Data In Community
Welcome to Cindy Lin Consulting's blog series on Data Culture. For all entries, see our Blog.
Published June 1, 2023
One of the principles of the Data Culture Framework is Community, that is the importance of using data within a community of peers to add more value than if you were each using it on your own. I cover this in some detail in my blog post on the Departmental Layer of the Data Culture Framework. Because a community that uses data together can take many different forms, I asked my community to share stories of what data in community looks like for them.
Do you have your own story to share about the power of using data within your own community? Share with us!
Kathryn Wolterman and Yohance Barret
I met Kathryn and Yohance in LA Tech4Good's Leading Equitable Data Practices workshop in December 2020. They are both consultants at CGI who have brought data equity and ethics topics to their organization to achieve significant impact.
"At the information technology consulting firm CGI, data justice is a topic that’s extremely important to both us as a company and to the clients we serve. We have held internal workshops to apply a data justice lens to the products and services that we offer, along with our internal processes that affect our CGI community. Working together as a group to promote our equitable data mission allows us to examine topics through a wider variety of perspectives and come up with creative solutions."
Jason Rubinstein
Jason and I met at HopSkipDrive, where they supported key clients on the operations team. They were also a regular attendee of Data Gym. (Data Gym is a once weekly event open to all in the company that shares data insights, usually based on coworker submitted questions.) Since then, Jason has joined me at Cindy Lin Consulting as a content editor, but more importantly, a close friend.
"I’ve worked in many different roles at several start-ups in the tech sector, and one of the most chronically counterproductive things I’ve seen was the lack of communication between different teams that hindered crucial decision-making. When the Engineering or Product Teams would decide on a change that significantly impacts business operations, there were times when there was little communication about the change to the larger organization. The teams most affected by these changes would then be left scrambling and frustrated. Missives from on high with no context or a chance to provide input left people feeling dictated to, siloed, and ill prepared to do their jobs, instead of empowered and engaged.
Let’s take a common occurrence I saw on multiple Customer Service Teams: Let’s say there’s a week the team starts getting a very high number of calls about a bug after the Product Team rolled out a new update. The Product and Engineering Teams (The Builders) are aware of this bug, but their data shows it’s only affecting 1% of users, and so they don’t prioritize fixing it nor do they share that fact with the Customer Service Team. But for the Customer Service Team, that 1% of users is taking up 90% of their inbound communications, slowing down overall response times and impacting customers in a different way. Perhaps the Engineering Team would prioritize this fix if they knew the impact on their coworkers. I do know that simply knowing the data behind the decision to not prioritize fixing the bug can go a long way to assuaging representatives’ displeasure at having to deal with the blowback.
That’s why I loved the weekly Data Gym meetings at HopSkipDrive, which Cindy organized. It was an opportunity for voices that are not typically heard to share what they’re experiencing in a forum where they can then actually break down the data in context, explaining why individuals are seeing what they’re seeing, and leading them to better understand why decisions are or are not being made. It was also an opportunity for people from different teams and departments to get to know each other’s roles a little better, and use their unique points of view to make helpful suggestions that normally wouldn’t be considered.
You didn’t have to have any special expertise or be a “data person” to meaningfully contribute to the work of others and get real value from these Data Gym meetings. Cindy made sure Data Gym was an accessible and encouraging space where there was no such thing as a stupid question or insight. You always left the meeting with something new to chew on for yourself or your team. From each meeting, I gained a better understanding of how to collect and analyze data, and how best to use the stories that the data was telling to much more effectively meet the needs of our clients. I could also see the impact that the operations and front line employees' feedback had on The Builders who would also attend the meetings; hearing the context for the data from us helped them better understand customer behavior, resulting in important insights that led them to build better solutions.
Equally important, I gained a growing sense of camaraderie among the attendees of Data Gym, especially with people I would normally never have the chance to interact with. It’s a simple principle that many workplaces overlook: if employees feel like they are all working together towards the same larger goal and they can see and understand the data that proves their efforts are paying off, they become more invested and impactful in their work. Even when smaller goals between departments might contradict each other, when the data shows there is an issue to be addressed, having that shared context primes people to take on the challenge together. That is the power of data in community!"
Left to Right: Cindy Lin, Mike Elder, Jason Rubinstein
Aaron Bianchi
Aaron and I are long time friends, meeting as undergraduates at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Since leaving WPI, Aaron has worked as an electrical engineer and moved into the data labeling and solutions space where he is currently the Director of Machine Learning Solutions at Digital Divide Data. In this role, he focuses on developing solutions to improve the safety and efficacy of autonomous vehicles by creating and optimizing data processing pipelines.
