Assessing a Role
The Great Upgrade Part Four
This article series is intended for data practitioners of all levels, especially those interested in leadership positions and in advancing their careers. You may be more interested to lead as a technical individual contributor than as a people manager, or vice versa. The lion’s share of this article has been excerpted from Chapter 10 of How to Lead in Data Science.
As discussed in The Great Upgrade introduction article, now is a prime time to take stock of your career and consider potential avenues of advancement to capitalize on The Great Upgrade. In previous articles, we examined industry considerations, assessing a company through its maturity and through its standing within the industry, as well as assessing a team through the hiring manager’s maturity, infrastructure maturity and practice maturity in evaluating opportunities. In this article, we discuss considerations when assessing a role. Keep in mind that new opportunities may often be within the industry, the company, or even the team you are currently in.
Assessing the role
As you assess opportunities for your career development, an understanding of the company’s mission, priorities, and success criteria over 3–12 months can help you focus and align your goals and succeed in a new role. This is illustrated in figure 1.
Company mission
A company’s mission defines its business, its objectives, and its approach to reach those objectives. You can find it shared on company career pages and news releases and discussed in company blogs. Understanding the underpinning narratives of a company can help you assess whether you can be passionate about a role at the company. If you are a Data Science executive, part of your responsibility is to infuse Data Science capabilities into a company’s mission.
When you evaluate an opportunity as a Data Science leader, you can observe in the interview process whether cross-functional partners are aligned with the company’s mission. This alignment is crucial for your projects and initiatives to be prioritized by your cross-functional partners among their competing responsibilities.
Company priorities and success criteria
The company’s mission provides a general direction for the company. At each stage of a company’s growth, company-level initiatives drive top priorities in the planning process. These priorities come with goals to achieve over specific time horizons that you will be responsible for executing, so it is crucial to assess three key questions:
- How realistic are those expectations?
- What would success look like?
- What are the negative consequences if they are not achieved?
You can synthesize your assessments of the industry, the company, and the team to evaluate how realistic your hiring manager’s expectations are.
This independent evaluation of priorities and expectations is crucial for your success in considering a new role. The potential impact of Data Science can sometimes be overhyped in popular media. If expectations from executives and hiring managers are too high and not realistic, you can be set up for failure before you even start. There are four levels of confidence various data applications can provide, including recommendations and ranking, assistance, automation, and autonomous agents. You can refer to these levels to determine what success could look like with your hiring manager.
Besides understanding what success looks like, you should also understand the negative consequences if goals are not achieved. The more severe the negative consequence, the more crucial it is to achieve the goals. Negative consequences, especially the natural ones that are direct implications of failure, can be very helpful in motivating your team and cross-functional teams prioritize work to achieve their goals. They can also be helpful for you in understanding the constraints of the situations and avoiding potential pitfalls when executing on the priorities.
Crafting a new role
In some cases, when you are passionate about joining a company or a team, and the company values your skills and experience, they may create a role for you. When you understand the industry, the company, the team, and the priorities, you may have enough information to present a role description as your offer for the company.
You can discuss the dimensions of the technology roadmaps and the data-driven cultural-maturity roadmaps to take responsibility for and work with the company to iterate on realistic success criteria to justify a new role. When you can start making your own offers of help to companies and organizations, you can be a much more powerful leader for producing business impacts.
We have now discussed assessing the industry, the company, the team and the role when examining your next-play opportunity. In the few articles, we will discuss aspects of onboarding into a new role.
As always, if you have views, questions, or examples in evaluating opportunities for the next stage of your career or in general, feel free to comment below or contact us directly.
About the authors:
Dr. Jike Chong and Yue Cathy Chang build, lead, and grow high-performing data teams across industries in public and private companies, such as Acorns, LinkedIn, large asset-management firms, and Fortune 50 companies.
The writing and opinions expressed are solely our own and are not shared, supported, or endorsed in any manner by our respective employers.
