When building a data culture - start with getting teams focused on impact

Building a data culture starts with getting your company focused on impact.

Shipping stuff

Tech companies must move fast, and most develop a healthy habit of shipping stuff early and often. But a common trap where companies get stuck is to celebrate shipping but forget about measuring impact.

The act of launching isn’t actually what’s valuable to the company. It’s the potential impact we are after and the learnings that will help us get better outcomes over time. What we want is to move our metrics, which can be really hard.

When teams are motivated just to ship and ship - they will never have time to properly analyze their impact and learn from it. Data becomes a nice-to-have and, no matter their speed, teams will likely not get the impact we want.

Focusing on impact

The best companies I’ve seen develop a culture where impact is king & queen. Their teams are expected to iterate and learn, and the definition of done is getting your intended result or learning why it’s better to try something else.

With this focus, individual projects might take a bit longer as teams take time to iterate. Over time, you will find the company is actually reaching results much faster and gets compounding effects from iterating and learning.

And when teams are motivated to make impact, metrics and analysis quickly become a need-to-have. On the data side, you will feel a great organic pull from the organization as more teams need data in their daily work.

Changing culture

I think it should be our job as data leaders to be champions for this impact-focused culture. It’s in our interests as building a strong data culture will be much harder without it.

Culture goes back to the company leadership. What gets rewarded drives behavior, and when leadership is visibly keen on getting measurable results, managers everywhere will notice. At Spotify - even back in my days - new managers quickly learned that they needed to bring numbers to discussions. Daniel and Gustav, in partnership with analytics, set the standard that spread throughout the org.

If your org is not yet impact-focused, you’ll likely need to partner up with your management team and start challenging your fellow leaders (in a friendly way). For me this simple question has worked really well: “if we don’t care about the impact, why are we doing the projects in the first place?”