#008: Building an Analytics Team

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. 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.”

[00:00:26] Hey everyone. Welcome to the digital analytics power hour.

[00:00:30] This is Episode 8 so I’m joined here tonight with my other two hosts Tim Wilson and Jim Kane. Guys welcome back.

[00:00:42] Great to be here legally mandated to be here. Please continue.

[00:00:46] That’s right. It’s part of a workplace 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 are listening to the podcast before. Tim Ancel and Krista Hansen asking about some perspectives on building and managing an analytics team. Right. So there are a couple of different contexts that you can do this and you can do this obviously in the context of inside of an organization building out your team and inside of you know a services organization like an agency and building on 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 it so we were easy to find analysts these days.

[00:01:31] Yeah I mean our recruiting is was going to put people to sleep.

[00:01:34] They’re just they’re everywhere. You’re right. 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.

[00:01:54] You know so you know 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 three months ensures that you’re really able to kind of smooth out those differences.

[00:03:03] As a proud way can I 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 possibly 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.

[00:03:26] Bringing somebody in and ramping them up and keeping them well since there’s a fair few members of my team or 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 on board so that we can start to improve or keep improving our process right. Let me know things that would work well. Things you noticed that weren’t working well. Those kinds of things I’m always looking to improve that hiring process. The other thing is about setting the right set of expectations upfront setting up people to understand the values of our organization and how to work well within it. And I think the other the other thing is yeah giving people a lot of time with other people like I personally think analytics works best in a team based environment. You know 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 you know kind of all of our work falls in that fashion.

[00:04:34] As much as possible I mean in my experience what I’ve found is that once you have a team kind of beyond when you’re six months or nine months and you started to realize oh this person is fantastic this thing is just never potentially never going to click on this other thing. 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 rape requirements. For me art of art. When I have been successful when I’ve started or so I’ve recognized what the different strengths of the team are and kind of shift them around to the who’s 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 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 shore it up all that much and I can make it work and shift them around.

[00:05:46] So you know obviously we’re always striving for a really well-rounded person. And ideally that person also wants to be well-rounded in a topic they will argue about later. One of my strengths coming from the strengths finder switches. We’ll talk about that later on is individualization rape which basically means I see every person is unique in one to really craft and shape things to kind of their skills and so very much so I’m thinking all the time about how do I give this person the opportunities to advance their skill set both in the ways that I think they should Vence them and the ways they want to advance them right. And so you know 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 in their job you know and to reconcile that with because you said well well-rounded which is a little bit scary.

[00:06:51] Well so here’s a memorable Aminov minimum competence. But in your opinion most of your time on this.

[00:06:57] 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 unless you’re working out like a pub. You know I have to do is a tad bit. Well OK but you know here in Atlanta we have mixologists this bartender of is really taking off. Yeah. Who came up with that. But do you see what I’m saying like it’s I guess here’s how I look at it. An analyst is somebody who exists on sort of this continuum. And I usually think of that continuum as sort of functional the technical mostly because that’s sort of 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. Right. Like 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.

[00:08:01] Like I think it’s part and parcel of your goals were 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.

[00:08:19] I think specialization unhand key areas of focus are important but never close yourself off to broadening your skill set. I guess is that I’d say so.

[00:08:30] So I just maybe won’t belabor it too much I think. I think that’s actually from what I’ve seen both with teams as well as with kind’s that I’ve worked with. There is still there’s kind of a fine distinction because even if you made it as simple as a binary functional and technical or 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 word more and they’re going to gravitate to learning more on that technical and it’s funding it as well as we talk drawstrings 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 that technical you don’t want to get in debug in the console in chrome and actually figure out what’s being passed like you have some minimum level of that. But we’re not going to turn you into I think from our last episode I can turn you into a javascript developer that you’ll love going out and helping business users can articulate and capture with their K.P. eyes are so you can you can be hungry too. I would guess this is what I’m thrown 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 going to push that as far as you can see you become absolutely superlative.

[00:10:02] 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 poster bugger and you know you have to understand what the difference is perhaps in the VARs or or whatever. Yes I know you need me to be the host. The whole level needs to rise kind of in parallel if you’re going to be or at the same time for a new rounded skill.

[00:10:23] I think that the three of us are used to dealing with quite significant teams of analysts which frankly is really really rare. Most 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 in 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 5 people.

[00:10:50] Yeah. And you kind of settle something I wanted to make sure we came back to you as well which is you know there’s two ways to look at this. The sort of. Optician or site 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 at will.

[00:11:08] No I I mean I have to go back 10 years before I had anything or was working even with anyone who was was more than a subpar team. So I’m primarily now and probably the reason I get brought in is usually because his teams are a lot or maybe they’re a little too lean but that 1 0 0 to 2 is kind of what a lot of my clients have from.

