Katie Bauer

gotta take the chances when you got em

Me buying best-in-breed tools for specific use cases: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me doing quarterly access reviews for all my best-in-breed tools for specific use cases: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

AI is the source of many of your blessings and curses tbh

This is an evolution of the :pizza-cry: emoji I could not have predicted

Being positive is an extremely underrated form of career impact

did @leoebfolsom.bsky.social just get his data dad joke wings?

Hourly pricing is definitely a trend in high end salons. Tends to be much higher margin and more sustainable for the professionals too, so you can feel good about supporting those businesses if you can afford the rates

I'm starting to think that WBRs are the heir to the OKRs cargo cult

Hey that sounds like a great slogan or substack name

Basically, value is created by being right, but it's also created by folks understanding and adopting what you've created

Value Is Created Twice Discover how examples like AI and Peloton demonstrate the importance of making value clear in the buyer's mind

Another way I've been describing this recently has been by cribbing from this post impactpricing.com/blog/value-i...

Based and responsibility-pilled

"Eat real data. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Karpman drama triangle - Wikipedia

I recently learned about the Karpman drama triangle from a @lethain.com post, and I feel like data folks often fall into the victim role en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman...

I like the push to smoothing, but 12-month rolling windows is A LOT of smoothing

For sure. You need a lot of patience and pain tolerance to stick with this career

One time I was buying clams from the fish counter, and a guy came up to me, said "Those animals wanted to LIVE", and then immediately ran away. It felt especially aggressive for something that didn't have a central nervous system

My stupid term for this is "data visceralization"

Berkeley Bowl is the only grocery store where I've seen someone aggressively shove someone else to grab the discounted produce first

He helped fix a bunch of cursed Stripe stuff, so as far as I am concerned he can be an honorary engineer if he wants to be

My controller writes python scripts, should we be celebrating or seeking help?

We didn't get there by demanding that senpai notice us, we got there by trying stuff and seeing what worked. It's obviously easier to get things done when you have official endorsement, but what I'm ultimately trying to say is that sometimes you have to EARN an endorsement

Don't get me wrong: this took a long time, required me to be persistent, and was overall very annoying to do. But it did work with enough time. VPs and even the c-suite cared about what my team was doing eventually.

We worked together to generate tangible results, and then used those to convince other folks, including people higher on the org chart, that we were on to something. We then used that to start building momentum and buy-in

The way I did it was by starting small. I worked with folks at lower levels who were interested in collaborating, such as engineering managers, PMs, TPMs, etc.

I suspect I may not be able convince you, but I HAVE managed to drive impact as you define it without official VP buy-in, including at a publicly traded company with 8000 employees.

Perhaps you've worked at much more rigid and hierarchical companies than I have, but I just don't agree that the only way for people to have impact is if a VP says they get resources to do it.

You might need to intentionally get the VP or directors' attention once it's done, but it's hard to imagine a reasonable person getting mad about you helping drive revenue or save on costs if that's more important than what you would have otherwise been doing

Lots of people below those levels do things that drive incremental revenue or cost savings, especially in the way I described earlier in the thread, where you're on a team that did this even if your literal actions didn't drive the impact.

Do those really only exist when VPs and directors are involved, though?