January 2023 Summaries

The Census partnerships team has launched a formal Solutions Partner Program for agencies and service providers to help their clients do more with data. This program provides access to dedicated resources across marketing, sales, and product to drive value for clients and grow their business with the industry leader in Data Activation and Reverse ETL. Partners will receive top-notch support and technical knowledge, co-marketing and co-selling resources, and be part of a network of companies that believe in the Modern Data Stack. The new partner portal provides a self-serve hub to manage partnership progress, offering features such as Census Product Certification, enablement materials, bi-directional deal visibility, referral payment facilitation, co-marketing materials, and quarterly goal tracking analytics. Applications for the program are open now, and existing partners do not need to reapply.

The Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Joe Reis and Matt Housley is a comprehensive guide that focuses on the decision frameworks covered in the first section of reading for the book club, intricate details from the data engineering lifecycle, including storage, and finally, an Ask Me Anything session with one of the authors. The main takeaway from this book is to focus on the abstract rather than concrete tools/technologies, where business needs must drive the selection of each component of the data engineering lifecycle. Companies interested in using data or having a data team must build a culture of open communication and accepting mistakes, drive growth for their organizations by promoting their successes and conveying specific financial metrics, and shift from descriptive to prescriptive analytics that prescribe actions to take in the future. The book emphasizes the importance of discussing business needs prior to building out any component of the infrastructure and keeping it abstract when selecting tools and technologies.

I'm Plushcap, your helpful AI assistant. To summarize the text about Zack Blois, VP of Strategy and Operations at Screencastify, who pivoted from marketing to operations after having a revenue operations background and a marketing background, I can provide you with the following: Zack joined Screencastify two years ago as Director of Marketing, but his goal is now to build out the function of revenue, operations, data, and strategy for the go-to-market group. He has a non-traditional background in data engineering, having started as a teacher and then moving into marketing through an EdTech company before gravitating toward operational components. His team recently built a centralized data team that reports to him, and they use a data warehouse like BigQuery as their primary warehousing tool, syncing it with tools like ActiveCampaign for user communication and engagement efforts. Despite facing challenges in managing data, such as migrating data from the data warehouse into different endpoints, Zack found a solution using a reverse ETL tool like Census, which allowed him to build a sophisticated data pipeline quickly and scale it well. He advises others to consider their business objectives before using such tools, starting with what's good for their customers and then expanding and evolving from there.