[00:11:29] From an analyst perspective we probably should have had Dylan Lewis on as a guest for this show.

[00:11:38] But even even with a small team and maybe that’s that’s part of it I think of the people who have been the one 1 person.

[00:11:48] Well if you’re a one person team then you’re not really building and managing how her team and the question. I think if some of the people who have been frustrated are sound the only the sole game in town 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 not just say that I can go higher. That person was it’s still a darn good time to say what our two person team. I better figure out what I really gravitate to and I should try to find somebody. I mean I’m a 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 where you don’t if you’re a two person team you don’t need two people doing that because somebody is going to not be gravitating towards doing the analysis or right.

[00:12:47] So let me spend the 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 Ansel’s question as opposed to maybe Krister Hanssens 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 has 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 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 like that inside of organization. Usually if it’s been you know a one guy or one or two people there’s a little less of that process that’s already built in 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 you know quote unquote minding the store if you will like your job is to just look at all the dashboards you know 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.

[00:14:27] Giving people those kinds of projects is a great way to stay out of it go completely. And I’m thinking back a few years from when I was at the team and I’d 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 is responsible for us we’re going to take you to every meeting with the business. Oh yeah. You wouldn’t have to sit and listen and then we’re going to use that to go back and say what I’ve never had the bandwidth to go dig into this one thing. And we didn’t commit that we’re going to dig into this one thing but this is a great way if you don’t turn our data in our business 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 we can figure out what’s going on there.

[00:15:24] Tim that works great up until you incorporate a millennial. No.

[00:15:34] I’m not touching that very hard at this point.

[00:15:39] There’s a quarter there’s a quarter or about you touching millennials I think that’s because of the licking real worth Olek anyway. No I agree with that. And so yeah 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 and I agree with having people attend meetings and be seen but not heard.

[00:16:05] Frank Pearla as you just said I think the approach to kind of shepherding someone slowly into the organization and even my example around you know 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 it because they’re in teeny tiny teams you know like I have 12 people in the analytics group that equals the whole company. Michael’s team is even bigger than that. You know a lot of the organizations that you work with probably have a whole room full of analysts right.

[00:16:36] I mean that’s one thing to be clear. No there are massive organizations that have one or two of them and they’re doing you know millions in revenue online you know weekly and they’ve got one full time analyst so be it. So it is a criminal right that the organization is always going to be. It’s not like you’re going to say we have we have no analyst.

[00:16:59] 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 up demand works that way. I think anytime you bring someone on there’s there’s kind of a realization that they’re not going to be able to answer any and every question you know right off the bat can they 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 a an expectation the organization that we don’t want to let you just get hammered with requests. You may be a Moginie or you may feel good about the respond to people with 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 requests we make sure that we’re Qadam managing the intake. I mean I think there is a risk there. Right. And you say oh we have this person you can start doing this week report. And the person is like great I can actually do a weekly report. I feel like I’m contributing to the organization. And three months later I got crack. I’m doing fucking weekly report. This thing is ridiculous. So you got to kind of manage that carefully to say I’m going to set the expectation that they’re producing nothing because what they are producing stuff. I want to make sure that this stuff is viable. We

[00:18:16] didn’t just just bring on people to do monkey work well and hopefully the analysts you hired is the right kind of analyst who’s going to get sick and tired to do in that report is going to do some nice things to automate increase efficiency so they don’t spend very much time on that. So let’s talk about motivation. You know so we’ve talked about onboarding and getting people up 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. Like what are the things that you do to get an analyst to stay longer than the industry average of 18 months 12 seconds.

[00:18:55] So you pay them you pay them. And the last thing you do is having go through any sort of Myers Briggs strength finder bullshit. Or maybe I’m sorry Michael. I don’t know. How do you keep them motivated.

[00:19:09] Well I mean everybody’s got their ways. You know I feel like I can’t give a serious answer to that question now.

[00:19:18] I mean we should probably say that like when we were prepping for this and I said I absolutely love first break all the rules and I absolutely hate the the. Now discover your strengths. And as Michael was kind of semi independent he prepping he was like Man we was Friend Finder 2.0. So I don’t know if you want to give. I mean it works for some people. I’m not a huge fan and I know you are.

[00:19:43] 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 Finder is not like here is 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 there. Absolutely. And actually so as a team we map out everybody’s strengths and 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. I was in a huddle at Xchange one year 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] So quick quick aside I’m going to go with I’m going to try to peg what your five strings are. So if you already said individualisation yup I’m going take them in a peg. I want to go with what I call strategic just because I was replaying the ads.

