Hey there. 👋
We’re Annika & Colleen. We’re a couple of enterprise data nerds on a mission to bring more conversation to what we call ‘the human side of data’.
Today, we’re launching The Sequel — a newsletter doing just that.
Here’s some background 👇
🔥 Data is heating up — and it’s here to stay
We've finally reached the point where data is everywhere.
It’s being analyzed and applied in businesses of all shapes & sizes — from tech-forward Fortune 500s, to analog pizza chains.
Data is officially *kind of a big deal*.
And it's not that Analytics, Data Science, or Machine Learning are new disciplines — it's that data is becoming more available & more useful than ever before.
Why is that? A few reasons:
☁ The cloud becoming a thing
🛠 Huge advances in analytics tools
📈 The staggering amount of data being created in our increasingly digital world
Unless you're living under a rock, you probably already know all this. And even if you didn't know it explicitly, you probably felt it.
Data is the new ‘lingua franca’ of business.
🐎 But, it’s still the wild west
Despite how much attention data is getting, it’s still early days.
Companies everywhere are scrambling to 'do data', and to get the right people in place for the job.
We hear of companies setting aside budgets to hire Machine Learning experts — when they're still using Excel as their source of truth.
We see job postings for new types of roles popping up, as companies retroactively uncover fundamental gaps in their capabilities.
We hear debates around basic team structure — centralized? federated? centrally federated? — as companies scramble to determine how to set up their teams.
It’s messy. It’s nuanced. It's fast-moving.
Even for the best of companies, it’s a bit of a shit show. If your team is struggling, you’re not alone.
🧮 We’ll dig into it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly
From Fortune 500s to early-stage startups, we’ve been there firsthand — working on & with data teams, building them, and selling into them.
We’ll explore how companies approach the union of people & data.
Data maturity, career paths, team structures — we’ll touch on it all.
Also, memes. Definitely memes.
We’ll aim to make our content accessible to all types of data people, from Analyst to Chief Data Officer. And we’ll err away from super technical writing — we want this to be accessible to people on the more of the business-y side of data work, too.
If that sounds like you, left join us (cheesy SQL joke) & subscribe.
And if there’s something in particular you’d like to see discussed — let us know!
— Colleen & Annika
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