Analyzing the Analyzers

Chapter 6. Final Thoughts

After considering themselves and their careers in the framework we have suggested here, Binita, Chao, Dmitri, and Rebecca all made some changes. Binita learned some clearer ways of talking about the diversity of people on her team and will help HR to more clearly define roles, at least until she leaves to strike out on her own. Chao sees the value in specializing more and will be signing up for some massive open online courses (MOOCs) to deepen his Statistics skills. He hopes to complement his existing visualization skillset with some work in time-series modeling. Dmitri, conversely, sees some benefit in diversifying a bit and will start to read more about data visualization technology and about how to sell data projects to managers. Rebecca has identified some process and organizational changes in her company that would help her be more effective and will start chatting with managers about how those might happen.

Others benefited from this framework too. That CEO who was looking for a “god” got his expectations in line with reality and is now looking to build a small, diverse data science team. And the firm that confused Binita’s Data Businessperson skills with those of a Data Developer has a newfound appreciation for the variety of people in this field and the variety of talents that they bring to the table.

We hope that our work can be valuable to the community broadly, but we realize that this article is just one step forward. Our suggested names for ...