In a recent post, Mode founder Benn Stancil discusses the maturation of analytics as a profession, drawing parallels between analytics and accounting. He makes an argument for the standardization of metrics (like Lever Labās SOMA) in the same way that GAAP standardized accounting.
We were at our best when we weren't just building dashboards and mechanically tracking metrics; we were at our best when we were given vague problems, well-sourced data, and the time and tools to go exploring.
I appreciated the post and I fully agree that, yes, if weāre thinking from a āmaturityā perspective and we want analytics to āgrow up,ā it would be logical to do so, but I disagree with the premise: who says we want to grow up?
Searching for fun
One book that seems to resurface in my life every few months is Linus Torvaldsā Just for Fun.
The book, Torvaldsā personal recount of creating Linux, is interesting to me not just because of the unique story of Torvalds and his playful writing style, but because of his motivation: fun.
Now donāt get me wrong, no one is perfect and I donāt expect Torvalds to be, but I do believe fun was one of his primary motivators, even if š° was another.
Absent entirely from Stancilās argument is what it means to make analytics fun, which isnāt mutually exclusive from a set of accepted metrics. Sure, as the profession matures, there will be fewer generalists and more specialists, but product/analytics is inherently more creative than accounting (Iām not sure exploratory data analysis has an accounting parallel).
Stancil briefly mentions creativity, but I think thatās the main component that differentiates accounting from analytics and the piece that makes it a bit easier to look for fun in data.
Learning to have fun
Itās a bit funny that I had to relearn āhow to have fun.ā When I think about what that phrase means, my perspective has changed drastically in the last half-decade.
Iāve always considered myself a driven, motivated person. I played baseball for the first 21 years of my life, trained with extreme passion (and still do, albeit at other endeavors), and relentlessly pursued things I felt important to me.
I walked away from college with two degrees (now somewhat irrelevant š ) and a trip to the D3 World Series. My enthusiasm and passion paid off in ways I didnāt think it could, but looking back on it, Iām not sure I really enjoyed myself until the very end.
I suppose winning is fun, too.
It was only when I surrounded myself by a group of quirky, rag-tag D3 baseball players that I was able to see the value and power in making things fun. They showed me you could work hard and still enjoy yourself.
Unfortunately, most people are not very passionate about what they do for a living. An even more unfortunate fact is that most people arenāt very passionate about what they chooseĀ to doĀ outside work. Thatās a bit sad!
In my experience, the best way to āmake things suck lessā is through gamification.
Take what youāre doing, maybe you donāt want to do it, and turn it into a game. Make it fun. Some how, some wayā I promise itās possible. Actually, itās more than possible: gamifying things for long enough brings enjoyment, even those inherently painful, like grueling exercise.
Track your achievements, your work product, or maybe the number of people you help/the nice things people say about you (I do).
Not all heroes wear capes š¦øš»āāļø
But donāt be selfish!
You have to make it fun for the people around you, too. Show up with a smile (not all the time, weāre not robots) and make dumb jokes. Talk about your weekend or toss in some self-deprecating humor.
Thatās what my teammates taught me way back in 2018ā that we could work hard while goofing around and end up the 5th-best team in the country. Maybe the other 4 were working harder and not goofing off (or maybe at that point itās luck), but if you can get to zeroth percentile and enjoy yourself, what more is there to ask for?
ā¦ but what about analytics?
Making analytics fun
Most of my experience still lies in product analytics, which can either be a joyride or hell. Ironically, what Benn describes in his article is usually when things go awry: ājust building dashboards and mechanically tracking metrics.ā
For something so inherently interestingā discovering what users enjoy, uncovering exciting trends, improving process, and influencing the direction of a productā how can it become so rote? So dry?
Well, the answer is pretty simple: undifferentiated work and a lack of creativity.
Differentiated work
The more time I spend doing things I shouldnāt be doing (the stuff anyone can do that isnāt fun), the less happy I am. If I spend 3 hours in traffic to go on a 90 minute hike:
I didnāt spend my time well
I remember the traffic more than the hike
Similarly, if I want to deliver a cool report and show my team an exciting new trend, but I have to:
Spend hours in meetings that donāt matter (some do)
Spend hours more than I should in Jira
Do the work
Respond to uninformed comments
Fight fires
Deal with bad tooling (data teams need to iterate faster!)
Send the work to a stakeholder who already forgot about it
Watch it slowly decay to obsolescence
Itās not difficult to see why work might be less than fun. Even if the actual work yields an exciting result, itās sandwiched between corporate hell.
If youāre working with a stakeholders that have a short attention span, the problem gets worse. Nothing is more demotivating than work that ends up in the trash bin.
So reduce undifferentiated work, for the sake of everyone involved. This looks like:
No dumb meetings
Reduce, but donāt eliminate, process
Get good tools (think ROIā being cheap helps no one)
Improve developer experience, relentlessly
Work with good people
All easier said than done, but if you start with #6, the rest are much easier. Itās actually funnyā the hype is artificial intelligence, but a vast majority of lifeās problems are solved by non-artificial (actual) intelligence and good people.
Start with finding good people that let you work hard on what youāre passionate about, the rest follows. This brings me to my next point:
Creativity
Iām feeling like the sun never sets
Heaven is a place in my head
Christo Bowman // Bad Suns
Ok, now hereās where itās on you. You can have a really great manager/leader that does everything Iāve just mentioned and still be unhappy. As a matter of fact, you can be unhappy no matter how many good things happen to you. Many are! I am sometimes!
Emotions are odd and somewhat uncontrollable, but that means the opposite is true: you can also be happy even when bad things happen. Now thereās a revelation.
For me, that means getting creative and saying yes. Say āyesā to those fun little experiments or new things. āYesā to those things that pique your interest but arenāt āin your lane.ā Say āyesā to that little project that you feel is slightly out of your current capabilities.
But to say āyes,ā we also have to say āno,ā right? After all, thereās only so much time in the day. Do it.
Say ānoā to dumb meetings and requests that are better suited for another teammate (or no one at all). Say ānoā to things that donāt make sense. Have tact, but be firm. I promise your teammates will appreciate it. Many of these things are no oneās fault in particular, they just come about from group-think and the difficulty of change.
Being creative is about Essentialism, removing the unnecessary, perhaps more than innovation. The latter usually follows the former.
For everything you do say yes to, challenge yourself to do it the best you can. I guess that goes for analysts & accountants, it doesnāt really matter. You can have fun with a balance sheet or a Google Sheet. Itās all a state of mind.
You can just āhave a jobā or you can live your dreamā thatās entirely up to you. Yes, we need to fight for process and a good work environment, but that only goes so far.
If you try for long enough and your coworkers/friends arenāt supportive, then get new onesā¦ or start a company. I hear thereās lots of funding if you snag an .ai
domain. šĀ
Choose fun
I fail to see why analytics needs to āgrow upā for the same reason I love tech and data. Itās the wild west. š¤ Ā
You can still move out to Silicon Valley (or donāt and work remote, but people are more fun outside of Zoom) and participate in some of the most exciting, low-bureaucracy work on planet Earth: itās amazing.
The moment we start to āgrow up,ā with standardization, pigeonholing, and rigidity, is the moment it dies. Thatās the moment I go somewhere else to continue doing exciting work, where I can focus and make a difference.
If analytics became accounting, I would cease to be an analyst. If AI renders data engineering the equivalent of making widgets, Iāll find something else. But to be honest, even if I ended up accounting Iād never be an āaccountant.ā
Thatās just itā regardless of whether your field āgrows up,ā you choose your own adventure. Forget āgoing further as an industry,ā how about we challenge ourselves to be the best we can be. I fully believe thatās tied to how much weāre having fun.
Not everything can be fun and life is not all š¹ and āļø. Bad stuff happens and life is hard sometimes. However, if youāre like me (pretty motivated and a little too type-A) and you notice yourself grinding a bit too much, ask yourself if youāre having fun and see what you can do to fix it.