Prologue
In my first job, one of my primary responsibilities was manually filling out an Excel sheet that powered a rudimentary dashboard with the most important KPIs. The dashboard was shown at the standup, which meant arriving early at the office every morning. Back then, I had little to no experience with data. But I was going to do anything in my power to sleep 15 minutes longer.
My plan was to find the right dashboarding tool and learn how to automate this report. That was when I came across Tableau. Very quickly, manually refreshing dashboards became a thing of the past. Honestly, I had a lot of fun building dashboards and torturing the data for insights.
One day, a top-level manager passed by my desk on his way to a meeting. When he noticed I was building a dashboard, he approached me and asked: “Are these the results of the latest campaign?”. I nodded. He grabbed a chair, sat next to me, and proceeded to ask me multiple follow-up questions. I will never forget the fascination in his eyes when I opened Tableau and started creating visuals in a matter of seconds. That moment changed the rest of my career.
As the requests started growing, I had to ask for help from my systems and database administrators. Unfortunately, they were always busy with other projects, and I was never on their priority list. Getting access to a system or requesting any change in the data warehouse was always a hassle. Often, it was easier to go to tutorial hell and teach myself how to do it myself.
The level of support from both the IT department and your management team can vary between companies and even roles. However, you can likely relate to this story. Despite this incident occurring almost a decade before the term “analytics engineer” was coined (during a time when the biggest buzzwords were Hadoop and IoT), two enduring lessons emerged: the ability to analyze data makes you indispensable, and enhancing your engineering skills reduces your reliance on the IT department.
Please note that the journey from manual data entry and lack of IT support is not just a story of personal growth; it highlights a broader need within organizations. This book is born from those challenges. At first glance, this book is a roadmap to empower individuals with the skills and knowledge to bridge the gap between data analysis and engineering. On a deeper level, it is about overcoming the technical and human challenges to become a data-driven organization.
Juan Manuel Perafan
Analytics Engineer
Xebia
