The landscape of data analytics is changing rapidly, becoming much more akin to software development in many organizations. Gone are the days where an analyst might have a folder full of SQL files on their desktop, used to generate charts which are pasted into a powerpoint. Today, most analysts are being asked to create work which is easily repeatable, traceable, and consistently reliable. In other words, work like engineers

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We absolutely love dbt at TripActions, for all the capability it affords our team for data transformation, lineage and documetnation management, and testing. As a lead, one of the things I appreciate most is it empowers everyone to produce and deploy production grade code with confidence. However, the technical requirements for the work environment continue to get more complex, and many analysts would prefer to focus on analytics, getting into the data, building models, and gathering insights.

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Like many companies, we regularly ask our customers for feedback in the form of NPS surveys after their travels. However, we have an additional challenge in that we receive thousands of comments a day in 11 different languages which need to be interpreted by Category Managers (CMs) and Sales Managers (SMs) who are very unlikely to be able to read that language (our CMs/SMs come from all over the world, not many speak Finnish).

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Why give feedback? Feedback is one of the greatest ways to help others succeed in their work and professional lives. It is a chance for us to identify weaknesses that we may not be aware of, reinforce things we do well that we may not notice or realize the impact on others, and can help us prioritize which weaknesses we should focus on addressing. Additionally and somewhat paradoxically, giving difficult feedback to each other is a way to build stronger relationships within a team and increases overall performance as it shows trust (for the person giving and the person receiving), investment in each other, and prevents issues from remaining below the surface.

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One of the core responsibilities in leadership is to help those you lead to grow and develop, to help them excel at their current role, and to prepare them for their next role. And yet, many teams do not emphasize learning to a large degree, focusing more on the current problems rather than growing their team’s skillsets. This is a missed opportunity, as there are a number of benefits associated with creating an atmosphere which values and encourages learning and development:

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