5 Questions to Ask About a Company’s Data Culture During Your Interview
Whether you’re interviewing for a change of place, to seek better compensation or work-life balance, or if you’re looking to be in a more impactful role, knowing about the organization’s data culture is equally important as their work culture.
In my experience of having worked in several analytics organizations with various organization structures, despite the job title I have always sought to be in roles that have maximum impact on the organization’s bottom line. My motives to be in these roles were mostly based on these two effects it has on my career progression:
- More impactful roles automatically mean more face time with L2 and L1 leadership, which could translate into you progressing in your career ladder.
- It is easy to quantify your impact in your resume, which could translate into better outcomes in future interviews. It is always better to talk about impact rather than responsibilities with your potential employer.
Ask these questions during your interview:
What does your data technical stack look like?
In a world where job descriptions loosely use the term “Big Data”, it’s easy to assume that the team is well-equipped with the tools required for data preparation and analysis.
Many organizations still rely on MS Excel and small-scale data management tools to process information and analysts are expected to provide high-quality insights and recommendations. No shade on Excel, but an organization that enables the analysts to spend more time on analysis work and less time on data wrangling makes work days exciting for their analysts.
Who does the analytics team report to?
Organizational structure is typically heavily influenced by the mission of the organization and the goals for your team.
Across various domains and industries with Analytics workforce, Analytics teams typically report to Product, Marketing, and even IT & engineering in some cases. There are also cases where analytics is established as a shared service among all these stakeholder groups.
Ideally, you’d want data teams to be part of in-house departments that are not heavily influenced by product and marketing budgets and other fluctuations. Matured organizations greatly benefit from keeping the Data teams an unbiased source of truth.
What % of the analytics reports are self-service in nature?
Analytics plays a key role, not only in evangelizing business insights across various teams in the organization.
An important function of analytics is to enable leaders to understand data concepts, provide them the ability to interpret and analyze data, and hence giving them the capacity to make data-driven decisions.
Data literacy goes a long way in providing tools to management to take educated next steps and carve out strategy. This also helps in reserving precious analyst time to solve complex problems that require data and domain expertise.
How often do decisions get made because of data evidence? Does your organization integrate data as a central component in decision-making?
Old habits die hard. This is especially true for older large organizations that still rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, biased opinions, and existing long-term relationships with vendors while setting up business strategy. This can lead to expensive mistakes.
Without an unbiased and independent analytics center of excellence, organizations cannot become agile and efficient in making data-driven decisions. Test, Analyze, Learn, and Implement cycles are essential for the growth of the company and eventually the employees.
How would my role influence decisions related to data strategy in your organization?
An analyst’s job description can heavily depend on the organization’s data culture.
During your entry-level analyst days, it is typical for you to just produce routine reports as a reaction to stakeholder questions. As time and your experience progresses, you should expect to be invited to strategy meetings where decisions are made.
You should expect to be proactively providing business insights that drive decisions across the organization and you should have an active role in the data initiatives.
Your feedback should be valued and taken into account before allocating a budget for data literacy and data management. This lets you do impactful work and analysts who are involved in doing impactful work are far more happy doing their reporting analysts counterparts.
Happy interviewing and data wrangling!
About the Author :
Nithhyaa Ramamoorthy currently serves as a Digital Analytics Lead at the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Digital Health. She has more than a decade’s worth of experience in all things Data, specifically in healthcare and consumer behavior. She holds a Master’s Degree in Information Sciences and more recently a CSPO along with several other certifications. She is passionate about leveraging her analytics skills to drive business decisions that create inclusive and equitable digital products rooted in empathy.
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