#008: Building an Analytics Team

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:26.16 [Michael Helbling]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode eight. I’m joined here tonight with my other two hosts, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain. Guys, welcome back. Great to be here.

00:00:44.52 [Jim Cain]: I’m legally mandated to be here. Please continue. That’s right.

00:00:47.49 [Michael Helbling]: It’s part of a work release program. So again, we’re super stoked. We’re trying to cover a topic tonight that was brought up by a couple of folks who were listening to the podcast before Tim Munsell and Christopher Hansen asking about Some perspectives on building and managing an analytics team, right? So there’s a couple different contexts that you can do this in. You can do this obviously in the context of inside of an organization, building out your team, and inside of a services organization like an agency, and building out an analytics team in that way. So we’ll try to hit the middle on some of those. As a ground rule, we’re going to skip recruiting altogether, insert commercial of

00:01:29.09 [Tim Wilson]: It’s so easy to find analysts these days. Talking about recruiting is just going to put people to sleep. They’re everywhere.

00:01:35.48 [Michael Helbling]: You’re right. Exactly. All right. So with that, let’s dig in. And I want to start this conversation off, guys, talking about day one with a new analyst. What are the kinds of things that you’re doing to prep them for a successful career in your organization? Go.

00:01:56.36 [Jim Cain]: So day one for a new analyst here, the comparison we use is like paired programming in a development organization. So when we bring someone in, they’re actively involved with someone who’s more senior, shadowing on work, participating in work, doing work together, and really kind of understanding the philosophy of the ways that we approach work, which includes potentially certifications for tools we use a lot, meeting and introducing themselves to customers, but really working alongside another analyst for probably the first 90 days and that we find that that’s a really good way to make sure that someone’s skill level is kind of level set with the rest of the org and it also helps them kind of get really well aligned with our culture because you know I find especially with something as detailed as web analytics When you bring someone in, they might have a very different approach to doing specific tactical tasks or approaching certain kinds of questions that might not jive with the rest of the team. So working alongside someone for two, three months ensures that you’re really able to kind of smooth out those differences.

00:03:03.34 [Tim Wilson]: I should probably kind of say right up front in this podcast that managing analytics teams has been something I’ve done several times and I think I’ve done it quite passively, but I’ve gotten very little enjoyment out of it, whereas I know both of you guys actually get fulfillment in your careers out of managing them and probably will have a lot more to contribute on that, bringing somebody in and ramping them up and keeping them.

00:03:30.20 [Michael Helbling]: Well, since there’s a fair few members of my team who listen to this show, I need to make sure I don’t say anything that’s not true because they will call me out, or at least I hope they would. So, yeah, I’m pretty well known for this phrase in the onboarding process, which is, hey, take notes as you onboard so that we can start to improve our, keep improving our process, right? Let me know things that would work well, things you noticed that weren’t working well and those kinds of things. So I’m always looking to improve that onboarding process. The other thing is about setting the right set of expectations up front, setting up people to understand the values of our organization and how to work well within it. And I think the other thing is giving people a lot of time with other people. I personally think analytics works best in a team-based environment. You can have a lot of great ideas as an analyst on your own, but when you’ve got a really good set of people you can bounce those ideas off of. I feel like you get multipliers of benefit there. So all of our work follows in that fashion as much as possible.

00:04:36.79 [Tim Wilson]: I mean, in my experience, what I found is that once you have a team kind of beyond when you’re six months or nine months in and you started to realize, oh, this person is fantastic at this and is just never, potentially never going to click on this other thing. And so there’s a part that says, how much do I kind of shift around the roles? This person gravitates more to the Excel, automating the bejesus out of stuff. This person actually loves to go talk to the stakeholders and always comes back really teasing out great requirements. And so to me, part of when I have been successful is when I’ve recognized what the different strengths of the team are and kind of shift them around to who works well where. How often do you guys feel like when you bring somebody in six months down the road, they are actually doing the tasks and the types of tasks and getting enjoyment out of those tasks as you’d envision versus how often are you finding that, you know, wow, they actually have a real strength in this area and they’re kind of weak in this area and don’t really want to short up all that much and that can make it work and shift them around.

