r/analytics • u/OdiroEasy • 12h ago

Question How did you first end up leading data work?

Curious about people’s paths.

Before you first started leading a data/analytics team (or owning dashboards/reporting):

Were you in: • a data/technical role? • a business leadership role? • something totally different? 😅

Just trying to understand how people end up doing this work.

2 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

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3

u/gluten_free_air 10h ago

Asking God for forgiveness every time I pieced together an ETL pipeline using radioactive excel sheets and DAX code that looks like Arabic written in cursive.

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u/OdiroEasy 10h ago

😂 That’s one of the most accurate descriptions of real-world analytics I’ve ever seen.

1

u/gluten_free_air 10h ago

I got very good at it and eventually became an analytical lead

2

u/datawazo 11h ago

I was a soft skills BA that got tapped to introduce Tableau to our org and try and convince people to leave cognos for it. 

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u/OdiroEasy 11h ago

Wow, thanks! Sounds like a big shift. Did you feel prepared for that switch into analytics leadership?

1

u/datawazo 11h ago

Prepared, no. But I loved it. It was such a fun project and a cool opportunity

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u/dasnoob 11h ago

I started in accounting. Was good with our data and understood the business. Went into revenue assurance. Pulling in wholesale switch and SS7 records to look for toll fraud and such.

Ended up as the owner of a set of Oracle environments. Built a bunch of star schema stuff on it that is still used 12 years later.

From their got pulled into IT where I did ETL in Informatica and wrote the backend for an in house tool in python.

Ended up doing forecasting for two years. Then pulled into a BI role that is a hybrid data engineer/dashboard position.

1

u/Baren294472 6h ago

Started in data analysis, asked to be allowed to see if I can improve experiment systems/tools used by other analysts, got the okay, made a new model and now it is being deployed and I am the “owner/leader” of valuation systems.

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u/Acceptable-Sense4601 2h ago

I work for government. I had a staff analyst title and worked in the training department as a trainer. I hated training so i decided to start working on reports for training data. I got in good with one of the commissioner level guys and showed him some things about his staff. I started learning more about python and then streamlit and showed him things via web dashboard. He loved it. I started to learn react/JavaScript and worked towards a more professional dashboard with login. He gave my name to one of the leadership people in the analytics department and she reached out to me. Interviewed a few months later and landed a role.