00:00:04 Tim Gasper
Juan, welcome. It's Wednesday, and it's time for Catalog and Cocktails. Your honest, no BS, non- salesy conversation about enterprise data management presented by data. world. I'm Tim Gasper, longtime data nerd, customer guy, product guy at data. world, joined by Juan Sequeda.
00:00:19 Juan Sequeda
Hey, Tim. I'm Juan Sequeda, principal scientist at data. world. And it's Wednesday, middle of the week towards the end of the day. And it's time to take a break, have a drink, have a very stiff drink today-
00:00:33 Tim Gasper
I can smell the swamp.
00:00:36 Juan Sequeda
...and chat data. And I'm super excited about our guest today, Aaron Wilkerson, who's a senior manager and data strategy and governance at Carhartt. Aaron is somebody who I've been chatting for... I don't know, almost two years we've had conversations. We had rescheduled meetings, and we would just chatting about what's going up in life and data. And we would have all these conversations. And you started getting so active on LinkedIn. And I just love seeing all your content, how you go with it. And when you read your content, you're like, " Wait. Aaron. There's so much stuff that Aaron has in his head." And when you said it's close to your vest, so let's see how much you actually open up and show us more of what's going through your mind today. Aaron, how are you doing?
00:01:18 Aaron Wilkerson
I'm doing great. Looking forward to being here. Longtime listener, first time caller here, so very excited to finally get on the show. When I work out in the morning some time, definitely, you guys are one of the podcasts I'm listening to to get some great insights on this data stuff. So definitely kudos to you guys for doing this stuff for a couple years now. It's a great topic. It's a great podcast.
00:01:45 Juan Sequeda
Oh, man, thank you so much. That is so cool.
00:01:47 Tim Gasper
That is so cool. Yeah. I am honored that you listen to us, Aaron, and very excited for our conversation today. I know we've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about.
00:01:55 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. But kick it off, what are we drinking? What are we toasting for? You kick us off.
00:02:00 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. I'm not a huge drinker, so I got here a, sorry, Gatorade Zero, one of my favorites. So this is a new flavor, cucumber lime, which sounds a little bit interesting, but actually, it's pretty refreshing. So it's pretty tough to find, so I go to a local gas station to re- up on it, but it's a pretty popular flavor. So definitely, this is my drink today.
00:02:24 Tim Gasper
Yeah. We were actually discussing his drink just before the show. And first of all, cucumber, fun ingredient in cocktails. And second of all, I'd never actually heard of this flavor before. And now I'm intrigued. I'm like, " Oh, where'd you get it? We got to find some."
00:02:39 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. And I like how you said that you have to go to your gas station to find it because it's not around that often.
00:02:45 Aaron Wilkerson
Walmart and Meijer's near us, they're pretty much sold out. So you got to find those special places that has it in stock. So people don't know about it there yet, so hope they don't find it.
00:02:53 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. All right. Well, we are having Islay Single Malt Scotch, Bunnahabhain, and I can't pronounce that.
00:03:03 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. I remember looking up how to pronounce this on YouTube in the past, and then I forgot, but it's delicious.
00:03:10 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. And what are we toasting for? What do you want to toast for?
00:03:15 Aaron Wilkerson
Toast to data, toast to family. My kids are back to school this week, so toast to all the teachers and educators.
00:03:24 Tim Gasper
Cheers to that.
00:03:24 Juan Sequeda
Cheers to that for sure. Cheers.
00:03:30 Aaron Wilkerson
Cheers.
00:03:30 Juan Sequeda
That was good. All right.
00:03:32 Aaron Wilkerson
inaudible.
00:03:31 Juan Sequeda
So we got a warmup question. You got this one, Tim.
00:03:36 Tim Gasper
Yeah, so we're going to talk quite a bit today about from technical to business data strategy, and one of the things is trying to get a seat at the table. So seat at the table, I was thinking Hamilton being in the room where it happens, the seat at the moment. So the warmup question for today is if you could have a seat at the moment, or be in the room where it happened for any kind of a moment in history or someplace that's not here, what would that be?
00:04:05 Aaron Wilkerson
I was thinking about that, just big events. So I think being there when they're with the big famous movies, so I was thinking about when they were first reading those scripts. I know Godfather, Star Wars, and one of my favorite movies. So even just being there when they're first reading that original reading, table read of one of those big scripts. I'll take Godfather. When they're sitting around the table reading through that script, getting into, that'd be interesting to be in the room with those people as they're digging into that material, and trying to get a feel for a film like that.
00:04:40 Juan Sequeda
That's an unexpected answer.
00:04:41 Tim Gasper
That would be really cool.
00:04:42 Juan Sequeda
That would be really cool. Now, I want to go change mine, which is I was going to go like, " Well, something about early science and Newton or whatever." But now I'm like, " Oh Seinfeld." I want to be at the table when actually the first reading-
00:05:00 Tim Gasper
When they come out with the first episode other something like that.
00:05:01 Juan Sequeda
... for Seinfeld. A pilot. How aboutyou, Tim?
00:05:02 Tim Gasper
You know what? There's a lot of ways to go with this. And I'm always very curious about various conspiracies and things like that, which I think is always a thing. But I would go with more of a founding politics answer, which is that I'm very curious about the conversations that the founding fathers had for the United States. When the first, the Confederate articles failed. And when they all got together, and they're like, " Man, that was terrible. We should have never done that. Here's how we should actually do the government." I just think it would be very interesting.
00:05:34 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. So a direct Hamilton reference, like the-
00:05:37 Juan Sequeda
Almost directly. All right, well let's kick this off. So Aaron, honest, no BS. Is having just a technical data strategy a bad thing?
