Alter Everything Podcast
A podcast about data science and analytics culture.
In this episode, we sit down with Heather Harris, Field Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx, as she shares invaluable insights for advancing your career in data and analytics. Tune in as Heather discusses how to elevate your personal brand, the power of storytelling in showcasing your work, and strategies for getting recognized in the workplace. Learn why asking questions is key to success, and get actionable networking tips to build meaningful connections.
Panelists
- Heather Harris, Field Chief Data and Analytics Officer @ Alteryx, @HeatherHarris, LinkedIn
- Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn
Topics
- Alteryx FREE trial
- Use Your Alteryx Badassery to Grow Your Career and Brand
- Building Your Professional Brand
- Alter Everything Episode 1
Transcript
168 Sharing Your Value Story & Growing Your Career
Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with Heather Harris, field Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx. In this episode, we chat about how analytics professionals can share the value of their work, build their brand, and grow their career as a network.
Let's get started.
Hey Heather, it's great to have you on our show today. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners? Hi Megan. It's good to be here. And I'm Heather Harris. I'm Alteryx's Field Chief Data and Analytics Officer. Hi. Awesome. Well, fun fact, Heather was on our very first episode of Alter Everything, so we're going full circle here by having her back on.
But I am really excited to chat and to hear your insights on building your brand, building your career, growing your career with Alteryx. But I think a good place to start would just be to hear a little bit about what your role is like at Alteryx and what you enjoy about it. Yes, the field Chief Data and Analytics officer, my role is to partner with leaders and executives at our customers to help them on their journey of analytics maturity.
A lot of the C-Suite, for example, they don't have true peers and data and analytics in their organization typically, and since I get to see across, Alteryx is more than 8,400 customers and I work with them. I really see what are some of the best practices that organizations do to become more analytically mature, to get the most out of their analytic investment.
And so I get the privilege of coming alongside them on their journey and really being a trusted partner. I bet you get to hear lots of cool stories and learn lots from all of the different C-suite individuals as well. What I wanted to talk about today was how do you recommend Alteryx users and just analytics professionals more broadly, share their work, share their analytics work, and build their brand?
Yeah. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is I believe that analytics processes can have huge impacts on an organization. And a lot of times, uh, let's say I'm an individual contributor. I'm an analyst, maybe even a data scientist, and I'm down in the trenches and I'm doing the work, I may not always realize what that impact is, and so I really encourage.
Folks to, to ask questions, to understand what is it that I'm impacting when I bring this data together? When I give you these insights, I'll share a story. I was recently at a big healthcare organization and this analyst was telling the story about how he was able to get accurate physician email addresses.
Now. That was a pretty hard technical task because these addresses came from multiple data sources. Sometimes they had different addresses, email addresses. Sometimes the spellings were different, so it wasn't a trivial technical task, and he worked hard. He used Alteryx to do all that data prep and blend and matching, and get it all just right and get it curated.
So for him that was a huge win because he figured out how to get that job done and that was the job that he was given. But there was a bigger story there. And so I asked him, I said, well, what are these email addresses used for? And he said, well, it's to make sure we email information to the physicians accurately and monthly.
And I asked him, so what information were you emailing? And he said, well, we're emailing their C-section rates. Because one, it's a reporting require requirement for us. It's a metric, a key metric that we wanna bring down C-section rates in the hospital. So we wanna make sure they know where they stand.
And I was like, well, what good does that do? And I was playing the teasing out the story. They get to the why and I was like, well, what would that do? And he's like, well, if they see their C-section rates and they bring them down, it saves us a lot of money. It actually improves patient outcomes. And the physician experience with meeting this requirement is much more seamless.
And so I was like, oh, so that's what you're doing as an analyst. You're improving patient outcomes, you're reducing cost for the hospital, you're increasing the bottom line for the hospital, and you're improving physician experience. And you could just see the look on his face of pride like, oh yeah, I did do that.
I. And that's what I'm passionate about is understanding, getting to the value that I know that people who are down in the data are doing every day. I love that story and I think that's a good example of a methodology of bringing out the data, storytelling, not stopping with one result, but keep asking why and seeing like where in the business the, the impact truly.
Lands, so I think that's a great example. Do you have any other strategies or methods you use with people when you're trying to bring out that story or help them share their analytics projects? I think part of it's just illuminating what those impacts could be, because sometimes if we've grown up in the data world and we're just working in the data, we may not have the business experience yet to understand what is valuable to an organization.
