Data teams

Building a new data function

On hiring a head of data, to me, a lot of this depends on how big the company is, and how big the potential data team is. At a smaller company, a head of data is often just the person doing everything, so they need to be decent at setting up data tooling, at building culture, and at actually doing the analysis. For those early hires, I’d think of them similarly to a very early engineer at a tiny startup - technical aptitude is useful, but the best folks are those who set the right cultural principles that others will build on. If the company is larger, then the right person depends on what problems they have, though in most cases, I think the best person is someone who’s been in a data leadership position before, and has a decent sense of what good looks like.

As for blog posts on this, I haven’t written anything on this. This post from Sequoia is as good as any, I think, but it (like most other posts on this) is a little bit of a catch-all of tons of different attributes. Part of that, I think, comes from how data roles aren’t terribly well defined, so it’s not easy to write a concise list of what people should look for, or what people in the role do. So I’d encourage the company to read a few posts like that one, and think about what’s most important to them out of the list of things they talk about.

And on where to look for folks, the best place to start is probably just linkedin, and look for data leaders. The range of titles is pretty wide (data science / analytics / data / BI / strategy analyst / scientist / lead / manager / director / VP), so I’d expand the search to a lot of things when you start out. For other places, Depending on how attractive the company might be, conference speaker lists (eg https://coalesce.getdbt.com/speakers/) isn’t a bad place to look either.