00:05:46.86 [Michael Helbling]: So, you know, obviously we’re always trying for a really well-rounded person, and ideally that person also wants to be well-rounded. In a topic that we’ll argue about later, one of my strengths, coming from Strengths Finders, which is, we’ll talk about that later on, is individualization, right, which basically means I see every person as unique and want to really craft and shape things to kind of their skills. And so very much so, I’m thinking all the time about, well, how do I give this person the opportunities to advance their skill set both in the ways that I think they should advance them and in the ways they want to advance them, right? And so, you know, if somebody is really passionate about, hey, I want to really get some chances to work on these kinds of things, I will do my best to make sure they’re going to get those kinds of opportunities. And it has a lot to do with keeping people motivated, interested, and excited about the work they do and their job.

00:06:44.22 [Tim Wilson]: So I can reconcile that because you said well-rounded, which is a little bit of a scary Well, is that a minimum level of competence, but then you’re spending most of your time on this stuff?

00:06:57.55 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s like if you’re a bartender who can only make five beverages, you should want to learn to make more beverages, right? Because then you’ll be a better bartender.

00:07:06.96 [Tim Wilson]: Unless you’re working at like a pub and all you have to do is pull the tap.

00:07:11.25 [Michael Helbling]: Well, OK, but here in Atlanta, we have mixologists. This bartender metaphor is really taken off, eh? Yeah, who came up with that? Do you see what I’m saying? Here’s how I look at it. An analyst is somebody who exists on this continuum, and I usually think of that continuum as functional to technical, mostly because that’s in our work how we align people. There’s other ways you could probably do it, and maybe even better ways. Everybody should be open to expanding on that continuum. I want to learn more about things I don’t know about. That’s part of what’s going to make me a great analyst, is that hunger to get better at honing my craft. to learn things I don’t know, like I think it’s part and parcel. And if you go all the way back to episode one, right, it’s sort of like keep learning things, get out there and do stuff, you know, test things out, like this is how to become a better analyst. And that’s what I mean by getting more well-rounded, not to be a jack of all trades and master of none. I think specialization and key areas of focus are important. but never close yourself off to broadening your skill set, I guess is how I’d say that.

00:08:30.88 [Tim Wilson]: So I just, and I maybe won’t labor it too much, I think that’s actually from what I’ve seen both with teams as well as with clients that I’ve worked with, there is still kind of a fine distinction because even if you made it as simple as a binary functional and technical and somebody is pretty strong on the technical and maybe they’re a little weak on the functional, then they could be, they could hunger to learn more and they’re going to gravitate to learning more on that technical and it’s funny as well as we talk about string finders later like the precursor book, the first break all the rules like that’s my absolute favorite kind of management book that says don’t take somebody and say you need to be well-rounded so we’re going to look at what your gaps are like you just, you just don’t seem to have the technical You don’t want to get in and debug the console and Chrome and actually figure out what’s being passed. You need to have some minimum level of that, but we’re not going to turn you into, I think from our last episode, we’re not going to turn you into a JavaScript developer, but you love going out and helping business users kind of articulate and capture what their KPIs are. You can be hungry to, and I would, I guess this is what I’m throwing out to the two of you guys. Do you say, yeah, why don’t you push the thing that you’re already pretty strong at? And you’re gonna, and push that as far as you can, so you become an absolutely superlative. But we’ve got really just kind of a baseline on other things. You have to be able to, you know, throw up the digital pulse debugger, and, you know, you have to understand what the difference between props and EVARS or whatever. No, you need to be, the whole level needs to rise kind of in parallel if you’re going to be, or at the same time if you’re going to be well-rounded.

