I’ve spent the last few years in the field of analytics consulting, working in fast paced, highly customer-facing roles. In my work, I’ve gathered a great deal of requirements and built many analytical tools, reports and dashboards. Below I’ve highlighted some of the lessons I’ve learned and advice I’ve received along the way (in no specific order!) that I’d like to share with you today.
1. Take note of stakeholder shifts in the middle.
When your stakeholders change in the middle, chances are the requirements you have gathered may not be the requirements anymore. Keeping your head down and marching along increases the likelihood that your next review meeting will not go as expected. Instead, I would spend some time level-setting again with the new stakeholders on the original requirements and assessing their buy in. It is likely there will be some scope change, and depending on lots of factors (magnitude of change, value of the customer, risk of churn, etc), your response might vary along the “ask for more money” to “do it for free” spectrum.
2. If you go the extra mile, highlight it.
I like a pleased customer, and sometimes (or many times) I go the extra mile to make customers happy. “Free work” is not the ideal state (as you are likely the one overworked doing it), but if it happens, highlight it and make sure your customer knows what you did for them. Planting a good deed in their minds comes handy down the road when success of a future conversation hinges on the foundations of a good relationship.
3. Take the time to document.
Like other things in life that are upfront investments for some future gain, taking a pause to document may not always be top of mind. However, if you’ve been asked about something twice or more, then maybe it is time to start oiling the documentation machine in your medium of choice (e.g help article, internal wiki, pinned post). If you struggle to find the time for it, but see value in it, add it to your OKRs or yearly goals. Documentation does not only have to be for the things people ask you about, it can also be for your raw thoughts and findings. You’ll be surprised what you can come up with when you write things down (that’s how the reporting framework I developed in my last role started off).
4. Seek productivity tools and automate.
There are a lot of productivity tools out there. A personal favourite is Blaze Text, which comes handy in roles that tend to have a pattern of similar follow-up emails, messages or replies to customers, stakeholders, etc. It lets you create and then seamlessly apply your templates anywhere on the web. Check it out here! However, not all automation is a plug-in or a piece of software, some are home grown with day-to-day tools. An excel logic for data cleaning, a simple python script, or integration between salesforce / google sheets / slack are all forms of automation that can free up your time in the long run and improve overall work satisfaction.
5. QA is king.
If you’ve thought you’ve done something many times and that you can skip QA, think again. Unfortunately, you never know when a product change or a failed data pipeline impacts the data you are working on. In reality, not all teams have the proper alerts setup to notify you when things fail, and it can slip the mind of your product / eng team to inform you about recent changes in product, data transformation, logging, etc. This is definitely a lesson I learned the hard way, so take a few minutes to do a quick QA, it’ll be worth it!
Kalia Akkad 