The Data Chief Podcast Episode

Last July I was the guest on a data leadership podcast called "The Data Chief". I've done a decent amount of mid-sized public speaking but I had never been on a professionally produced podcast before. It was a great experience and we got to cover a lot of ground from my diverse work history (astronomy, infosec, health tech, developer tools), to becoming an executive, and some of my thoughts on running a data team at scale.

I’ve had a slow but steady stream of people reaching out to me since then saying they enjoyed the recording and were able to apply some of what they learned. I thought it was a good nudge to write some thoughts down about the experience.

You can find the episode webpage here (opens in a new tab) as well as the embedded Spotify link below.

Highlights From My Conversation

A theme I tried to bring into the conversation was my perspective of a first time junior executive, someone who is on the executive team but not yet in the C-suite. I wanted to share some perspectives on how I got where I am, what I think worked for me, and what problems I’m working on.

One of the ideas I emphasize for folks who want to move into leadership positions is to understanding your unique value as a leader. You can’t be everything to everyone and make it to the top of any hiring pile you have to have the self-awareness to understand what makes you special.

For example, I’ve worked with a lot of security teams in my career. This is unusual and it’s influenced the way I think about risk. As I said on the show:

You can never completely neutralize risk. You want to document the risk and accept it. And I think it's the same thing with data work. You don't want to, for every situation, have the same degree of precision, the same amount of data required. It's sometimes okay to be directionally accurate and to estimate things.

That’s probably not a make-or-break opinion, but it is something that is based on my experience and it sets me apart a little bit. Having the self-reflection to Identify these things in yourself is something aspiring leaders need to be able to do.

There’s lots more in the episode so if that sounds interesting please check it out and let me know what you think.

Sheepishly Helpful

I was actually hesitant to appear on The Data Chief because it feels intimidating, even arrogant, to get in front of a microphone and claim you have something meaningful to say about data leadership. I’m easily taken in by the common cognitive distortion that just because there are people who are more knowledgeable than me, then clearly I can’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the conversation.

I’m glad I was able to ignore that voice in my head. Earlier this week someone reached out to thank me for helping them find a job leading a data team. My contribution was this podcast episode and few other conversations that inspired them to want to come back to data work and gave them a roadmap to do so.

This was kind of a full circle moment because this is the same individual who encouraged me to go on the podcast in the first place. We had met at a local data meetup and I had offered him some career advice. In turn, I told him I had been invited to appear on a data podcast but doubted I had anything interesting to say. He politely corrected my self-perception (a common theme for me) and encouraged me to go ahead.

All this is to say, everyone struggles with being “enough”. If you want to do some public speaking and get a chance to — go for it! And let me know.

This work by Alex C. Viana is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4