When people asked what I do for a living at conferences or parties, I told them I run data strategy. Their first response was “oh, that’s cool”. Then they paused for a moment and asked “what do you do exactly?”

After spending fifteen minutes explaining all the aspects of my job, I either totally confused my audience or bored them to death.

So I set out to develop an elevator pitch, something as punchy as “I am a photographer who specializes in marine life”. I thought I could get some help from online job postings. Searching “data strategy” on LinkedIn returned 84 listings. Few of them described what I do. By contrast, the search on “data scientist” returned 40 times more results.

I was not hired per a job description. I was lucky to convince Eventbrite to create the role for me.

My argument was pretty simple: think of all the data-related challenges the company faces, how many of them are technical, how many are organizational?

Most data-driven organizations have the following data pipeline.

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