00:05:50 Aaron Wilkerson
I would say from my experience, yes. And I can say that just because in my career, I've been the person to push a technical data strategy. And I think where we say technical data strategy is really more of the data infrastructure, the backend support platforms that. Don't really have a tie- in to the business. So one example I think is that there's a lot of discussion around lakehouse and I remember, what, two years ago when I was at a different company, I was just a huge proponent of like, " We need a lakehouse. Everyone's doing it." We had this old SQL Server data warehouse that was out of date. We wanted say, " Okay, we need to get to a lakehouse. It's cooler. It's more up to date. Everyone else is talking about it. The skills are much different." So really that was our technical data strategy, was just us trying to update and get everything to the latest and greatest technology. And if you ask me about how does it benefit the business? It was like a, " Well, I don't know, I just really want to do it." So no tie-in to the business. And then you put the business case together. I mean, I think at that point it was like a 18- month project, it would've cost the organization like$ 3 million. And the only justification was like, " Hey, it'll make a platform more robust. We'll have much more reliability." But there really was no tie into to... That's a huge amount of money. I didn't recognize that at the time, where it's a huge investment of company resources to take that many millions of dollars and that much time, you're talking 18 to 24 months to do this project, and we couldn't connect it to the business. The second part of that is when we talked about business impacts or it is going to be business disruption, the conversation was, " Well, it shouldn't disrupt the business. They'll get the exact same dataset. They'll get the same reports. And we'll do all this stuff to not change the business." Which in retrospect is like you hope that we would change the business. So the whole point of transformation is that you want to impact the business. So when we say things like, " Oh, it'll be no impact to the business," well, we're spending millions of dollars, all this stuff just to give the business the exact same reports on the same cadence, is like, " Is that right?"
00:08:13 Tim Gasper
inaudible.
00:08:12 Aaron Wilkerson
And I think that's even something I thought about recently. I don't know if that's the right thing to say that. I think we're saying that to show, like, " Okay, we're not going to be disruptive." But I think part of data transformation and all this stuff is to be a little disruptive. We want to have an impact on the business, we want to change business outcomes and that can sometimes be disruptive. So I think when we talk about these different data strategies, I don't think that it should be a nice, like, " Okay, we don't want to disrupt the business." Like, "Hey, we are going to, and that's why that justifies the amount of spend." So that's my initial rant there.
00:08:45 Tim Gasper
And Aaron, you've triggered so many memories for me of, I used to do a lot of big data consulting and worked in some different big data startups. And I had forgotten some of the talking points that we had. And in exactly as you're saying, it was like, " Oh, 18 to 20 months, spend millions of dollars, keep exactly the same reports that you have today, except it'll be more scalable. And it'll be able to support unstructured data. We can tap into the power of big data." And people will be like, " Oh wow, that sounds really good. Let's do that." It's crazy in retrospect. It's crazy how well that pitch worked. Hopefully we've learned some things, but that was very much a tech data strategy.
00:09:27 Juan Sequeda
Wouldn't one argue that you'd start out with, you get into the big data space in the mid 2000s, late 2000s up to now. Before that, it was all about data warehouses, analytical data warehouses, analytical warehouses and all that stuff. And that was a very clear business reason to go do that. Right?
00:09:47 Aaron Wilkerson
Right.
00:09:48 Juan Sequeda
Because before that you weren't doing any analytics. So now we got analytics. And now I think the situation was like, " Oh, this doesn't scale, we need more." But then you would hear all these things because of the Googles of the world, but you really didn't have such a scaling issue. You thought had. They were selling you that you would need one. So then-
00:10:06 Tim Gasper
You might've had some performance issues-
00:10:07 Juan Sequeda
Issues.
00:10:07 Tim Gasper
...and things like that. And so there was pain.
00:10:11 Juan Sequeda
But pain to whom? And what was the cost? So it was paying for the technical, but the outcomes was still going to be this, outcome for the business. So I'm just getting into the whole... it seems to me that the whole big data, late 2000s is what changed the mindset of folks to be very technical and focus on the technical side as that's the great value. And we had that disconnect from how is this producing business value? And then we probably spent, what, almost a clear decade on technical this and that and data science and doing this, with very big disconnect for business. I don't know. I'm having this little realization right now. I mean, what do you think, Aaron?
00:10:51 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah, I mean that's something that Joe Reese posted on LinkedIn, I think, what, a couple months ago, was just that lost decade. So from like the early 2010s up until the early 2020s, it's the lost decade, where we all jumped into the big data thing. So there was this huge inaudible. Even I remember being interviewing at a company. And they were jumping into big data. They were talking about Hadoop. And I felt like I was missing out. Like, " Okay, I want to do that." It sounded cool. So you think about the different big data engineer job positions, all the Hadoop stuff. So I think there was this decade of just jumping on these big tech platform or... Cloudera was out there too. So all these huge tech platform that had this promise of we're going to benefit the business. There's all this hidden value in your data, and you have this treasure trove of money hiding your data. And all you need is the tools. Essentially, it's like you need a pickax to get at all this goals stored in your data. And that resulted into just that much. So I think a lot of salespeople made a lot of money selling all the different technology and services, but if you look at the results of these surveys, the business is still like, " We don't see the value. We're not getting value of our data assets. It is still the same results. It's just that we spent 10 years proving something that probably people knew at that time as well."
00:12:12 Juan Sequeda
So what I really appreciate is how open and honest you're being about like, " Yeah, these were the issues of that time." And you were part of that. You fell into that. Like, " Let's go. I want to go have fun with that technology." So what would you tell your previous self, also, what would you tell the upcoming generation accelerated leaders, like, " Okay, do this, don't do this"?
00:12:37 Aaron Wilkerson
I mean, I think it revolves around the big three of there's top line growth, there's expanding the bottom line, margin, margin growth through reducing costs, and there's also risk mitigation. So I think I would tell myself those are the big three. So unless you can communicate how millions of dollars of investments in this platform is going to generate some type of dollar sign or value, that's some kind of tangible benefit, you're going to have issues because you're going to get... Even if you got through this project on the other side of it, the business is going to say, " Okay, we spent all this money. Okay, where's the value? What are we doing with this?" And all you got is you have a Lamborghini or Ferrari or Cadillac, you have a shinier car. But really that's not going to help the business expand, get more clients, get more customers, improve their products, reduce the amount of cost there. So I think it's more of a go back to the basic economics and let that drive the strategy versus just saying, " I want a shiny toy, or Hey, these queries underperforming and the cloud is supposed to get us much more efficient query performance and things like that." Essentially it's going back to the basis of business.
00:13:53 Tim Gasper
So tell us more about what doing this right would look like. For example, what is a business data strategy versus a technical data strategy?
00:14:09 Aaron Wilkerson
So I think the keywords in there are business strategy. And what interesting things that I've seen through listening to podcasts and just trying to be business focused is the language is different. At Carhartt, we have some pretty large sales meetings. And I remember going there, I was just amazed at how the business and the sales team in particular talked about things. So they talk about products, they talk about customers, they talk about linking products to customers. They have videos talking about customer journey mapping. Even I listened to a podcast with the CEO of Ford, I'm forgetting his, Jim Farley. So even he talked about products. They make automobiles, and they talk about customers. So there's a linkage there that I think has a pretty strong language, and that's really the business strategy. It's like, " Either how do we improve our products? How do we create new products? How do we get new customers or convert demand to customers and link that together?" So I think the proper way is to think about given that relationship of product and customers, how does data fit there? So how does data either help us create better products, get more products? How does data help us get more customers or find more customers? That's I think the better strategic initiative is trying to figure out those pieces of it. And talking about data, the way our business talks about our business, which is very different than I think in technology or data, we talk about it. We talk about data quality, data governance. But do we connect around like, " Hey, we make these products, we have these customers, this is what the customers want, this is how we market to them"? It's a language difference that I think the right way to do is switch our language up.
00:15:56 Juan Sequeda
You know what I'm going to say now, probably. It's the business literacy that we need to go focus on. I mean, I think, if you're in the data technical side and you feel uncomfortable or want to go learn, go talk to the salespeople in your organization and tell them... Have them explain what they're trying to go do, what is their value prop and stuff and what are they struggling what do they want to go increase and so forth. And then just figure out that language and tie their language to your world. And these are the honest no BS conversations that we need to be having. I want to just bring up this question here from Doug. Be curious to hear from Aaron's perspective if the often emphasis on pitching the technology versus working to articulate business value is an education thing.
00:16:46 Aaron Wilkerson
I mean, education within the data teams?
00:16:50 Tim Gasper
Yeah. Maybe enablement and inaudible-
00:16:55 Aaron Wilkerson
I would say it's an education thing, but also I think you have to tie it to, I'm going to say incentive. But it's how do we gauge our effectiveness of our performance? I think the tricky thing that we have in the data industry is that we don't necessarily know how to attribute value to what we do. So our performance goals are usually on like, " We deliver this project, or the project got complete, or we met the business requirements." So I think that that's where we have opportunities. So I think we can educate people on how to be better at business literacy, but it's a do we have people that care? We can teach and train them, want to. But if they don't care, if there's no buy- in that they need to think differently, then I think you're educating people. It's like when you go to training class or go to a conference and then you have nothing to tie it back to, so you just forgot everything you learned. So I think it's education, but we also need the practical experience or some type of tie to something that gives people a lot more meat and bones there.
00:18:01 Juan Sequeda
That's it. So what do we do? I mean, Okay. You've acknowledged another gap, another problem there. So what? What would be incentive structures to bridge this? And actually let me bring up here another relevant question that Sarah just asked. What roles, not necessarily individual people, are needed to cross that tech business barrier?
00:18:27 Aaron Wilkerson
What roles? I think it's the data leader, but I think it's the data leader that has the structure to not be tied down to the technical infrastructure part of it. I think it's the data leader, but also having the proper architect roles or the right structure so that they can go and work with the business and have that lens into the business. I mean Juan, I remember you months ago you posted a comment... essentially did a post a couple months ago on a Saturday about data marketing. I think that's something that's interesting, I think critical role in terms of how do we sell what we do? So I think the step one is how do we sell what we do to our stakeholders? How do we talk about, okay, even if you built a data product, a dashboard, a table, how do you then go take that and then sell it to the stakeholder and say, " Hey guys, we built this for this purpose. This is what it's going to do." So it's thinking, going back to that product customer, I think the first steps is getting better at sales or even marketing. How do we better market what we do? I think, Juan, you talked about the data marketing. I thought about it too like, " What's a data marketing and value function within the data team that their job is to market and communicate with the business around just the stuff that we're doing?" If you think about a data catalog, you already have tons of assets at your disposal. How do you take that and then go and market that to the business, say, " These are all the things that we have"? I think that's a role or a function that I think we don't have. So I think that's at least a starting point. If I'm looking into, it's how do we better communicate what the team is doing? Because I know I can speak from my experience, I've been very bad at that. Because we're pulled back into other initiatives and firefighting, we just don't have the time to do it. But I think having a true marketing aspect of what the data team does, I think that's a good first step just to get better at marketing and selling the value that we provide.
00:20:30 Tim Gasper
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. You can spend a lot of time and energy just focused on cranking out work and just like, "Oh, we got to rip through tickets. We've got a request coming in and things like that." But ultimately you're not going to do the best service to the business and you're not going to have a full understanding also of what's going on in the other parts of the business. So there's an interfacing part that the CDO and the data team have to do, or whoever's wearing those hats in the organization, it seems like.
00:21:01 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. On Netflix, I've been watching this documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he talks about the '80s and the'90s when he was this huge blockbuster movie star. And he talked about just the need to sell his movies. He was like, " It's one thing to make all these movies, and you can be an artist, but it's like you got to sell it. You got to go around. You got to travel to across the world and sell these movies that you're in." So it's like, " It's not enough to just build stuff and be very good at building or creating. You also have to sell your work at the same time if you really wanted to take off and get value and people to pay you for it or get much more adoption."
00:21:39 Juan Sequeda
So that's how you would eventually get a seat at the table.
00:21:43 Aaron Wilkerson
Right, exactly.
00:21:45 Juan Sequeda
What does it mean to get a seat at the table as a data team, as the CDO or the VPs of data stuff? What does that actually mean?
00:21:57 Aaron Wilkerson
The phrase that comes to mind is trusted partner. It's like you're found to be someone that is critical to a discussion or conversation. Juan, if you're in that role, if Tim and I are talking about business decisions, we're talking about how to improve our business, like, " Guys, we need Juan in this meeting or else we can't make improvements here." Or it's like, "You know who would be great here? If we added Juan to this discussion because he's going to give us some insights or he is going to give us something to help this." So I think the seat at the table is, to take Tim's or something, you're in the room where it happened. You're in the discussion talking about these critical decisions so that when they're made, you had a part to play there in terms of providing insights or some type of feedback that's helpful. But the challenge is if you're in the room and providing nothing of value, then you're not going to be in the room very long. They're going to kick you out because you've offered no value. So that's the part is, how do you learn the business literacy? How do you learn the lingo, know so you can actually provide a contribution? You come in there talking about servers and query performance of data quality. They're like, " Okay, yeah, but that's not what we're talking about. That's not at all." If the CEO is like, " How do we improve revenue? How do we increase our customer base? How do we improve our products," they want to hear tangible ideas about that. So I think that's where it goes to the language and getting a good rhythm and consistency around how you talk about the business and sell what you do. So I think the data marketing stuff, to your point, I think when you guys said it around, gives you the rhythms and the discipline around talking about this enough. So when you get invited to that, you can provide a contribution to the discussion.
