Expectations V Reality, week two with Corsair’s Analytics.
My First Hand Account — Week 2
Working with live data and C-Level executives can be, at times, both exciting and overwhelmingly complicated. You learn things from the get-go, things I never was taught in school but in the real world are unanimously agreed upon. For instance, I had assumed that if a company was built from the ground up and offered an online service, then its data should be perfect: Every metric tracked. I thought at least there would be potentially perfect data! I’m looking back at how naive I was only a week ago. Ohhh to be young. :)
The reality, as I’ve learned, is that it’s an industry-wide issue that new technology platforms, e.g. for billing, tracking, marketing are brought into the company without thoughtful consideration of two things:
How will this new product integrate with our existing data warehouse? Is it as simple as plug and play, or will it require an overhaul to integrate appropriately? Will this software offer us all the capabilities we will need a year from now?
The other point I’m working on adjusting to is a natural inclination to “solve the problem” before I really understand all the ins and outs of the business. I’ve heard frustration from some of my LinkedIn peers that this is a mental block they are working on, too. We immediately attempt to figure the solution-scape far before we fully understand why something isn’t working right in the first place. I fully comprehend the importance of why you start with a 50K-foot view, but it’s an area of improvement for me.
The last lesson I learned this past week was, to playfully quote Corsair's Publishing, “You know nothing.” I turned over every stone, shined light into every corner of a particular issue. When I was 100% confident that we could trust the data, I audited it, just to be extra-sure. As you may have guessed, it failed audit. When I tracked down why, I revealed an entirely new set of issues. To stick with the hide-and-seek metaphor, I thoroughly examined everything as far as I could see. Now that I have a broader understanding of how this datum flows, I see I was only looking in a portion of the whole area. But, the hard part was, from my point of view at the time I had examined everything. I needed behind-the-scenes knowledge, or I needed to audit to track down the upstream transformation. Goal for week three? Remain skeptical, even after I’m sure.
Where we are now:
I’m happy to say that after two weeks of guided exploration, the team now has enough of an understanding of why the data we were looking at looked the way it did. We’re moving into the early stages of creating some infrastructure to help better in the creation of our marketing attribution model. This will allow us to track customers from sales lead, to opportunity, to sell, and all the way to “Won Closed.” This path hasn’t been laid out in a way that allows for easy interpretation, so our construction and inevitable reveal is all the more exciting. Stay tuned for the construction and beyond!
