Three flavors of data teams

The Scrappy team:

Younger company with modest or fast growth that’s assembled a data team out of necessity. They are small (often 1-5) and don’t have established data infrastructure, budget to hire, or time to take on large data platform projects. They get the job down with Google sheets/Excel, leading BI tools (like Power BI) and maybe a database. Daily work is often filled with manual tasks, managing ad hoc data requests, and generally trying to hold everything together with duct tape. Biggest need is often establishing systems and scalable infrastructure (or getting buy-in from management that data really is important)

The legacy team:

Established companies operating for 20+ years. The data team has several long-tenured team members. On-Prem systems still play a key role in the data foundations, however migrating off legacy systems is a key priority. Often these teams are caught in forever tension between cloud and migrating off old systems (i.e. they are in year 5 of a 2-year migration plan). The struggle between the old and new shows up daily as new team members and a new cloud stack fail to mesh with older tools and veteran employees

The cloud-native team:

They completed their migration or had the chance to build in the cloud from the start. This is often a mature team of 5+ data professionals. They regularly fight against large cloud bills with all the services they have running. This team often finds themselves in a data silo with little natural connection to the business teams and difficulty understanding their problems.

These are flavors of data teams, and many teams are a mix of 2 or 3 flavors - creating their own unique taste profiles.

Where does your data team fit?

What flavor would you add?

Sawyer