00:23:39 Tim Gasper
What does this look like when it's happening well? Are there lots of meetings happening cross- functionally across the organization? Or what are some of the traits that are exhibited when this is happening well?
00:23:57 Aaron Wilkerson
I think the traits that you see is that when you... Because I've seen this before because I switch over to a little bit of governance hat. So I think you hear a lot of just positive feedback. So when you talk to people that you don't know... If you're in the office and you're having a all- persons event and you meet people, they say, "You know what? I heard about you. You were the person that helped this, helped so-and-so out with this, or I heard that you guys were working on this or Yeah, we heard about the..." So I think it's the word of mouth. So I think the traits is you hear. Not even knowing people, there's a word of mouth that goes on around the good stuff that's going on, and you hear about it from different third parties just because... Or people reach out to you. I've also seen it where, especially in my old BI hat where people reach out to you asking for your help. So even if you don't have the relationship, they say, " Hey, I heard that you guys are working on some great stuff. We'd really like to introduce you in this because we want to see how you guys can potentially help us. How can you guys help us scale out this process or improve this?" So I think you hear it through third parties or you hear about a word of mouth or people reach out to you because it's really starting to grow.
00:25:08 Juan Sequeda
So this is a really interesting point, but I think we should differentiate if somebody's coming to you because, " Hey, I need this report" versus" I'm going to you because I need your help to solve a problem, which I don't know." I mean, I would see those as two different-
00:25:22 Tim Gasper
I think there's risk in the organization. And I should partner with the data team to even try to think about the question.
00:25:30 Juan Sequeda
Yeah, give me an answer to this. So you come to me all the time because you need some answers, and I just do the work.
00:25:36 Aaron Wilkerson
I think there's a difference between them already having an answer and coming to with requirements versus" We have a problem that we need your help to solve, but we don't know the answer." So I think it's the known versus the unknown of, " We have a known solution, and we've already solutioned for you versus we have a challenge. This is the outcome we're trying to get to. Can you guys help us solution it, help us design it?" So I think to your point, that's the difference in showing up saying, " I need a report." It's like, " Well, what you trying to solve for? What are you trying to do here?"
00:26:08 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. That's an excellent point. So I think if you're on a data team or you're a data team you realize people come in with known things versus unknowns. That's how you know if you're making an impact or how big of an impact you're doing. I mean there's still the knowns you need to get addressed. But then you're not-
00:26:25 Tim Gasper
So there's always the table stake things, but are you really getting brought into the strategy?
00:26:32 Aaron Wilkerson
Because I would argue to say if it's a known answer already, then it's not really strategic, it's much more tactical. If I already know the answer, if I already know the steps... The genesis of strategy is it's a hypothesis, is where" Hey, we're going to try this approach, and we're going to see if this works because we have an outcome. We want to increase or improve something, but we don't really know how to get there. We're trying to figure out different options. We're comparing options. We're comparing opportunities. And we're trying to see if this is going to work." But I think to talk about the seat the table. I think that's the higher- level discussion is like, " We have no clue if this is going to work. We're going to try this out. We're going to get feedback and data to see if it's going to work." I think that's when if you're in a strategic versus tactical discussion is if they're there to discuss different options and figure out the strategy versus telling you what your strategy is. I think that's where you're like, " Well, this is more tactical. They've already decided. I'm just here to write down and go back and make the..."
00:27:28 Juan Sequeda
I like this. If known, you're doing just tactical things. If you get involved into the unknown stuff, the challenges, this is about the strategic. That's a great differentiator. I think it's important for people who are listening that you're on a data team, ask yourself, " Am I getting pulled into known things? Am I getting pulled into unknown things?" That's how you know if you're being seen more as somebody tactical or somebody strategic. That's an important differentiator right there to figure out. And then ask yourself, what do you want to go do? One is your team, but also personally is your career. Which path do I want to go to?
00:28:03 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. Because some people know. They enjoy just their particular path. They enjoy their work, where they like the knowns. Where it's like, " I know that I'm good at this one thing. So if you give me a report, I can kick out a report, I can create a dashboard, I can create a data pipeline." That stuff is definitely needed because once you figure out the strategy, someone's got to execute it. Because the other side of the strategy that sometimes we don't talk about is the execution around, okay, how do we now take this strategy and actually execute this and bring this to life. And hopefully you have structures in place to deliver and then see if that actually gave you the result that you wanted to. So it's two parts of the coin, the strategy and the tactical. But if you're talking with senior leaders into the C- suite, they probably don't want to hear tactics. They just want to talk about, " Okay, this is the outcome. This is the approach. You go figure that out. I don't care how the sausage gets made, I just want my sausage. That's what I'm looking for."
00:29:06 Tim Gasper
Yeah, I think that's actually an excellent tie- in to a question that just came in from Emily, which is that one of the many problems that companies deal with is leadership buy- in for data strategy projects most of the time revolving around a lack of knowledge around the value of data other than the technical business verbiage to learn from. How would you actually mitigate this problem, mitigate this situation? I mean, you talked about evangelism. I think you talked about execution. For example, I've definitely seen that sometimes you have to do POCs or smaller things, and then show the results of that, and then people go, " Oh, I see now. I can see what's possible now." I'm curious, Aaron. Would you double down on those two things or are there some other things we're not thinking about?
00:29:51 Aaron Wilkerson
I mean, I think part of the challenge for buy- in is potentially you're solving problems that people don't care about or they're not really problems for them. So I found that as I go to leaders and I talk to them about challenges, if they resonate with that problem, it's actually a problem for them, then they're going to buy in because they have to. Because it's how their incentivize, it's how their performance is driven on the outcomes of a process or things like that So I think you have to think about just with my strategy, what problems am I trying to solve with this strategy? Are they problems for me? Am I bringing up problems that no one knows about? Or is this a problem that everyone knows about and they're trying to get solved for? Because I found that, and I talked about one of my sessions at DGIQ was if it's a problem, they're going to show up to figure out how you're going to solve the problem, and they're going to come and show up to the meeting to help you. I've not found an instance, where someone had a problem, it was a big problem. I asked to help them, and they said, " No, go away." If you have a solution, and you're ready to help them solve the problem, then they're going to show up and there's that buy- in. And I think at the company's strategic level, I think it's potential that your strategy may not be something the company wants to pursue. It may not be a big enough opportunity. They may be going after a much larger opportunity. Maybe you're talking about a 10% growth of the company, and they're working on something that's worth 20 or 30%, much higher lift. So I think it goes back to is, what you're proposing or what we're trying to address something that no one cares about, or it's small in proportion to the stuff that they've been asked to do or work on as well. Yeah. You learn pretty quickly if people are showing up to your meetings, then that means that you're saying your message is something that resonates with them that they care about.
