Welcome Data Crunch Listeners!

Tools won’t build a culture. The right people will.

When companies want to become great at other competencies - 'we want to be design driven!' 'we want a great brand!' - they often invest in building robust teams. When companies want to get more out of their data, however, the instinct is different: the first focus is often on tooling and efficient scaling.

Nobody says we want to be a leading tech company but don’t want to hire many engineers.
Nobody believes they can be the next Apple by buying the design tools that Apple designers buy.
Nobody becomes Nike by using their marketing automation tools.
In these disciplines, companies understand that expertise comes from investing in the experts.

With data, it’s different. We often believe we can become Airbnb by copying their stack. We try to make ourselves data-driven by “scaling ourselves,” by providing data access to everyone and assuming this makes us smarter. As a result, companies focus on making data accessible, offload analysis to business users who can “self serve,” and often neglect making sure that access leads to true business value.

Companies that want to become data driven should take a different approach: they should invest in hiring more analysts who specialize in answering questions with data. While data visualization tools now enable all of us to create charts that look just as good as any that Nate Silver would make, the gap between his insights and most of ours is enormous. To build a culture that not only values data, but also gets value out of data, companies should focus on hiring and empowering their data scientists - their Nate Silvers - to be as productive as possible.