So sometimes just giving that language, and what I mean is just understanding that what I'm looking for is am I impacting revenue? Am I doing something that brings more money into my organization, or maybe my analytic process is reducing risk. Or in financial organizations ensuring that I'm doing regulatory reporting correctly and on time.
I like to say keeping my company outta jail, which might be a little extreme and exaggerated, but that's the point. And in some cases it actually could be true. Or did I develop a new business process? Did I open up a new market for my organization? Commonly people will save hours. And I like to say that's a low hanging fruit.
When I automate a process for sure, I can save a lot of hours. At the organization I was with as an Alteryx customer in the Wayback machine, we saved 10,000 hours in our first a hundred users, so that was not trivial. Wow. But there's also business stories to be told as well. Maybe someone comes and hands them a project and just says, Hey, I need you to take these five data sources and get me accurate email addresses.
To not be afraid to ask w why. What's the impact to get to that? Why? To keep asking those layered questions so that you can understand, because as I like to say, these are linked in worthy stories of your impact in an organization. Totally. And I love that tip of asking the why about how the analysis is gonna be used or even outside of analytics, even like.
My job with content, if somebody asks, oh, do you have the link to this? Or, oh, could I repurpose this? It's like, okay, what's it gonna be used for? And are we tracking that and how can we measure the impact of just that effort? I've started asking those questions more as opposed to just doing a, okay, yes, checking all the boxes.
But really following up on what was the impact of each of these things. Can we tell a story about it and like report it up? And that's just been helpful for me personally in my career growth as well. Because intuitively we know we matter, right? We know our companies have hired us to do something because we matter and we like to know how we matter.
At the end of the day, it's about people and feeling valued and feeling like we are seen and a part of something that's making a difference, and we know it intuitively, but to be able to actually articulate it feels really good. How have you seen this articulation, this sharing impact people's career journeys?
I know we talked earlier about upleveling in the career, so curious how you've seen that impact play out. Yeah, so for sure we talk about the value story and being able to get to that value story and knowing what our impact is. And part of what I see is I might have an individual contributor who does that and has done it well and is also able to articulate how they got there, like what did they actually do.
And this is actually where my role comes into organizations is helping with that coming up with a systemic way, a more organizational enterprise way of. How do we do this to have great impact, but even at the individual level, what I've seen practically speaking is when I have a, an analyst who's done a good job with telling their value and how they got there, often they get tapped to bring others on the journey, and that's how that leadership journey might start For them, they might be put in charge of a group as a technical lead or as a lead, an analytic lead.
Then given a management position, and then it can work up from there. And there's practical ways you can do this in an organization. So one example is in a lot of organizations where there are a lot of folks, there's a lot of analysts on an analytic journey, there might be some kind of internal community of practice or user group.
And it may be an Alteryx user group internally, or it might be a greater analytic community of practice. When folks lean into what's usually a voluntary position to help lead these groups, it can really accelerate and expand their own exposure in the organization and develop their own leadership capabilities.
So here's an example of an organization where I led analytic transformation. I wanted to stand up an internal Alteryx user group. I knew I had power users from very disparate parts of the business, and I thought, okay, I wanna have this user group. I can't do it by myself, and I wanna give other people an opportunity to come on the journey with me because the more I can bring people into increasing their own careers and their own journey, that just elevates us all.
And so what I did was I individually went to these four people and I said, Hey, you're doing great things. Increasing analytic maturity in our organization. Would you like to co-lead a user group? And what's in it for you is, I know you want to become a manager one day. This will give you a great opportunity to demonstrate your leadership capabilities, increase your visibility in our organization.
And then for me, my role was to increase analytic maturity in the organization. It also helped me get a win there because I got other people coming on that journey with me. I. Then by bringing in people from different parts of the organization. Basically I brought four leads in together. They took turns leading that user group and we only did it once a quarter, and by doing it once a quarter, each person only had to lead one time a year.
So I wasn't asking them for a heavy lift. It was, but it also gave them an opportunity. And so it's thinking that way about how can we do this together? How can I elevate other people? How can other people elevate their own career and how can we take advantage of opportunities we have? So it's just being mindful of those opportunities and how you can grow your career through some of these opportunities and leaning in.
Yeah, definitely. And I'm curious what you would say to people who maybe think, oh, well, I'm not a speaker. That's not me. I wanna move up, but I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna be posting on LinkedIn, I'm not gonna be speaking at things like. What would you say to those people, Megan? That's exactly why. When I was putting together this user group, this community of practice, I went to folks one-on-one because a couple of those folks were what we might term introverted, right?
