This blog is part of Aryng’s analytics tips series for executives: CMO, Chief Product Officer, and CEO
One of my CEO friends is extremely disappointed with analytics. Not one to let such a feeling (about analytics) slide, I discovered that he had hired a chief data scientist about 18 months ago with great hopes of getting on the BIG DATA bandwagon. The chief then hired a team of 12 statisticians and started solving complex problems with advanced and complex algorithms. As expected, those problems took long to solve, but unfortunately did not quite move the business. The CEO, a year and a couple of million dollars later, was disappointed with his analytics investment. Under pressure from the board, he fired the chief as well as his team.
As it turned out, the chief data scientist was entirely motivated by technology and not driven by business outcome. Working on analytical research projects is intellectually rewarding. But outside of academia, analytics work should be aligned with real and important business goals. Having seen many bad hires for the role of head of analytics, I’d like to share with you on what to look for when hiring such a person.
Analytics
Before we get into discussing how to hire the head of analytics, let’s talk about the team makeup. The team can include people with expertise such as:
- The Head of Analytics or Analytics Director, who drives the analytics agenda and leverages his team to execute against it.
- The Business Analytics professional, who has strong hands-on business analytics and testing skills using Excel or other tools.
- The Predictive Analytics professional, who has hands-on expertise in business analytics as well as advanced analytics and statistical tools
- The Data Analyst, who has strong SQL skills to pull data, and has high-level comfort in business analytics
You might be able to recruit professionals with hybrid skills combining two or three of the above skills. The exact skills makeup of your team is entirely governed by your analytics agenda and the kind of questions you are looking to answer with data. I had previously written about how to lay the analytic agenda using the 3-key Questions framework here.
Back to the leader of the analytics team. The Head of Analytics should have these three skills in addition to having a strong analytics aptitude:
- Have the ability to layout the Analytics agenda for the organization to drive growth and revenue using a structured approach like the 3-Key Questions.
- Have the ability to build a data-driven culture by mentoring and training analysts; including “Data to Decisions”™ training for business professionals to enable the team to self-serve for 80% of the business questions.
- Have the ability to understand what the analysts and business professionals need to effectively leverage data and provide that as an input.
Successful Analytics needs appropriate data infrastructure to enable productive use of data in decision-making throughout the organization. In a larger organization, the head of analytics needs to provide input to the data infrastructure. In smaller organizations, the head of analytics may be responsible for the data infrastructure, in which case they need a high-level understanding of information architecture to hire the right database analyst. The end goal is that it has to be easy for both the analyst and the business professionals to access the data they need. If it isn’t easy, they simply won’t use it.
The head of analytics need not be your best analyst or a brilliant data scientist. Rather, the role is managerial, part visionary and part evangelist. Yes, the head of analytics should be a competent analyst, but more importantly, he or she must be able to communicate the power of analytics, to bolster the KPIs, and demonstrate success in increasing the top line.
Thus, finding the "Analytics hero" often entails a long drawn out search followed by a long interview. At Aryng, we offer specialized Analytics staffing services to accelerate the time to find the perfect fit for various roles including the head of analytics, data-driven head of product and marketing, and analytics professionals at various levels. We use quantifiable metrics to assess a company’s business needs and provide tailored solutions. We also mentor/coach professionals through our Aryng Intensive Analytics training program. If you would like us to help accelerate your search and find the right person to hit the ground running, please fill this short form and we will get in touch to discuss further.
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