[00:21:03] I’m going to go with Harmonie nope. Dan I’m going to go with woo woo woo guy. You know look at the lower activity.

[00:21:15] I am positive yeah. Haaga given what I miss. I think input and really developer are related. I can’t measure which one or is there one for owns lots of baseball caps.

[00:21:33] I think I would get that one. I think that’s a collector.

[00:21:39] Here is so so yeah. So not to belabor that because I don’t think it’s contextually necessarily relevant for every 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. Like one of the things that I think is really under appreciated is how long it takes in a particular organization for analysis to become action. Some organizations are just hopelessly stymied right.

[00:22:11] Like that’s not not the business cycle from a club you’re saying look at the pace at which the pace at which the business Kinoos and businesses change their motivation from time to time right.

[00:22:24] 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 as 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 time especially larger 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 good explained enough to analysts in the organization because of analysts are leaving the organization in 18 months. That means they literally had one year of actual utility when they are probably not really going to hit their stride as an analyst letter organization till a year to two and a half. You know when they really start to get some traction and get going in and organizations start to make a difference and start to see that things they were recommending a year ago start to hit the digital digital experiences and show incremental value. And honestly that’s the payoff rate. When you see the impact of your work like I analyze this we did this as a business and we got this outcome. There’s very few things I was for me personally that I find more professionally rewarding than that.

[00:23:50] I think the one thing you miss Michael was allowing someone to screw up a couple of times.

[00:23:55] 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] There’s some level of what you want. Kind of all of us to have around curiosity some analytical you know bent strategic that sort of thing but it sounds like you were saying well you’re doing an office I’m on the grid and saying let’s find the people who kind of have outlier strengths and let’s make sure that we’re 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 kind of work with that. So I feel like that’s like that’s in a cold 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 things differently.

[00:24:48] I’ll throw out kind of the other end of the spectrum and these aren’t mutually exclusive by by any means but I’m a I’m a big fan because I’ve used it for three of my last four jobs including even as a consultant having a like fairly detailed competencies matrix and calling it a true matrix because you have down one column. These are the skills you know. It’s reporting its analysis 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 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 in filling in that Ridd insane what is it. In a couple. One or two sentences that we expect this level when it comes to team management. Guess what. As a digital analyst one digital analyst one there are no expectations of team management. It is a digital in all as to whether that’s the H.R. title or not. But I found that to be useful. And this goes back to the one that I have used has kind of evolved in different organizations I’ve been at one actually makes the most sense and a little bit of credit to Michelle Kosinski and I before the one of us were the mystified actually collaborated a little bit on 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.

[00:26:25] It starts to get a little HRB and performance review like but I’m going to sit down and forced myself to look through these 22 things and say what level are you at. And then 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 the whole matrix and realize that to be a senior analyst or to actually manage the organization or be a weed or whatever our roles are. This is what it’s going to 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 going to go into.

[00:27:13] So I agree with that. But I think it’s also like that’s pretty unique. I feel like that’s a universal like management thing right.

[00:27:22] Well I think like there are times when it winds up being just sort of platitudes and it’s not necessarily thought through. Really what does it mean for our organization. And then you’re right. But that’s that’s fair. This is what I want to one.

[00:27:35] So Jim you were going to say something that I’m going to tell you a story. Stories Yeah it’s a day.

[00:27:40] I was just going to switch it up a little bit because we’ve been talking an awful lot about team development.

[00:27:46] 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 youre a director of marketing or or the person I.T. is building the analytics group or whatever and you can hire three people like here’s headcount for three people what will be the three people that you get. Would it be three general generalists would it be a hard core tool practitioner like. How would you approach it from that angle.

[00:28:21] So if 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] We have nobody. We’ve decided that measurement is a priority. We’ve come up with enough budget to basically hire three people. All right.

[00:28:36] So here’s what I would do. I would hire business analyst I would hire a technical analyst and I would move a really strong manager from a different area and the organization has been there for a while over to manage those two people.

[00:28:53] That’s what I would do. Ideally somebody who’s been kind of hankering and has some interest in the data. Ryan somebody who knows the organization and knows how to get stuff done and is well regarded because you’re probably going to have to be press on barriers because he isn’t afraid to let their people shine underneath them.

[00:29:13] Right. So like go to the analytics folks and say OK 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 good. Be a good manager. So I think that’s an ideal set up being something like that or if you’re the digital analytics manager you are in that organization for a long time and look for complimentary 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 complimentary aspect will pay off. I think quite a bit I would have said exactly the same thing as you except that your still someone who is well regarded in the org to be the leader of the.