00:10:23.53 [Jim Cain]: I think that the three of us are used to dealing with quite significant teams of analysts, which frankly is really, really rare. Moest organizations are lucky to have one person who’s good, let alone two or three. And I think that every question that’s being asked so far and every question will go through, I would basically have two answers. And one of them is for sub-five people, and the other version of the answer would be for more than five people.

00:10:50.56 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and you kind of stole something I wanted to make sure we came back to as well, which is, you know, there’s two ways to look at this, the sort of practitioner side team versus sort of maybe the services or agency side team. And we mostly talked about it from that perspective, because that’s what all of us run.

00:11:08.64 [Tim Wilson]: Well, no, I mean, I have to go back 10 years before I had anything or was working even with anyone who was more than a sub five team. So I’m primarily now, and probably the reason I get brought in is usually because his teams are a little, maybe they’re a little too lean, but one, zero to two is kind of what a lot of my clients have from an analyst perspective.

00:11:32.09 [Michael Helbling]: We probably should have had Dylan Lewis on as a guest for this show.

00:11:39.00 [Tim Wilson]: But even with this small team, and maybe that’s part of it, I think of the people who have been the one person Well, if you’re a one-person team, then you’re not really building and managing an analytics team. And the question is, I think of some of the people who have been frustrated because they’re saying, I’m the sole game in town. I have to handle everything from the tagging to troubleshooting to analysis to requirements gathering. And then all of a sudden, they say, oh, go hire somebody else. And let’s just say that I can go hire that person. Well, it’s still a darn good time to say, well, now we’re a two-person team. I better figure out what I really gravitate to, and I should try to find somebody. I may totally click with somebody because we gravitate to the same thing. We love getting in and just coming up with crazy things to do with Adobe Analytics and all these clever ways to capture data. If you’re a two person team, you don’t need two people doing that because somebody’s gonna not be gravitating towards doing the analysis. Right.

00:12:46.97 [Michael Helbling]: So let me spend a second talking about when you bring a new analyst into an organization that’s more like a small team in a company, right? So more to Tim Munsell’s question as opposed to maybe Chris Johansson’s, given where both those guys are from. And so when you bring a new analyst into an organization, it’s all about getting that analyst able to present and do analysis for the organization. Typically, there’s a lot of context building that has to happen. And I’ve always maintained there’s a good 90 days at least before that analyst is worth a lick from an analysis perspective and maybe closer to six months. Because if you go into the services organization, you’ve built processes and structure around the work that you do. And so you hand people those things and they have experience and they can apply that experience on some level. And obviously you’re looking at kind of how they’re applying it to increase the quality of how they’re doing things and stuff like that. Inside of an organization, usually if it’s been one guy or one or two people, there’s a little less of that process that’s already built and the contextual understanding of the organization is really like that key milestone to begin to produce analysis that’s really meaningful. I mean a great way to do that is to become the guy who’s in charge of, quote unquote, minding the store, if you will. Your job is to just look at all the dashboards every week or every day and ask the questions or find out what questions could be asked of those and dig into this data a little bit, giving people those kinds of projects. It’s a great way to do that.

00:14:31.28 [Tim Wilson]: I would go completely, and I’m thinking back a few years from when I was bringing on the team, and that almost be Similarly with the we have kind of no expectations that you’re going to deliver glorious insight for the first three months or six months or whatever. But instead it’s we’re going to drag you along with somebody who’s already highly regarded in the analyst organization. or whoever’s responsible for anything else, we’re gonna take you to every meeting with the business. And we’re gonna have you sit and listen, and then we’re gonna use that to go back and say, look, I’ve never had the bandwidth to go dig into this one thing, and we didn’t commit that we’re gonna dig into this one thing, but this is a great way for you to learn our data and our business, because we have this quirky little thing, and that we don’t sell stuff on our site, but we really want people to look at these infographics. So let’s see if you can figure out what’s going on there.

00:15:24.24 [Michael Helbling]: Tim, that works great up until you incorporate a millennial. No, I’m just kidding.

00:15:34.42 [Jim Cain]: I’m not touching that. We already covered this one.

00:15:39.61 [Tim Wilson]: There’s a quarter order about you touching millennial.

00:15:45.21 [Michael Helbling]: Worth a lick. Anyways, no, I agree with that. The idea is not to hide that person behind the reporting. It’s more to get them as much exposure to as much of the business as possible. I agree with having people attend meetings and be seen, but not heard, frankly, for a while.

00:16:07.94 [Jim Cain]: I think the approach to kind of shepherding someone slowly into the organization and even my example around that kind of paired programming approach is a luxury again that the vast majority of people that might be listening to this podcast can’t afford because they’re in tiny teams. I have 12 people in the analytics group that equals the whole company. Michael’s team is even bigger than that. A lot of the organizations that you work with probably have whole rooms full of analysts, right?

00:16:36.49 [Tim Wilson]: That’s what I’m trying to be clear. No, there are massive organizations that have one or two. And they’re doing millions in revenue online weekly, and they’ve got one full-time analyst. But it’s incremental, right? The organization is always going to be, it’s not like you’re going to say, we have no analyst, And now you bring in one analyst, and all of a sudden, there are all these questions pouring on that person. Like, I don’t think pin up demand works that way. I think any time you bring someone on, there’s kind of a realization that they’re not going to be able to answer any and every question right off the bat. You’ve got to kind of use that time to say, how are we going to transition you in? And by the way, we also want to make sure we’re not setting an expectation in the organization But we don’t want to let you just get hammered with requests. You may be a millennial. You may feel good about that you’re responding to people’s requests. But you’re also setting precedent. And there’s a piece of that that says, yeah, we now have more bandwidth. We can respond to these requests. But we can’t just respond to the request. We better make sure that we’re kind of managing the intake. I mean, I think there’s a risk there, right? You can say, oh, we have this person. You can start doing this weekly report. And the person’s like, great. I can actually do a weekly report. I’ll feel like I’m contributing to the organization. And three months later, they’re like, oh, crap, I’m doing this fucking weekly report. This thing is reckless. So we’ve got to kind of manage that carefully to say, I’m going to set the expectation that they’re producing nothing. Because when they are producing stuff, I want to make sure that it’s stuff that’s valuable. We didn’t just bring on people to do monkey work.

00:18:18.97 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and hopefully, the analyst you hired is the right kind of analyst who’s going to get sick and tired of doing that report and is going to do some nice things to automate increase efficiency so they don’t have to spend very much time on that. So let’s talk about motivation. So we’ve talked about onboarding and getting people up to speed. Let’s talk about how do you keep an analyst in your organization going? How do you keep your spirits high, keep them excited about the work? What are the things that you do to get an analyst to stay longer than the industry average of 18 months.

00:18:54.07 [Tim Wilson]: 12 seconds. Well, you pay them, and the last thing you do is haven’t go through any sort of Myers-Briggs or Strength Finder or bullshit. Or maybe, I’m sorry, Michael, I don’t know, how do you keep them motivated?

00:19:09.42 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I mean, everybody’s got their ways. I feel like I can’t give a serious answer to that question now.

00:19:18.53 [Tim Wilson]: I mean we should probably say that when we were prepping for this and I said I absolutely love First Break All the Rules and I absolutely hate the Now Discover Your Strings and as Michael was kind of semi-independently prepping, he was like, man, we love Spring Finder 2.0. So I don’t know if you want to give I think it works for some people. I’m not a huge fan and I know you are.

00:19:43.12 [Michael Helbling]: We use it across the organization and I think we might use it a little differently than maybe you’ve seen it used before or in the past. But yeah, because Strengths Finders is not like, here’s a strength and it directly applies to how you will pull a report or analyze something it’s more like these are your strengths and so how do we apply those strengths to kind of your role in the organization and what you do but it gives people one of the strengths is analytical like is that absolutely and actually so as a team we map out everybody’s strengths in a big Sheet and you know surprise surprise analytical and strategic are like way dominant strengths in the organization, right? Just because which is great, but the beauty of it is is that a diversity of strengths gives you that much more flexibility and capability and I’ll be honest with you I stole the idea how I was in a huddle at exchange one year and And he was talking about how they did that. And so I, I stole it from their team. You know, I was just like, that’s a really great idea.