If I would've sent out a blast email, Hey, I'm looking for four people. They're not gonna be the ones to raise their hand. What I've learned as a leader is sometimes people. Just need to be asked. They need to be seen that they have that leadership capability, that they have something to bring, and just asking them, they see themselves differently and they will lean in.
So I think as leaders, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're thinking about different ways to bring in. Folks who may not be the first to raise their hand. I'm a true believer of the power of our introverts and of our quietest people. There's a book out there called Quiet that I really love because I'm actually an extroverted introvert.
So I'm an introvert at heart and I've learned to be more extroverted in the world. But I recognize that there are people who, if I just ask them, they're gonna blossom and bloom. I love that when I've taken Myers-Briggs tests, I've scored like 51% extrovert, or then I take it the next time it's 51% introvert, so very much in the middle.
So that resonates with me as well. But yeah, I think those are great stories of seeing people uplevel their careers. And I mean, I'm curious on your take, if there's ways you've seen specifically Alteryx as a product help with that upleveling, what's the relationship there? Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the cool things about Alteryx as a platform is the continuum of analytic capabilities.
And what I mean by that is a lot of people come into using the platform to bring together disparate data sets and do the prep and blend tasks that they're typically doing in Excel manually, and to take them a lot of time. Once I do that and I make that part seamless and more automated, I now actually can do more analytics, true insights in my data, and I can keep going on that journey to predictive analytics, to ai.
And sometimes folks don't realize that Alteryx has had AI and machine learning in our platform for many years. Gen AI is the new kit on the block that we're putting under the hood to accelerate some of this analytic development. But the ability to develop and deliver your own AI and machine learning capabilities has been there.
So the way I've seen individuals and teams elevate their careers and roles look something like this. So I might have a data scientist, what I'll call a classically trained data scientist or someone with. More of an deep analytic background, like someone who comes from an economics background where they've learned some more advanced analytic techniques and they have more of a data science mindset.
And this was true of an analyst that I worked with in one of my prior roles that I was supporting on his journey. And what he recognized was he could develop data science models in Alteryx and he could use that code free approach to data science. To bring some of his analysts on the journey into developing data science capabilities.
And so he would share his work and they would build upon it, and they would grow their own skills. And then what was even cooler about that approach was so not only did he equip and enable his team to become more analytically mature and do more advanced analytics. He grew his own career by taking that approach, it was very clear that he had leadership capabilities.
He became a manager, then became a director, and really grew his career by using that holistic approach to analytics across a continuum of capabilities to show that he could bring together people on this analytic journey. So I think that was a fabulous way that I saw this data scientist grow his own career using the platform.
That's a really great example of bringing others along for the journey, helping others upskill. I'm shifting gears a little bit. I'm wondering what some of your networking tips are for growing your career. Yeah, so definitely when you meet people or I'm in a very externally facing role, so I meet people out in industry and at events and customers all the time.
And reaching out and connecting with them on LinkedIn. I know that sounds basic, but the more we grow our LinkedIn careers, the more exposure people have to us and our capabilities and us to the capabilities of our network and where we have touch points. And that has been benefited me over my career for a long time.
Being a resource to others as well as identifying folks in my community. That may be someone I met way back, and then now I'm working with this organization and realize we have touch points. So building that LinkedIn network, just every time you meet someone, add them to your network. I'm a big believer in the informational interview, especially people who are earlier in their career journey, but even people who are mid or leadership levels.
If you have aspirations of a next role, let's say you're an analyst and you wanna become a data scientist, reach out to people who have the role that you want, either in your organization or out. And you would be amazed at how open people are, even if you reach out to them cold and say. Hey, I noticed on your LinkedIn profile, you're a data science in the financial space.
That's an area I wanna get into. Hey, would you have 20 minutes for an informational interview? And 20 minutes is about a good, easy amount of time to ask for, and it's about all you need. When you do that, and when they accept, which many of them will be very thoughtful about that time together, have literally just three, four, maybe five targeted questions you're going to ask.
And be sure those questions aren't questions you could get answered on a Google search. Like don't ask 'em the obvious stuff that you should be able to go find out. Ask them personal questions about their journey. And by the way, one of the best places to find these people. Is the Alteryx community. We have more than a half million folks in our community.
