Framework for onboarding as an Analytics leader in a new team:

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1. Start with people:

On a new team, start with meeting people. This includes your team, stakeholders and cross-functional partners. Ask them about the company, product, team, help they need and seek advice. Understand the career growth plans for every member of your team.

2. Understand product/company:

Read docs. Ask questions (lots of them). Attend cross-functional meetings. Try out the product yourself. Dig deeper to understand goals and success metrics of the products and company. Recommend creating an shared live doc where you invite other folks to add their comments & suggestions.

3. Build out team vision and roadmap:

Document customer pain points. Map that against the projects that your team is executing. Learn about the top successes and misses. Articulate team vision. Build a roadmap. Iterate with partners and get alignment with leadership.

4. Focus on Impact:

Identify projects in the first 90 days that will deliver impact early. Stay focused on long term vision and impact. Keep learning. Get alignment with the leadership on how success will be measured. Roll up your sleeves and start delivering what the team & customers needs most.

#analytics#leadership#data#team

Originally posted on LinkedIn here.

Half way through Toastmaster’s competent communicator manual, it’s one of my career goal.

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Mastering the art of Public Speaking is one of my career goals. Four years ago, I had participated in an impromptu speech competition. The way it works is that you get a question and you are supposed to speak on that topic without any prior preparation. So I was given a topic – it was fairly broad topic – I “could” have spoken for about 3 minutes – but, I froze. let’s call it fear of public speaking. From that day on, I decided to be better at this scary thing called public speaking. I took up positions in student clubs that required frequent public speaking. One such position was being a President of a Technical student club and I got to practice in front of audience – and that definitely helped. Other role was representing my University as Microsoft student partner (3 years ago) – and in this role, I delivered technical topics as I can to practice public speaking and share what I knew. And to continue practicing public speaker – I joined Toastmaster’s club around 9 months back. And today I completed 5 out of 10 modules of competent communicator manual. I encourage anyone who wants to practice public speaking to join Toastmaster’s club. I have written about this club before, you can read that here: Want to practice public speaking? Join Toastmaster’s!

That’s about it for this post. Just wanted to share my career goal with you all!

What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

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This is one of the GEM i found on Quora. And what is Quora? Well, it’s a QA site. What makes it different? Well, for me it’s Quality of the content and the fact that who’s who of our small world are active on Quora. And people who have followed Quora knows that it tends to throw GEMS at you once in a while. yeah, and this question that “What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?” followed by a wonderful sequence of discussion is a perfect example to show why you should have an account on Quora. Anywho, Here is the link: http://www.quora.com/Management-Organizational-Leadership/What-are-common-mistakes-that-new-or-inexperienced-managers-make and the rest of the blog post is just me taking notes.

1. Human motivation is NOT tied to economic outcomes
2. Nothing can replace face-to-face interaction in motivation
3. Do not be slow in dealing with performance issues
4. Good managers put the blame on themselves and understand that any failing within the team is a failing of the leader.
5.Good managers attempt to redirect kudos and credit onto their team
6.play fair, open communication, admit to mistakes, praise in public, criticize in private, deflect credit to others, accept blame personally, be accountable, etc.
7.More authority is not associated with expertise, but rather accountability
8. Have enough guts and self-confidence in your own capabilities

Again the link is: http://www.quora.com/Management-Organizational-Leadership/What-are-common-mistakes-that-new-or-inexperienced-managers-make