00:20:49.77 [Tim Wilson]: So quick, quick aside, I’m going to go with, I’m going to try to peg what your five strengths are. So you already said individualization.

00:20:57.89 [Michael Helbling]: Yep.

00:20:58.45 [Tim Wilson]: I’m going to, I’m going to peg, uh, I’m going to go with analytical and strategic just cause those are playing the ads. I’m going to go with harmony. Nope. Damn. Uh, I’m going to go with, uh, Woo, woo, you gotta be a woo guy. You’re not a woo guy?

00:21:13.78 [Michael Helbling]: Nope.

00:21:14.44 [Tim Wilson]: Positivity?

00:21:15.97 [Michael Helbling]: I am positivity, yeah. Okay, then what I miss? I think input and developer or relator, I can’t remember which one.

00:21:29.28 [Jim Cain]: Is there one for owns lots of baseball caps? I think I would get that one. I think that’s a collector.

00:21:37.45 [Michael Helbling]: There it is. There it is. So not to belabor that, because I don’t think it’s contextually necessarily relevant for every person. But in terms of keeping people motivated, one of the things on the practitioner organizational side of things is understanding the business cycle. One of the things that I think is really underappreciated is how long it takes in a particular organization for analysis to become action. and some organizations are just hopelessly stymied right like that’s not not the big business cycle from a club you’re saying like the pace like the pace at which the business can moves and businesses change their motivation from time to time right like an organization may shift from a new customer growth strategy set of strategies to a customer retention and loyalty set of strategies over the course of a few years, which as an analyst then points you in different directions is keys to kind of the things that you should be analyzing and doing. And so that’s one way to keep the job fresh and interesting is to move with the business. I would say that’s a lot of times, especially in large organizations, more of a tectonic thing, right? It’s a slow-moving pace of change, but I think it’s something that doesn’t get capitalized on enough or doesn’t get explained enough to analysts in the organization, because if analysts are leaving an organization in 18 months, that means they literally had one year of actual utility when they’re probably not really gonna hit their stride as an analyst in that organization until year two, two and a half. when they really start to get some traction and get going and organizations start to make a difference and start to see the things they were recommending a year ago, start to hit the digital experiences and show incremental value. And honestly, that’s the payoff, right? When you see the impact of your work, like I analyzed this, we did this as a business and we got this outcome, there’s very few things, at least for me personally, that I find more professionally rewarding than that.

00:23:49.98 [Jim Cain]: I think the one thing you missed, Michael, was allowing someone to screw up a couple of times.

00:23:55.15 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that goes in with the whole thing, like that’s part and parcel. I always tell people, make a lot of mistakes, just never make the same one twice.

