Blog: Technical and Leadership Articles

From a Sr. Business Intelligence Leader at Amazon

Are you Aware of Dashboard & Query Performance Issues? analytics data Jun 16, 2023

Throughout my career leading analytics teams at eBay, Amazon, GameStop, and a handful of other companies, I’ve seen a lot of data analysts overlook potential performance issues. Whether through SQL written directly against the database or through derived SQL from Tableau and Power BI...

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Correlated Data Could be Costing You Millions analytics data stakeholders Apr 30, 2023

Stakeholders frequently ask for data from analysts without providing context. Worse, with the increase in self-service tools, stakeholders are drawing their own conclusions with data, even though they lack the proper understanding and training to use the data. These conclusions are then used to...

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The Dangerous World of Self-Service Analytics analytics analytics engineering data sql Apr 10, 2023

 

Most analytics leaders put self-service analytics at the top of their list of items on their annual roadmap, but they never seem to talk the potentially disastrous implications of creating self-service tools. Enabling self-service analytics sounds straight forward where data engineering...

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Avoiding Vanity Metrics analytics data sql stakeholders Nov 15, 2022

Early in my career in the analytics field I started to become inundated with task request from stakeholders.  I felt overwhelmed and confused at times by what my stakeholders were asking for.  There were already countless dashboards and metrics, yet I was receiving more request to...

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SQL Best Practices analytics analytics engineering data data engineering sql Jun 18, 2022

In this post I’m going to share some best practices for formatting SQL that I’ve learned and used over the last 20 years. Many of these tips are things that I’ve collected along the way out of frustration with inheriting code, needing to perform updates, chasing down bugs, and...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Implementation (Part 7) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Jun 11, 2022

Welcome back to Part 7 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. In parts 1–5, we covered a number of challenges that analytics organizations face and in part 6, we covered a comprehensive solution. In this part, we’ll discuss how to implement the solutions within your...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - The Solution (Part 6) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Jun 04, 2022

Welcome to Part 6 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. So far, we’ve discussed:

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Table Issues (Part 5) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 28, 2022

Welcome to Part 5 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this part, we’ll be covering a few issues surrounding the usage of tables and views.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 ...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Visualization Issues (Part 4) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 21, 2022

 

We’ve arrived at Part 4 of Building a Better Analytics organization and in this part, we’re going to cover issues around visualizations within applications such as Power BI and Tableau since those are the two most common applications. In this article, We will highlight the...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Code Issues (Part 3) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 14, 2022

If you’ve been following along, this is Part 3 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization — Code Challenges.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Common Issues (Part 2) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 07, 2022

Welcome back to my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the specific problems that...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Introduction (Part 1) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Apr 30, 2022

Welcome to Part 1 of my 7-part series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this series we’ll be discussing how to create a connected analytics world to help you move faster, with fewer bugs, and less headaches. In this article, I’ll cover a background of the analytics...

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What is Jira and Why Should I Be Using It? analytics analytics engineering data data engineering management Apr 22, 2022

If you’ve never used Jira (or any other issue tracking software) then allow me to introduce you to Jira. If you are an existing user, hopefully I’ll be able to share a few practices that may be of benefit to you and your environment. This article provides an introduction to Jira and...

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Analysts are not Software Developers (but they should be) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Apr 02, 2022

 

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been consistently working in the tech space and I’ve worked as an individual contributor and a manager with 6 different companies. I started out in software quality assurance engineering, wrote various applications, and later moved into analytics...

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Are you Treating your Analysts like Task Rabbits? analytics data management stakeholders Feb 16, 2022

Throughout my career I’ve seen a number of different analytics teams and as you might expect, there are a handful of similarities and a handful of differences in how each team operates. But one thing that has consistently stuck out is how analysts are frequently hired, viewed, and utilized...

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Tips and Components of Great Analytics Project analytics data Feb 07, 2022

Recently I was mentoring an individual (early in his career) and he asked me a question: “What makes an analytics project a good project?” I thought that this was a really good question and worth talking about because the answer impacts individuals that are working on existing...

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