August 2021 Summaries

Ben Cohen, a data leader at SpotOn, shares his experiences in creating high leverage data teams and operationalizing data. He emphasizes the importance of understanding stakeholders' pain points and providing value through reducing decision-making time or unlocking new insights. Data quality, lineage, and cataloging are crucial for empowering stakeholders to be self-sufficient. For modern data stack tools, Cohen recommends Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt, but suggests being vendor neutral. He also highlights the cultural impact of data access and how it can empower people within an organization. Over the next few years, Cohen expects increased adoption of cloud data warehouses and more open-source tools turning into fully managed SaaS products.