00:24:03.62 [Tim Wilson]: There’s some level of what you want kind of all analysts to have around curiosity, some analytical, you know, bent, strategic, that sort of thing. But it sounds like you were saying, well, you’re laying all this out on a grid and saying, let’s find the people who kind of have outlier strengths, and let’s make sure that we’re one, playing to those strings, but also kind of recognizing when it comes to maybe how they communicate or how they interact that we can kind of work with that. So I feel like that’s like, that’s analytical bucket number one of how you can kind of very tactically, that’s one tool to say, hey, we can use this and we’ll start to recognize maybe why there’s this friction in this one place because we have sort of different strengths and we’re dealing with these things differently. I’ll throw out kind of the other end of the spectrum. And these aren’t mutually exclusive by any means, but I’m a big fan because I’ve used it for three of my last four jobs, including even as a consultant, having a fairly detailed competencies matrix. And calling it a true matrix because you have down one column, these are the skills. reporting, it’s analysis and interpretation, it’s digital marketing knowledge, it’s troubleshooting, it’s knowledge of analytics tools, it’s professionalism. So some of it gets into requirements gathering, that sort of thing. That’s one level. And then you’ve got across the top, what are the different roles? Maybe we have three different levels of just a digital analyst. But we also have more of an operations role. And filling in that grid and saying, what is it? In a couple, one or two sentences, that we expect at this level when it comes to team management. Guess what? As a digital analyst one, in digital analyst one, there are no expectations of team management. But as a digital analyst two, whether that’s the HR title or not, but I found that to be useful. And this goes back, the one that I’ve used has kind of evolved in different organizations I’ve been at, what actually makes the most sense and a little bit I mean credit to Michelle Kiss, she and I before either one of us where it domestified actually collaborated a little bit on the one that I kind of use as my basis, but that is this other way to sit down with people and say I’m going to, it starts to get a little HRE and performance review like, but I’m gonna sit down and force myself to look through these 22 things and say, what level are you at? And then I’m gonna sit down with you and have a discussion and say, I think you’re kind of weak here. These are your biggest strengths. Now let’s talk about that. Do you actually really see yourself moving forward? And I’m giving you kind of the clear career path because you can look at that whole matrix and realize that to be a senior analyst or to actually manage the organization or be a lead or whatever our roles are, this is what it’s gonna take. So you’re kind of laying out a path to, these are the skills that you need to be demonstrating without necessarily saying, you know, this is the role that you’re gonna go into.

00:27:13.42 [Michael Helbling]: So I agree with that, but I think it’s also like, that’s pretty, I feel like that’s a universal like management thing, right?

00:27:22.81 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but I feel like there are times when it winds up being just sort of platitudes and it’s not necessarily thought through of really what does it mean for our organization? And then, yeah, you’re right, but that’s fair. That’s management 101.

00:27:35.13 [Michael Helbling]: So Jim, you were gonna say something and then I’m gonna tell you a story.

00:27:38.62 [Tim Wilson]: stories.

00:27:40.16 [Jim Cain]: I was just going to switch it up a little bit because we’ve been talking an awful lot about team development, but we also seem to agree that the majority of organizations don’t have teams to manage per se. And the question that I would, and I have an answer, but let’s say you’re a director of marketing or the person in IT who’s building the analytics group or whatever, and you can hire three people. Like here’s headcount, for three people. What would be the three people that you get? Would it be three generalists? Would it be a hardcore tool practitioner? How would you approach it from that angle?

00:28:21.21 [Michael Helbling]: So you’re basically saying, hey, I’m going to build a team of three people to do digital analytics in the organization.

00:28:29.32 [Jim Cain]: We have nobody. We’ve decided that measurement is a priority. We’ve come up with enough budget to basically hire three people.

00:28:35.89 [Michael Helbling]: All right. So here’s what I would do. I would hire business analysts. I would hire a technical analyst. And I would move a really strong manager from a different area of the organization who’s been there for a while over to manage those two people. That’s what I would do.

00:28:54.50 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, ideally somebody who’s been kind of hankering and has some interest in the data. Right.

00:29:00.03 [Michael Helbling]: Somebody who knows the organization and knows how to get stuff done.

00:29:03.65 [Tim Wilson]: And is well regarded because you’re probably going to have to be breaking a lot of barriers. Exactly.

00:29:08.66 [Michael Helbling]: And isn’t afraid to let their people shine underneath them, right? Go to the analytics folks and say, okay, you guys, I’m here to clear the road for you. Tell me what we’re going to accomplish and hold them to it, right? Be a good manager. So I think that’s an ideal setup. You can get something like that. Or if you’re the digital analytics manager and you’re in that organization for a long time and look for a complementary skill set, don’t try to hire somebody exactly like you. find somebody that’s sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum. So if you’re more of a business analyst, hire somebody a little more technical, and you’ll find that that complementary aspect will pay off, I think, quite a bit.

