A Culture of Partnership During my time leading an analytics and data science team, I spent a lot of time thinking about how an ideal analytics team should operate – how the team should work together, how the team should prioritize their work, and how the team can most effectively partner with the broader organization to generate business value. I believe that for an analytics team to be effective, the team must develop a strong culture of partnership in order to actually drive business value.

People often ask for advice about building out an analytics organization – How to structure the team? What skills to hire for? Do we need engineers? What about data scientists? How big should the team be? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to these questions, because the best analytics team is the one that best supports the organization and its specific needs. To make things even more complicated, A) different organizations have very different needs and B) your organization’s needs today will be very different from its needs in the future. In this post I will discuss some of the different dimensions that are import to evaluate when thinking about how to structure an Analytics team.