And if you look at the people who are constantly contributing or answering questions, those are the people who love to engage in these kind of conversations. Don't be afraid to me. You could message through the community to these people and ask them, Hey, can I have a conversation with you and can I talk to you about your analytics journey?
So I'd say that's one way to really think about. Increasing your network, increasing your own brand, making yourself visible, and use the community to your benefit. Mm-Hmm. Don't be afraid to post your story up on the community. Don't be afraid to contribute to the community and share what you've done. You might think what you've done is basic.
I hear this all the time. I just had this in a conversation yesterday. Yeah. I'm just getting started on my journey. I don't think what I'm doing is all that, you know, special. And I was like, so you're the exact person that needs to post that story in the community because there are so many people like you who don't realize that's actually a great place to start.
And that's where someone is starting and that's where someone's increasing their contribution. So just remember, you don't have to have the most moonshot rocket science thing. To be valuable. Sometimes people wanna hear from people just like us. I totally agree. And it's easy to underestimate just the amount that you know, more than three months ago.
More than six months ago, like you may feel like you're still a beginner, but you may look at discussion posts and questions people have and realize, oh, that was a challenge I encountered and overcame two months ago. And I think people can be afraid to post or put themselves. But like you said, with messaging, the super active users, I've just seen their love for helping other people grow and mentoring.
Like the response that you can get back and valuable conversations you can have. I think it's so worth it to, to put yourself out there on the community. For sure. Totally. I thought a fun place to end would be to hear about. What's one thing you wish you understood about the analytics field earlier in your career?
Well, you know, when I first came out of even high school, going into college and trying to figure out what I wanted to study, I went into engineering. So my undergraduate is electrical and computer engineering. So a very analytical data-centric field. But every one of those assessments of what your interests are would point me to actuary.
No offense if you're an actuary out there because you do really important work. But I'm a really people oriented person. I'm really gregarious. I, for an introvert, I do like being around people in my roles or working alongside people, and I just thought that is just not a good fit for me. And it was because I actually loved programming.
I wrote my first computer program at age 11 and absolutely found that was a passion of mine. And, and math was always a strength of mine as well. And so when I was entering my career, the data science wasn't a thing yet. And mid-career was really when the data science moniker really became more popular.
And for me, that was when all the light bulbs went off, like. I love all these things and it's bringing together my strengths, my passions, and so I made a mid-career pivot and I went through a classical master's program in data science to make that pivot. But we had used big data in, even I was a computer chip designer, as an electrical engineer, and we had used big data and statistical analysis.
These have been in that role. So what I wish I would've known then was that there was going to be this path, bringing together this thing, and there was no way I could have known that. But I did just stick to the things that I was passionate about and I really enjoyed. And it was like a tapestry that ultimately wove together to bring everything together.
But what I would tell people now, because the world is a little bit different, maybe a lot different now, is data now. Is a part of everything we do. And what I mean by that is every role, if you're a finance major, if you're a marketing major, if you're somebody who's in supply chain, uh, if you're somebody who's in content development, right?
And content delivery, there is data that is a part of that role somewhere. Everybody can be a data person. Megan, you talked about how you're looking at the data, the insights of what you are doing, the impact that we know that you create for our organization, but bringing that data story behind it to life.
Anybody can be a data person. That's why Alteryx got into where it got into with the platform is to be able to equip anybody to be a data person. And I've seen this play out. Time and time again when I was a leader at a prior organization and I was leading analytics training, I had an admin come to me and she said, kind of sheepish Philly, I know I'm not a data person, but I see this Alteryx training thing you're doing, and I'm wondering, can I just sit in?
And I was like, oh heck yeah, like this is for you too. And she sat in and she developed some data skills. She found data that she could work with in her current role, and she became a data person. And, and that's what I would encourage anyone who is thinking about elevating or growing career, your career in any area, data can be a huge part of that.
And, and the technology is there to help you without having to code, without having to be a traditional data person and study it in college. It really truly is. For anyone. Yes, I agree. I love that. And super encouraging to hear stories of how you have enabled everybody to be data people when visiting these different companies.
So. It's been so great to talk to you today on the show, and I'll definitely include your social accounts in our show notes so people know how to find you on LinkedIn and connect. But thanks again for taking the time. Oh my goodness. Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure. The Alter Everything podcast is such a rich part of our community and it's just an honor to be here.
Thanks for listening. To learn more about top expansion in this episode, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast. And if you like this episode, leave us a review. See you next time.
This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.