00:29:52.66 [Jim Cain]: I would have said exactly the same thing as you, except that you’re still someone who’s well regarded in the org to be the leader of the little tagger team. I really like that idea. I would have gone outside and got someone who was more of a kind of senior business analysts to run the two of them. And I take that back because I think one of the biggest problems with building an analytics team internally is what you guys are touching on in terms of the impact that it has on culture and getting people to start thinking of measurement before they do something and not after they do it. So I really like that idea. And I think the other thing, you know, both of you guys, Tim said it at the beginning of the session and I was gonna say it, Michael, you just said it, but that concept of the analytics operations person, so someone who is, and we touched on this in our last session, you know, just the importance of someone who understands business analysis but is highly technical and kind of lives between IT and marketing and can turn requirements solicitation into technology implementation. To me, it’s such a critical role that’s even rarer than a digital analyst, in my opinion. And I think we all agree you got three people. One of them is that kind of, I would call them an analytics professional, but the operations are technical analysts.

00:31:18.78 [Tim Wilson]: And I’ll say nothing you said. Being comfortable with people who are working, who are going to work in that team, who are going to be better at something, I mean, the largest team I’ve ever managed was just under 20 people. And there were multiple people in that group that in certain areas could completely run circles around me. And that ranged from everything from being super highly regarded in certain really tough organizations to penetrate within the company. But then even more so the, you know, hardcore, you know, stats person and saying, yeah, that’s fine. Like that’s needed. So when back to kind of thinking of what’s my team, you’re trying to build a high functioning team. You’re not trying to build a high functioning set of individuals. And so that that’s, I think that actually may be one of the bigger challenges for the person who is building or managing that team is actually understanding that full spectrum. and recognizing that it does run all the way from the technical side of the knowledge, to the communication, to the relationship building, to the doing the analysis, to building and automating reports, and sort of having that always kind of something that they’re kind of keeping in their mind of where do we, collectively as a team, What are our gaps? And what’s the best way to fill that gap? Is it hiring somebody else? Is it somebody who would want to pursue that and letting them pursue it a little bit more? But it’s kind of a little bit of a puzzle that you’re trying to put together to say collectively, we’ve got to cover this whole range of things.

00:32:58.99 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, no, I think that’s just it. And I like the puzzle metaphor. So one of the things, and my team can tell you this is true, when I first started building my team, I was like, hey, everybody can kind of choose their own title, pick any title you want. I really don’t care. I’m not driven by titles. So as long as it’s not completely unreasonable, when I first joined Search Discovery, I wanted my title to be Captain Bounce Rate, which that turned down. So that’s how we started doing a bunch of the hires and then we brought in our COO and the organization and he was sitting down and started to organize things and he’s like, What are you doing here? This team is going to get much bigger, and everybody’s got this hodgepodge.

00:33:47.14 [Tim Wilson]: I was going to say that was actually the receptionist, but he said that he wanted to be the COO, so he was the COO.

00:33:52.49 [Michael Helbling]: That was just the COO. So just as hodgepodge of titles, how are you going to give people a clear understanding of their career path? You’re going to invent unique career paths for every single person that’s impossible. So we had to go back and standardize titles. And I had to go back to some of my people and explain to them why I was changing their title from one thing to another. In some cases, it didn’t sound as cool as what they had come up with. But at the end of the day, the conversation actually went well because people understood the reason we’re doing this is so that we can make sure that we’re getting you ready for this next opportunity. And to what you said, Tim, which is, here’s the progression that you’re on. Here’s the skills at each level that you’re building and that you need to kind of be thinking about. And here’s how we’re going to get you there, right? So here’s the opportunity. And honestly, I think that’s a really big key to keeping people happy in their jobs is how do they know they’re progressing? Like, what are my steps for progression? And how am I making an impact? Those are kind of the two. All right. I feel like I talked quite a bit. So why don’t we wrap this up and I’ll let you guys say something.

