4 Tips for Finding Success as a New Product Analyst in Data Science

A New Career

I recently pivoted my career and became a Product Analyst on a Data Science team at a software company. In the role, I am helping to plan and create the future of our internal and external analytics products. If you’re interested in learning more about how I went from back-end Technical Support to Product Analyst, check out this article. Although I’ve only been in the role for a few months, I have found early success not only because I have a lot of domain knowledge, but also because I’ve been doing these four things to earn stakeholder buy-in and beat Impostor Syndrome:

1. Work towards your top priorities on a daily basis
2. Speak up
3. Commit to learning new tech
4. Hype up stakeholders about your projects

If you’re pivoting you’re career, check out my reflection on my first 90 days in data science:

Work Towards your Top Priorities Daily

This piece of advice comes from the influential author and project manager, Neal Witten. In short, he says a successful Business Analyst and Project Manager not only comes in to the office every day understanding their top three priorities, but actively focuses on making progress on those before the rest of the priorities on the list. I think Neal is mostly using the number 3 as an arbitrary place holder; however, it is a good benchmark to start with if you’re new to prioritizing, analyzing and managing projects.

The first few weeks of my job, I made it a point to write down in a notebook tomorrow’s top priorities along with a list of “nice-to-haves.” It allowed me to start my day focused, and actually acted as practice prioritizing a workload. Taking the time to write down my priorities for the next day helped me look and feel organized, which is important for a new analyst.

After the first few weeks, I was involved in projects and didn’t need to write my priorities every day. I make it a point to still do this a couple times a week just to keep the habit and feel a bit more organized. Writing stuff down often ends up reducing my anxiety too!

If you want to know more about Neal Witten’s work, he has some great free resources on BAtimes.com

Speak Up

Feeling new to a role can make it hard to speak up, but as an analyst people are depending on the conclusions you’ve drawn. Be sure to speak up when needed and keep the focus on the business. For example, I test some of the software my team develops, and sometimes I find bugs. I can’t avoid reporting a bug just because it might lead to an uncomfortable conversation. I need to speak up to help protect the customer experience and the business. Just remember to keep any criticism focused on the thing, not people: Produce actions, not arguments.

Speaking up is also important from a networking standpoint. Knowing the key players and where they fit in the company’s organization is important since there is a chance you’ll present to them one day. Familiarize yourself with your stakeholders, and get to know your teammates. It will make it easier to prioritize work.

Keep Learning New Technology

Data Science and Data Analytics are exploding fields right now, and the tools and techniques are evolving rapidly. If you want to work in data science in any capacity, you must be comfortable with learning new technology. When I started on the team, I was introduced to a ton of new tech including Jenkins, Airflow, Artifactory, Graylog, and the Elastic-stack. Becoming a life long student will likely help you find success in any venture, not just in Data Science.

A lot of highly educated and academic-focused people exist in the Data Science sphere, and they produce a lot of work. There are troves of research papers on https://arxiv.org/, an abundance of free online learning content like MOOCs and tutorials, and countless bloggers like me sharing our projects and ideas with the world through sites like Medium. Spend 30 minutes to an hour a day learning some new technology or reading about advancements in the field so you can keep up, but understand that the real value add comes from your ability to learn and understand new information quickly, not necessarily what you know off the top of your head.

Get Stakeholders Hyped

If you’re not hyped about your work, who will be? Be the champion of the project and polish your talking points so you sound smooth, confident and prepared when presenting to stakeholders. Remember, as the person communicating the ideas to the listeners, it is your responsibility to speak without ambiguity and to clarify any misconceptions. You must describe your ideas in ways that make it easy for executives and stakeholders to understand and get behind your vision. As a general rule of thumb, when I am presenting I always establish my character, use emotionally moving language, and include data to backup my points. In a nutshell, that is applying Aristotelian rhetorical theory to persuade an audience through appealing to ethos, pathos and logos.

Being prepared and coming off as well-spoken are critically important to finding early success with stakeholders. As an analyst, it is your job to understand the nitty-gritty details of your project, but the executives probably don’t need that level of detail. Get good at identifying the key aspects of your project that will show the value it adds to the business. Don’t cause your audience’s eyes to glaze over by getting lost in the minutiae. You want to keep things short, sweet, and memorable. Stay focused on the value and progress of the project.

One of the projects I’ve been working on is creating interactive dashboards using Dash. Check out my introduction to the Dash Python library.

Wrapping Up

After pivoting my career and becoming a Product Analyst, I’ve been doing these four things to help me find early success. It is important to earn stakeholder buy-in and beat Impostor Syndrome early on, and these helped me find my path in my new role:

1. Work towards your top priorities on a daily basis
2. Speak up
3. Keep learning new tech
4. Get stakeholders hyped about your projects

Thank You!

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— Eric Kleppen

Interested in my coding projects? Check my github repo for the latest: