Hey Yesterday I had a long chat with a marketing director at a bank.She told me, almost apologetically, how frustrated she gets with data teams.“They’re brilliant,” she said. “But they act like we’re idiots.”Oof.Her exact words:They throw a number at...

Hi I used to ask, “what’s the priority?”It sounds smart. But it’s useless.Because people don’t have a stack-ranked list. They have vibes. Deadlines. Politics. Fear.So now I ask this instead:What happens if we don’t do this?It slices through the noise...

Hi I once thought acting like a lead meant speaking first. Taking charge. Driving the meeting.So I did that. I took up space. Gave long updates. Asked hard questions. Tried to sound like the smartest person in the room.It backfired hard.One senior st...

Hi I used to spend hours in status meetings.Every Tuesday. Every Thursday. Always the same story.“Still waiting on the upstream team.” “Almost ready for testing.” “We’re about 80% there.”It felt like a play where everyone repeated their lines just to...

Hi It was a Tuesday afternoon when it hit me.I had just shipped a new data model. Spent weeks on it. Optimized, documented, tested. Felt like a damn masterpiece.I posted the update in the project channel. Nothing. Crickets. The kind of silence that m...

Hi , Yordan here,How's your summer? Mine is busy (and that's a good thing). So this week, for the review, I only have 1 article and one announcement. No seignifficant social media, unfortunately.Business Value MappingIt's the dead-simple method I now...

Hi I used to rehearse every stakeholder call like it was a TED Talk.What if they ask about the SLA again? What if I forget the numbers? What if I sound like a fraud?So I wrote scripts. Bullet points. Worst-case scenarios. I’d prep 40 minutes for a 15...

Hey If you’ve ever shipped a dashboard no one uses, here’s a thought:It’s easy to go heads-down and build a full pipeline or dashboard before showing anything.But most data products benefit from starting smaller.Next time, build a working slice. One...

Hey If you’ve ever shipped a dashboard no one uses, here’s a thought:You probably didn’t miss the requirements—you never got them in the first place.Data engineers get vague asks all the time:“Can you pull this data so we can maybe look into churn?”T...

Hey ,It’s been almost a month since The Data Leader’s Influence System went live. Time flies.I just wanted to check in and ask you something simple:How’s it going so far?Some folks already reached out with feedback, and I’m really grateful for it. I’...