[00:30:01] Little Tiger Team. I really liked that idea. I would have gone outside and got someone who is more of a senior business analyst to run the two of them and I take that back because you know 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. 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 going to 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 I.T. and marketing and can turn requirements solicitation into technology implementation. To me it’s such a critical role that it’s even rarer than a digital analyst in my opinion.

[00:31:09] And I think we all agree that three people one of them is that kind of I would call them an analytics professional but the operations are technical analysts and I would say to them you said being comfortable with people who are working who are who are going to work in that team who are going to be better at something then I mean I had a daughter disesteem overmanaged was just under 20 people and there were multiple people in that group that in certain areas could completely run circles around me in that range from everything from being super highly regarded and certain like really tough organizations to penetrate within within the company. But then even more so the you know hard core you know stats person and saying Yeah that’s fine that’s needed. So went back to kind of thinking of what’s my team you’re trying to do have a high functioning team you’re not trying to build a high functioning set of rules. And so that’s I think 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 there it doesn’t 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 forwards and sort of having that always kind of something that they’re kind of keeping in their mind of where where do we as a collective we as a team.

[00:32:40] What are our what are our gaps and what’s the best way to fill that gap is to hire somebody else is it somebody who could could who would want to pursue that wedding and 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 this whole range of things.

[00:32:59] Yeah. No I think that’s just it. I like the puzzle metaphor. So what are the things and my team can tell you this is true. When I first started building my team I was like everybody can kind of choose their own title you know pick a tiny tile you want. You know I really don’t care I’m not driven by title so you know as long as it’s not completely unreasonable you know when I first joined search discovery I wanted my title to be captain bounce rate which that turned down. So but so that’s how we started doing a bunch of the hires and then we brought in our CEO and the organization and he it now and starting to organize things and he’s like What are you doing here. Like this team’s going to get much bigger and everybody’s got this hodgepodge.

[00:33:47] I’m going to say that I was actually the receptionist but it has to be the CEO also he was the CEO that was the CEO.

[00:33:54] So it’s hodgepodge of titles. How are you going to give people a clear understanding of their career path. You’ve got to invent like unique career paths for a single person. It’s impossible. So I had to go back and standardize titles and I have to go back to some of my people and explain 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 conversations actually went well because people understood the reason we’re doing this is so that we can make sure that we’re getting ready for this next opportunity and what you said Tim which is here’s the progression that you’re on here is 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 is my steps what are my steps for progression and how am I making an impact. Those are 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 some genuine Trepp first.

[00:35:05] Sure. Hi I’m Jim Cain you may remember me from the introduction at the beginning of the podcast where I said something so that I think that things for me.

[00:35:16] 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 you know whether you’ve got two people or two hundred 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 winds with the work like presenting it to an executive or or analyzing a recommendation they made after it was done or helping something happen that’s where you start having people feel like their data monkeys and all they do is just throw stuff into excel and you’ll lose. 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 so if you know 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 or if you’re going to build a 30 person team. Really we like to. And if I 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 either 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 age are best practices.

[00:36:39] And a lot of the companies that we work with that are you know quite large the measurement team is almost treated like it 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 H.R. in operations in tooling in fostering collaboration in how to run a meeting. You know there’s a lot of important things that are measurement related my pop turned down promotions for 20 years. Once you 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] While those injured are good ones I’ll use the opportunity to throw in one point we didn’t. We didn’t talk about with when it comes to building a team.

[00:37:39] You know what there are times when you have to recognize that this person is not 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 can you know you have to call it call it and hopefully not fire them hopefully. Kind of have the you know discussion and recognize that they’re not necessarily fit the role they are in.

[00:38:03] But think of the other stuff that largely happened Jim recapped it pretty well and so 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 digital. And so every time we onboard analysts who are not only doing something for our business but we’re doing something for our industry and that 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 onboarding to how do we create a high functioning team and that high functioning team concept in the culture around him that you kind of talked about. I think that really that gels with me a lot.

[00:38:53] And then thirdly can’t say enough about the benefits of straight finders to Syria is you have an ability where you can actually get the you get your affiliate code for trade.

[00:39:06] 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 that are there where their strengths are as they approach their careers in their professional life and analytics so I’m excited about it anyways. Great show guys. I loved your insights. Hopefully this will be helpful. Thanks again to Tim Ancel and Krista Hansen for bringing this topic up I think as with all of our topics we never do at 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. 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 is equal passion in all of our parts about this topic.

[00:40:13] Thanks for listening. And they’d love to hear your comments. Thanks a lot. Tim and Jim it’s been a pleasure as always. He’s out. First day.

[00:40:26] Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook dot com slash now. All that I don’t think now on Twitter.

[00:40:40] Smart guys want to fit in. I’ve made up a term called analytic analytics. Don’t worry.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS