Picture this: You’re in an executive meeting. The company just acquired another business, and the CEO wants to change how you calculate monthly active users to include the new customer base. Simple request, right? “That’ll be six months,” comes the response from the data team. Six months?! To
Why AI is exposing decades of accepted dysfunction You can’t move at AI velocity when your data team still says “that’ll take six months.” Here’s how an entire industry normalized broken patterns, and why AI is forcing us to finally confront them. I was talking to a
Culture doesn't just happen. You build it. You have to be intentional. Patrick Lencioni's "The Advantage" shaped how I think about culture. Values have to be real, not aspirational. They have to mean something. They can't be corporate nonsense that no one
A ritual playing out in boardrooms everywhere: the new data strategy presentation. This time it’s different. This time we’ll capture the value. The slides are beautiful. The architecture diagrams are comprehensive. Everyone nods. Nobody believes it. We’ve been here before. At least three times, in fact. The
Matterbeam goes against the data industry's complexity addiction. We built it to let small companies access sophisticated data integration without enterprise budgets. You're not locked into decisions. Time is on your side. Transform and emit data fearlessly as new use cases arise.
Around 2015, I was leading an extraordinary architecture team in an effort to decompose Pluralsight’s monolithic application into distributed services. The system exhibited classic tight coupling symptoms: changes cascaded unpredictably into other components, deployment required coordinated release windows across multiple teams, and specific engineers became single points of failure
"Can I just get the data? Can I just get a dump? Can I please just connect to the database?" If you've worked in data in any organization for more than five minutes, you've heard this plea. Usually it comes from someone who just
Stop chasing tools and focus on business value. You've heard it a thousand times. So has every data team. We nod, agree, and then... buy another tool. Why? Because the tool obsession is a symptom of something deeper. We don't need better discipline. We need a better way.
Data doesn't work in companies, I think everyone feels this on some level. One reason I've heard repeated is that it's a people problem, a lack of data culture and data literacy. Companies spend millions on training programs, hire Chief Data Officers, bring in
