engineers. A one-person startup with one engineer

is very different from a company with 300 engineers and how you have to trade. So I'm excited to dig into that as well. What about you, John? Yeah, very similar. I think that data is all about doing what's right for the business from a value perspective. And with any engineering task, if you don't have a business goal or a business lead into that, you will eventually waste a lot of money.

So tying all that in, I always run all my teams like a product. It's got an engineering side, a product side and a design side as well. So you have all of that in there and leading to that, you know, business value is really critical. And not all companies are the same. So you got to kind of figure out, like, what does it mean for one person? Like Ethan said, versus, you know, what does that growth look like? What do you need right now versus, you know, what do you need later? And What do you need right now? Versus, you know, what do you need later? And making sure you don't spend a lot of money up front.

And the product side of that really drives that home. Love it. Well, tons to talk about. Let's dig in. All right, let's do it. All right, that's a wrap for The Prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.