00:31:43 Tim Gasper
I think this is a really important insight because there are situations where you are trying to build buy- in something, and people just aren't getting it. And you've got to figure out how to evangelize it, communicate it better, maybe do a POC and things like that. But it also might be signal. It might be signal that that's not the right thing, and you need to figure out what the right thing is because if it was the right thing, then they would get it, and it would resonate.
00:32:08 Juan Sequeda
I mean, it sounds pretty simple. It's like, " I'm trying to get buy- in for this, for whatever thing. And if I don't get buy- in, that means I'm not solving a problem that people care about." But if I am getting buy- in, if the conversations are going going, then I'm like, " Oh, the buy- in should actually go simple." So if you have an easy sell, you're solving a real problem. If you're having a hard sell, then you're solving a not really important problem. Would it be as simple as that?
00:32:33 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. I mean, I can throw you some examples. If you have meetings or you're a part of meetings that continuously get rescheduled, or you have meetings that no one shows up to, that could be a signal that this is a project or something that really has not a lot of buy- in or something that people don't understand, or to Gordon's point, the right language. Maybe you're not using the right language in how you're trying to set up this meeting. But the ones that people are showing... If people are asking you, " Hey, when are we meeting again? What's the next steps on this?" That's something I think you can see that people are resonate with. So I've seen both of those, where you have people who are struggling to get people to attend. Because the people, they don't understand. Like, " I don't understand what this meeting for. I don't know why we're meeting. I thought you guys take care of this," versus people are asking you to, "When are we talking again?" Or they willingly move the calendars around. So I think to your point around signal, Tim, I think that's one of those data points to see, okay, is this resonating with people? Because as we know, when we're dating our significant others, people will make time for you when it's important. So if someone's not making time for you, then it's obviously what you're trying to convey or present, they're not interested in. People will make time. People will call you back if it's important after a certain amount of time. If they're not, then it's a they're not that into you.
00:33:57 Tim Gasper
No, this is good advice for data, life, love.
00:34:03 Juan Sequeda
Relationship.
00:34:03 Aaron Wilkerson
You said it.
00:34:05 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. If you're trying to go out with somebody, you're calling them and they're not picking you up, inaudible like, " Not into you."
00:34:12 Aaron Wilkerson
Exactly.
00:34:13 Juan Sequeda
Everything applies with the work that you're doing.
00:34:16 Aaron Wilkerson
It does.
00:34:18 Tim Gasper
Okay. This is great. So I'm tempted to continue to roll on this topic. But one other topic that I would love to go back to and dig more into is a business data strategy. How do I build a business data strategy? Is that the data team building that with help from stakeholders and friends? Is it really an extension to the corporate strategy, and it's just a part of the corporate strategy? Curious about, Aaron, what your thoughts on building a business data strategy.
00:34:53 Aaron Wilkerson
To your point, I think it goes back to business literacy and trying to tie back to what people care about. So I think you don't want to try to reinvent the wheel. So if you can find something that already has been created that people are aligned to, then it's like, " Use that." So if there's a one pager that your CEO or C- suite have put together, I would say take that one pager, and then try to connect what you're doing to that. Because that's what they put together. They've probably spent tons of time and strategy workshops and offsites putting that together. So that's what everyone's aligned to. So if you put together something that's completely different, it's more of a distraction because they're focused on this thing. So I would say taking whatever corporate initiatives that you can find... Sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes some companies I've seen where it's like they have it on the website, it's known. Sometimes you got to talk to 15 or 20 people just to get it. But I would say trying to find just the one- pager that shows these are the corporate initiatives, and then tying all the work that the team is doing to that. For example, at Carhartt, we have some operational excellence initiatives, and one of my corporate initiative ties into that. So usually what I talk about is linking it back to the corporate initiative, which people are aligned to. They know what it is because that's another thing. With education, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time trying to retrain and reframe people. If they're already framed about this language, speak that language because they're already used to it, there's a whole corporate communications around it. You don't want to spend too much effort trying to teach people a different language. I would say to answer your question, it's tie into the corporate initiatives that are already somewhere, speak in that language and tie the data initiatives to that. So how is what you're doing helping the organization improve in the areas that they've already listed? Because if you try to create something else, you have to spend a lot more effort trying to re- point them to what you're trying to do. And their effort for that fiscal year is going to be tied to that strategy. So you're trying to convince people to do something else, and they're not incentivized to help you. They're incentivized to follow the corporate strategy. So it's don't make your life worse, just follow link in to what is already out there.
00:37:07 Tim Gasper
I think that the speaking and aligning to the language is really important. And not only does it help you to get buy- in for what it is that you're doing, so operational excellence, for example. If you've got data strategy and data initiatives that are tying to the business corporate initiative of operational excellence, that's going to help with budget understanding, buy- in, tie in, but also you get to benefit from all the change management and all the communication that's happening on that. And when people say, " Oh, I'm learning about this new operational excellence thing," then you get to say, " Yeah, and our data strategy is doing X, Y, and Z, and it's extending that." And they go, " Oh, okay." And all the dots get connected.
00:37:46 Juan Sequeda
Yeah. This is why it's so important to understand what are the strategic goals, the operational goals, the OKRs, the objective key words, all these things. Whatever approach your organization takes, you need to understand what these things are. And I think also, Aaron, you on LinkedIn, you'd like to go say, " Oh look, this public company just reported their earnings report. Let's go in and see what exactly the things that are going on." So if you actually work for a public company, these things are actually reported. You can go find them.
00:38:15 Tim Gasper
Publicly available.
00:38:16 Juan Sequeda
They're publicly available to go see what it is. Literally, what is the CEO talking to all of Wall Street? So this is part of that business literacy, I would argue.
00:38:25 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. A lot of companies I've seen is when they try to get people to do stuff, they use these insert C- suite name said" X, Y, Z," and that usually tries to galvanize people. So to your point, I mean if you're part of a public company, you can see the strategy. They clearly lay out the strategy. And that's most likely been approved by the board, by the shareholders. They're sharing that strategy because they're trying to communicate how the company plans to grow, how they plan to expand. And essentially that's the blueprint for how they plan to get the stock price to go up. So I would say if you can align to, " Hey, our CEO said this on the earnings call, so we're going to do this," you have a much higher chance that people are going to align better to that. Because well, why would they go against something the CEO said on a call that went out to shareholders and financial analysts? Everyone's aligned to that. So to me, it's like, " Bro, that's the strategy." So I always post about that because it even gets me into the mindset around, okay, how do CEOs talk? Because like I said before, the language of how CEOs talk is very specific and very different. They're always talking about growth, growth pillars, year- over- year growth, quarter- over- quarter. You have to listen to how they talk about the business. And if you take that language, that's where people are used to hearing. So if you can speak like that, I think it's a much higher chance that you'll get buy- in alignment because you're speaking in the same language.
00:39:57 Juan Sequeda
This is great advice. I mean, just go read earning calls of companies and hope... This is hugely, hugely valuable. I mean, we've already been 40 minutes at this stuff. Before we head into our next sections, there's one topic I want to hit, which is the data leaders. We had this conversation on LinkedIn. I was privately about... I was at the CDOIQ conference. And I shared in one of my takeaways is, well, if CDOs are... their tenure is 18 months or two years, whatever, and like, " Oh wow." It's probably a problem because you're hiring the wrong people. Well, that's one way of seeing it. You had some interesting thoughts, so please share what's close to your vest on this.
00:40:43 Aaron Wilkerson
That's a good setup. It's the ultimate setup. No. And not to call out any particular people. But I think looking at LinkedIn, and you start to look across the landscape. And you see a lot of former CDOs, former CDAOs. You see people being... you can tell they've been let go. You can see that there was layoffs. Some people just resigned. After a while, you see a pattern of people in those CDO CDO role just not with their companies anymore. So you start to think about, " Okay, is it the role? Or is it we just don't have the right people?" Because I remember I was talking to someone on LinkedIn. And they had said that, where they said it took them 20- plus years to really get business acumen, get aligned data to business outcomes. Where it's like it took them decades to get the experience that they felt comfortable in their own shoes to be a competent CDO. So I think that there's something to be said that potentially some of the tenure could just be because people are being very ambitious in trying to get to these top roles. And they get that, they get to seat the table, but they just don't have the experience or the chops around how do they communicate. If you think about the C- suite, all those people are there because they have some type of enabler lever to improve the business. So if you don't have the ability to say, " My lever is data, and this how we're going to use this lever to improve the business," like I said, I think that you're going to be out there pretty quickly. So this is just my conjecture more about if we're seeing patterns around people just not in some of those higher roles, it's potential that just we've not set up other day leaders for success. It could be that they don't have enough experience or maybe there's just not enough product. Like I said, that role has been out there, I think for 20 years now. So I think we're still learning about it. So I think unfortunately there's potentially that people are in those roles, who just weren't prepared. Because especially in this year with potentially talks about a recession in the economy, there's some very specific goals around revenue. So if you think about it, it's all about top line revenue around we need to grow revenue. So if we're not in a position where we can't attach data to business outcomes or revenue goals, then it's a, Well, then what are you doing here? Why do we have this person in this role? So it's the gift and curse of a, hey, if we want that C- suite title, you want that CDO moniker. There's some huge implications around what that role means. And my curiosity is more of a, as we see people in that role at large amounts just go through high amounts of attrition, sure, their organizational may have some challenges, but also is the question, do we have the right people in those roles? Are they ready for them? How many qualified CDOs do we have? I mean, I also say, do we need that role in many companies? But it's like, " If they do need it, are these the right people that are in those roles?"
00:43:35 Tim Gasper
You ask an interesting question about, are they the right people for the role? And are there potentially more CDO openings than there are actually people that truly, deeply are qualified to be CDO? I don't know. It's an interesting question.
00:43:55 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah. I-
00:43:57 Juan Sequeda
Now, I'm curious to, you can do analysis on if we can get some LinkedIn data and seeing job openings for CDOs, seeing people have these title CDOs, how they've shifted. There's a lot of patterns that you may be able to observe.
00:44:14 Tim Gasper
Well, and here's a different lens on it. And I'll just ask this as a question to you, Aaron, a person who needs to be the CDO, would you rather have somebody who worked at the company for 20 years and has five years of data experience, so only five years of data experience, but they work at the company for 20 years as the CDO? Or would you rather have somebody who has seen it all, data, everything, 20 years of data experience, but only has, let's even be a little smaller here, like a year and a half of experience in that company? Who would be the better CDO? I know that's a tough question, but just curious about your gut reaction.
00:44:51 Aaron Wilkerson
I mean, I think the gut reaction is that all experience is not equal. So even when you say 20 years of data experience, well, what is that experience? So if your only experience is building data warehouses and building BI reporting and doing that, then I think you can try it, but I think you're going to have issues. I think it more so leans on someone with actual business acumen, who knows the business and all those big questions. Why did the business exist? How does the business make money? What's the operating model? So I think it's a who's better equipped to help lead the business and be much more of a business leader versus a tech oriented leader? But if the data leader has 20- plus years of experience at that level, tagging data to value, tagging into business outcomes, getting a new person in the business is good. But if you're much more in the back office, more and more data infrastructure, platform, traditional reporting, then I think you're going to have a challenge just because... I think the challenge is, I think organizations still don't know what they want out of the CDO. So it's really up to you to define the role and what you want it to be. But if the organization says, " Hey, we need to figure out ways to drive revenue," then you're on the hook for creating that strategy. And if you have no experience with that, then you're going to have some challenges.
00:46:12 Tim Gasper
Yeah, no. I think you said it really well when you said, " Not all data experience is treated equal." There's a big difference between somebody who has 20 years of experience in data, but it's building data warehouses and doing data integration, maybe even master data management or something like that, versus somebody who's spent the last 20 years building business data strategy, tying data initiatives to initiatives within a corporation and driving those three things you mentioned. Risk mitigation, cost prevention, and revenue growth.
00:46:46 Juan Sequeda
Hearing this back and forth, anecdotally, going to conferences and talking to people I've been seeing is there's been a lot of CDOs have been very technical. And I'm starting to see a shift of new people coming in who don't have a technical background in data that come from the business side and actually never work with data. And now they're being put in charge inside of CDOs. So I think it's like we've started being more technical to the CDOs, and it hasn't been working out. So you know what? Let's just flip it, and let's put the business people because they can get supported by other technical sides. So I don't want to call out company or stuff, but I've seen this. Having this, hearing this conversation, I'm connecting the dots and realizing that this-
00:47:34 Aaron Wilkerson
Yeah, it's the great question of if you bring in a business oriented person, can you... I don't want to say outsource those, which skills are much more commoditized? I know data, technical skills are tough, but it's like, " Can I bring in a outside firm to help me build out my data team, my technical abilities while I try to insource and internally staff that?" Trying to find someone to go out and... Try to find a technically minded person, but then trying to outsource someone with business skills, that's more harder to do. So I think that's the question is which can you outsource or farm out while you try to build out the skillsets? More the technical side or the business side? I mean, it's an interesting dichotomy.
00:48:24 Juan Sequeda
This is a good conversation for the next conference, then we go. Not recorded. We get some CDOs or former CDOs in the room, and we'll see what do you think about this? All right, well, we got to move on here. Next is our AI minute. One minute to rant about anything you want about AI. Ready, set, go.
00:48:49 Aaron Wilkerson
Okay. So AI, it's interesting just because I think it all revolves around just use cases. If you look at just earning inaudible reports, Uber had its first profit. They talked about AI one time and they called it just machine learning. Look at SAP, and they talked about AI in terms of it was like 63- plus times that SAP talked about it. So I think AI has the ability to definitely transform and provide a lot of benefits, but I think the question is always what are those use cases of what are we leading with? Are we leading with the business initiatives and use cases? Or just we're trying to find a use case for it, but no one really knows to do with it? And also just how the business is architected. Multiple years ago, we all talked about RPA. RPA and intelligent automation. But to do that, you needed transformations around the business to re- architect how the business works together. And I think we're in a similar boat, where we need to figure out how the business is going to work with all this AI capabilities.
00:49:53 Juan Sequeda
It's not AI for AI's sake.
00:49:55 Tim Gasper
Nope.
00:49:55 Juan Sequeda
As you've been saying.
00:49:58 Aaron Wilkerson
Yep.
00:49:59 Juan Sequeda
Lightning round time.
00:50:01 Tim Gasper
Let's do it.
00:50:01 Juan Sequeda
All right, lightning round. So first question. If the CDO reports to the CIO, is that going to cause problems with being business oriented?
00:50:17 Aaron Wilkerson
I would say not necessarily. I think it goes to ownership and accountability. So if that CDO has defined ownership and defined accountability that's set by the CIO for a part of the business, then I think it's good. So I think expectations needs to be very clear around what the CDO owns and what they're accountable for versus what the CIO owns and accountable for.
00:50:42 Tim Gasper
I think that's a good answer. Yeah. All right. Second question for you. Seat at the table, does the CDO need to earn it or should they expect it?
00:50:58 Aaron Wilkerson
It's so hard. I think it depends on the organizational culture. I've yet to be at a company, where they truly had the use case for a CDO. So I would say that if you're at a company that doesn't really need a CDO, then you should probably earn it. Because if you show up there expecting it, you probably won't last there very long. So I think it depends on the culture. It's not all equal. I think some place you have to earn it because you have to create your own role versus showing up and having it already established.
00:51:31 Tim Gasper
That's a good answer.
00:51:32 Juan Sequeda
All right, next question. Data engineers and data infrastructure people, do they need to understand the business strategy?
00:51:41 Aaron Wilkerson
I would say yes, because you do want people to understand why they're doing it. So you don't want someone to just go out and then build some amazing pipelines that no one's going to use. It's a waste of their time. And eventually you're seen as a true call center, where you're building stuff that no one uses. Eventually when times get tough, they're going to ask what this person's working on. So if you can't tie it there, you're having problems. So I think you definitely need to understand it just from a professional perspective, knowing that what you're doing makes a difference. You're not just a cog. You're not building something no one's going to use.
00:52:13 Tim Gasper
Interesting.
00:52:14 Aaron Wilkerson
Nope.
00:52:14 Tim Gasper
All right. Last lightning round question for you, Aaron. Are there some situations where technical data strategy first is the right thing?
00:52:30 Aaron Wilkerson
Not really. I would say only if that's your role. If you were hired to do that and that is your role, that's your passion. If you're an architect and you were hired to do that, then yeah. That's your focus because someone else has defined the strategy for you and that's where you live at. So I think in those very specific roles potentially. But still, it is hard to do that in isolation unless you have a very specific role, you were there. Maybe you're a consultant, so very specific project and that's how your gauge on success is delivery of that. But it's very tricky.
00:53:09 Tim Gasper
And Gordon says, " Security maybe," in the comments here. Yeah. I think if your role truly is focused on the technology piece and somebody else is doing the business data strategy, it's not like that can't exist. It just might not be your role. Right?
00:53:21 Aaron Wilkerson
Right. It's the person responsible for data strategy, yeah, you need to make sure you have a business strategy. You can't just be pushing just a solely technical data strategy.
00:53:33 Juan Sequeda
Well, takeaway times. We have so many notes here. Have you been seeing Tim's typing? And I'm on my iPad here. Let's go. Tim, take us away.
00:53:42 Tim Gasper
Sounds good. ChatGPT hasn't replaced us yet. So we started off with, would it be bad to do just a technical data strategy and technical data strategy versus business data strategy? And you were very firm in the camp of yes, it would be bad just to do a technical data strategy and only to think of data strategy through that lens. And so what would that be? What would technical data strategy be? It would be hyper focus on the data infrastructure and the tooling and the platforms and the architectures and not tying it to the business outcomes. So we talked about an example of the lakehouse architecture. Data lake eventually evolved into the lakehouse. Everyone is doing it. We have an out of data SQL Server. It's cooler. It's more modern. Let's just migrate all of the same stuff that we already have onto a new platform and tap into the magical power of big data. Unfortunately, that approach did not work well and retrospectively we should have seen it happen. We should have knew it, but we didn't. I think we're smarter now. But Joe Reese probably said it best on LinkedIn, as you mentioned, it was the lost decade. We jumped onto the next big thing, we jumped all into the big data thing and we saw what came out of that. Salespeople made a lot of money selling tech and services with the valued income. So dos and don'ts, three things. Top line growth, bottom line growth, a k- reducing cost, and then risk mitigation. You mentioned that those were the three things. You have to communicate how your tech investments are going to impact those three things. What are the tangible benefits? What is your business data strategy? You had mentioned in your own story, you were talking to the salespeople and they were talking about customers. They were talking about how to get the customers, how to get more of them, customer journey mapping, products, how to make better products. These are the elements around the business and around the business strategy and the business data strategy is how data helps you accomplish those things. To get more customers, to get better products, happier customers. People need to talk about data the way the business talks about the business, AKA, in terms of the business. And we talked about enablement and engagement. How do you engage around performance, business literacy? Which is really important here. And we need to sell that to the stakeholders. Data teams need to get better at selling. Communicate what your team is doing outwardly. Juan, what about you?
00:56:16 Juan Sequeda
All right. Well, we got the seat at the table. We talked a lot about this today. If you have a seat at the table, it's because you're a trusted partner. You're being asked to be in the meeting because a critical decision needs to be made, and they can't make that decision without you. If you're in the room and you're not providing value, you'll be kicked out of that room if you just start talking about servers and data quality and whatever. So how do you know that this isn't working? How do you know that it is working? Is that word of mouth? People start talking. They want to go talk to you. People you didn't know are reaching out to you. So then there's this difference between people coming to you that they already have a solution and they just need you to do it versus they have an outcome and a desire to partner with you. And this is a big aha moment for me, was this differentiation of if they come with knowns, it's very tactical. If they come with unknowns, it's strategic. And we don't know if it's going to go work. And that's the differentiation. So ask yourself, are folks coming to you with known things or unknowns? By well, if it's unknown, you still need to go execute around this. Talking about getting buy- in. If the problem resonates with leaders and it's a problem for them, they will buy in. Otherwise, if it's not a problem for them, then they won't really care. But buy- in will be hard. So if buy- in is hard, that means that it's a problem that they don't really care about. Maybe it's a problem for you, but maybe others don't care about it. So if you have a solution to a problem that they have, of course they will want that. As you said, nobody's going to say, " No, I don't want your solution for my problem." If your proposal is about something that folks don't really care about, or it's probably too small because they're focused on something bigger, then that's also probably the wrong thing. There's all these signals out there. If you're having a project or you setting up a project, but people aren't even coming to your meetings, signals, signals right there. So a takeaway for me personally is just go find the signals. There's so many obvious signals right there. Will they make time for you? Are they calling you back? Think about it, if you're dating in your personal life, same type of signals will apply here. Building a business data strategy, how do you do that? Hey, if there's a one pager or slide deck from your business strategy out there, go take that, understand it, tie it to your business strategy, the corporate goals, the corporate initiatives, the operational excellent initiatives within the organizations. Check out the public reporting documents, the earnings call. That's the strategy right there, simplified and publicly available. Look how the CEO talks, they talk about growth, they talk about quarter- over- quarter expansion, about new geographies, learn to speak that language. And we wrapped up our conversations about data leaders and say, " Heck, if CDO tenure is only 18 months, then those organizations may be hiring the wrong people." Is it the role? Is it the wrong people? I mean, this is something that we need to start asking ourselves. How long does it take to truly be a competent CDO? That's another thing that we should all be asking ourselves too. If you don't know how to leverage your levers to improve the business, you're going to be out. So if you really are striving to have that CDO title, there's a lot of expectations. And we had this balance between the CDO with technical experience or business experience. And let's remember that not all data experience is treated equal. And then sometimes, hey, organizations don't know what they need out of that CDO. How did we do? Anything we missed?
00:59:41 Aaron Wilkerson
You got it. I mean, I think big ones just the one where it's just intentionality. We have to be intentional. A lot of times no one's going to ask us to do this. We have to do it ourselves and have the internal fortitude just to be trailblazers and pioneers. So we have to go out and do it ourselves because few people will make us or force us. We have to do it ourselves.
01:00:04 Juan Sequeda
Love that as a closing thought. So wrap up, throw it back to you. Three questions. What's your advice? You already gave us some relationship advice too. What's your advice? Who should we invite next? And what resources do you follow?
01:00:21 Aaron Wilkerson
What was the advice? I would say the advice is to learn as much about the business. The top three questions I always talk about is why does your business exist? What value do they provide in the marketplace? How do they make money? How do they bring in revenue? Third one is, what's their operating model? So how do they actually bring people together to deliver on the value proposition and make money? So I think you follow those three questions, that's a big one. I think you've talked with Samaya Ramen. She's a person I would say that I think I met at DGIQ, we kind of talked on LinkedIn, that I would definitely recommend, has very great ideas on data in this industry. Resources. I mean, I think podcasts are huge. One thing I'm digging into now is RevOps, so revenue ops. A lot of podcasts around sales, marketing, customer service, all those types of things that really help drive revenue to the business. So I think understanding those functions will I think help the data team out a lot in terms of how we bring business value.
01:01:35 Tim Gasper
That's cool. I didn't realize there were dedicated podcasts on RevOps, but there's dedicated podcasts about everything.
01:01:42 Aaron Wilkerson
I was surprised. I looked it up. There's like 10 of them.
01:01:44 Tim Gasper
Nice.
01:01:44 Juan Sequeda
And to close up, as we like to say here, show me the morning. This is LinkedIn user, which I know it's Mark Kisen, whose just probably woke up because he's another loyal listener all the way from Perth in Australia. So it's probably, I don't know, 6 o'clock in the morning.
01:02:02 Aaron Wilkerson
Good morning.
01:02:03 Juan Sequeda
All right, well, hey, before we wrap up, next week we have Ari Kaplan, who is the original Moneyball guy. He's the head of evangelism at Databricks, so it's going to be a really interesting conversation. And then after that we'll have Alexa Westlake from Okta continuing the conversation about data value. After that, you and me, we're going to be on the other side of the pond. We have some interesting stuff going around. We're figuring that out ourselves right now.
01:02:29 Tim Gasper
Yeah. Mid- September we're going to be in the UK and also in Amsterdam. So it should be fun.
01:02:34 Aaron Wilkerson
Fun.
01:02:34 Juan Sequeda
And with that, Aaron, thank you. Thank you so much. It was a phenomenal conversation. Really excited we finally got to do this. Excited we finally got to meet in person a couple of months ago. And as always, thanks to data. world, who lets us do this every Wednesday. We keep doing this. This is year four.
01:02:52 Tim Gasper
Hey.
01:02:52 Juan Sequeda
Cheers.
01:02:53 Tim Gasper
Cheers.
01:02:54 Aaron Wilkerson
All right. Cheers, guys.