"Working with peers in a data-centric space has been an amazing experience. What I have seen again and again is that there will always be problems with the data, and most people can find a solution to whatever problem may exist through collaboration. When you get together and engage with the data and its challenges simultaneously, you can get much more effective and efficient solutions.
An example: I was working with a colleague to generate labels for an autonomous driving training data set. We had a weird request from a client, which led to questions on what data to label and how to label it. Between my colleague and I, we were able to develop (1) a simple process for the human labelers, and (2) a low-touch data transformation technique to get our client up and running. Independently, we would have only succeeded on one of those goals. Instead, we were able to leverage each solution to improve the output by more than just the sum of its parts."
Patrick Carmitchel
Patrick hired me into my first Product Manager job at TSIA, where he was the Vice President of Product Management. His development of TSIA’s three pillars - Data, Community, Outcomes - was one of the inspirations that eventually became the Data Culture Framework.
"One of the most gratifying seasons of my career was when I experienced the power of community-led data for producing meaningful customer outcomes. For six years, I led product management at TSIA, a global leader in data insight for technology subscription business models. My first task was to identify and prioritize new markets for expanding the portfolio.
I observed how the data insight was derived from peer groups of experienced executives through the sharing of data with TSIA. The pool of data was used to set the baseline for best in class performance across business line disciplines and departments in various industry verticals. In action, customers collaborated with an executive researcher to safely share deep operational data, which analysts used to develop a benchmark. The researcher shared that benchmark contextualized with anonymized data from key competitors within that customer’s peer group and clear recommendations for improvements. What had historically been a qualitative business practice, was now correlated to quantitative improvements in key performance indicators and financial results.
The data from the peer group acted as a spark, which became a flame when correlated to business outcomes, drawing executives from all over the world to warm themselves in its glow. They weren’t alone anymore. They too could participate by contributing their data and be honest with where they stood in their peer group and their industry. From this place of honesty, they could have the confidence to make thoughtful decisions and defend them, accelerating growth and profitability.
The beauty was its organic, evolutionary nature. The community would apply new proven best practices, fundamentally altering their business performance, then continue to participate in peer data sharing, resulting in the next best practice. It was a virtuous cycle.
Data. Community. Outcomes. These became the pillars of the company going forward, and the litmus test for any new product or experience we would create, contributing to consistent profitable growth YoY.
It also led to the Why statement for our organization - Be the answer.
That’s what we get to do when we lean into our communities. We get to be the answer, by participating in the data that delivers the solution we needed all along. "
Mike Elder
Mike wants you to know first and foremost to listen to his podcast, Box Angeles, where he, an actor and comedian, interviews other actors and/or comedians. He and I worked together at HopSkipDrive and bonded over our degrees in Civil Engineering that neither of us use.
"When I think about data in my community, I have a number of friends who create content for various social media platforms. We are constantly sharing insights – views, durations, likes – on our videos to try to identify trends in what draws people in and what holds their attention. There is no shortage of analytics on these platforms that allow us to really focus on what works and what doesn’t. We have spent many moments going through relevant search terms we see and sharing ideas to replicate our most successful works.
If we were doing this on our own, we would largely be blinded by anecdotal situations and our own biases. I want to create content for people that have the same interests as me, but come from it from a different perspective and background, and I can’t do that without sharing data in my community."
Cindy Lin (hey, that's me!)
I have seen the power of data in community throughout my entire career and wanted to contribute my own story from my time in manufacturing.
"Early in my career, I worked in a factory as the process engineer. At shift changes, I led meetings reviewing the MDI or Managing Daily Improvement Board, which showed updated key metrics results from the last day. I would prompt the group with questions when the data showed unexpected or undesirable results, and the operators would share their thoughts to help improve the overall numbers for the factory. This was key because when machine output drops on one line, the machine operator is the person who best knows what caused that drop. Surfacing data on machine output to all team members in that meeting where everyone attended created opportunities for team members to see how they compare; so that they can then connect with others to share and see what they can do to improve their performance.
I saw operators grow professionally, to the point where they would check the metrics before the meeting, and come ready to discuss and suggest improvements. Integrating data within your community may require certain rituals or new cultural standards of team collaboration and support for this to work but I believe teamwork done in this way is the most effective method of operation."
Sometimes, you can only carry strawberries with help from your community. But the strawberries is actually data.
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Cindy Lin Consulting is excited to bring this blog series on Data Culture to you to help you make impactful, ethical, and data driven decisions that grow organizations. If you need hands-on help with your Data Culture, I am available to help you strategize, plan, and implement a Data Culture for your organization. Contact us!