Being in the Data Science industry for the last decade, I have seen small businesses and enterprises alike change their perspective on the value that data has for their company. It is no longer about ‘why’ your business should focus on data and analytics strategy, but about HOW to integrate data within your company. As a leader concerned about delivering success on data projects, it is now left up to you to define how data strategies and initiatives are executed in the whirlwind of all other business objectives, and ever-changing practices.
While playing in past leadership roles in data utilization, I’ve had some wins among the losses that have helped build data product strategy for the events industry. One company’s objective was to mature the events industry in their data and analytics strategy by giving them data products to visualize the operations of event management (dashboards, charts, and self-serve reporting), and offer customization on those data products by listening to customer needs and feedback. According to an article by The Harvard Business Review, “To tackle the challenge, companies should emphasize cross-functional collaboration, evaluate and prioritize data product opportunities with an eye to the long-term, and start simple.” In order to meet the SAAS roadmap deliverables, we had to adapt our product development strategy. Here are the three organizational initiatives we found most successful in accelerating data product development.