00:35:04.34 [Jim Cain]: Jim, you want to wrap first? Sure. Hi, I’m Jim Cain. You may remember me from the introductions at the beginning of the podcast where I said something. So I think that thanks for me. The one thing that I didn’t mention earlier is that I think the number one thing when you’re growing your team is that whether you’ve got two people or 200 people, Anybody who’s really into analytics or measurement really is passionate about action and not just throwing stuff into Excel. And if you alienate someone doing work from the ability to help get wins with the work, like presenting it to an executive or analyzing a recommendation they made after it was done or helping something happen, that’s where you start having people feel like they’re data monkeys and all they do is just throw stuff into Excel and you’ll lose them. I think the second thing that I thought was really interesting today is that the three person teams that we all built were exactly the same ones. And you know, so if you have no people on your team, you need a technical person, you need a business analyst, and you need that kind of senior stakeholder ideally within the org. If you’re gonna build a 30 person team, really we’ve identified the three types of person that make up that 30 person team. So you don’t end up with 29 business analysts and one technical person. to me they’re equally weighted. I think the third point that I would make is that as you start to grow a team, some of the things we talked about today have nothing to do with analytics. They have to do with operations and HR best practices. And a lot of the companies that we work with that are quite large, the measurement team is almost treated like, or the digital team is treated like an internal startup. and things that would be considered standard business practices for the rest of the org they’re almost learning for the first time in the digital group and so really thinking about to go from five people to 15 people requires a boot camp in HR and operations in tooling in fostering collaboration and how to run a meeting you know there’s a lot of important things that aren’t measurement related. My pop turned down promotions for 20 years once he hit a certain level because he wanted to do the work and not facilitate other people doing the work and that’s what happens when an organization gets to a certain size and it’s something that you need to plan for as you grow your team or else it will go bang. I think those are my big points.

00:37:33.11 [Tim Wilson]: Wow, those are good ones. I’ll use the opportunity to throw in one point we didn’t talk about when it comes to building a team. You know what, there are times when you have to recognize that this person is not a fit for, might not be a fit for analytics, might not be a fit for the organization, either one, there’s only so much time you can kind of, you know, you gotta call it, call it and hopefully not fire them, hopefully kind of have the, you know, discussion and recognize that they’re not necessarily a fit in the role they’re in. But I think the other stuff, I had largely, I mean, I think Jim recaptured it pretty well and,

00:38:09.24 [Michael Helbling]: So I think one of my takeaways, and it’s also something we didn’t quite touch on, but I want to mention which is to all of us in this industry, we all live in a world that doesn’t have enough analysts in it for a digital. And so every time we onboard an analyst, we’re not only doing something for our business, but we’re doing something for our industry. And that ought to make you feel pretty special. So way to go, everybody out there. Secondarily, I liked how we started moving from, you know, how do we get a great analyst on boarded to how do we create a high functioning team? And that high functioning team concept in the culture around it, Tim, that you kind of talked about, I think that really, that gels with me a lot. And then thirdly, can’t say enough about the benefits of Strength Finders to Paldo. I’m serious, Tim.

00:39:01.52 [Tim Wilson]: Is there a building where you can actually get your affiliate code?

00:39:05.94 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right. Yeah. No, unfortunately, I’ve not receiving any compensation for that. But yeah, we give that book to every single new hire and use it in our performance management processes. I do believe in it. And I like how it is setting people up to focus on the things where their strengths are as they approach their careers in their professional life and analytics. I’m excited about it. Anyways, great show guys. I loved your insights. Hopefully this will be helpful. Thanks again to Tim Unsell and Chris Johansson for bringing this topic up. I think as with all of our topics, we never do it the justice it deserves. And so please put your thoughts into this on our Facebook page and also reach up to us on Twitter. And hey, if you’re not on the Measure Slack, That would be a place where you could also hook up and give us some of your points of view on the show, apparently. So I guess that’s our show. This is about the sloppiest ending ever. But I think it’s a subject. I think you could tell there’s equal passion in all of our parts about this topic. And so thanks for listening and I’d love to hear your comments. Thanks a lot. Tim and Jim, it’s been a pleasure as always. Peace out. Cheers. Good day.

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