Beyond Hiring: How to Cultivate a Thriving Data Team
Learn how to create an environment where your data team remains motivated and consistently delivers high-impact insights.
So you’ve assembled your dream data team—they’re curious, excellent communicators, and self-motivated. They dive deep into data, uncovering insights that drive smart decisions and propel your business forward. Their technical skills and ability to translate complex datasets into clear, actionable insights are unmatched. But how do you ensure they remain engaged and productive over time? Without proper nurturing, even the best teams can become bored and disengaged.
In my experience at Amplitude, where I’m a director of product, growth data, and product-led sales, and my former role as an analyst at HubSpot, I have seen how a well-supported data team can excel. In my previous post, I covered the essentials of building a high-performing data team. In this one, I’ll share best practices for keeping your data team motivated, engaged, and consistently delivering high-impact results.
Key takeaways
- Hiring the right people is just the beginning—it’s important to create conditions that help analysts thrive and stay engaged.
- Teach your team to prioritize clarity over technical complexity when communicating results, ensuring their analyses are actionable.
- Continuously present your team with new challenges to keep them motivated and inspired, avoiding the monotony of repetitive analyses.
- Empower the rest of your organization to perform self-serve analyses, freeing analysts to focus on more complex questions.
- Give analysts the autonomy to determine the best approach for their work. It will help keep them motivated and foster trust in their expertise.
Encourage action-focused analysis
Insights are only valuable if they are shared and acted upon. The goal is to drive action, not to conduct research for its own sake. This means prioritizing clarity over technical sophistication.
If the results of an analysis are too difficult to understand or people can’t grasp how you arrived at them, you’ve lost an opportunity to drive action. Sometimes, the best approach is a simple pivot table that answers the question and gives stakeholders confidence.
Teach your team to be results-oriented and action-oriented, not necessarily technique-oriented. Encourage analysts to adapt their analysis presentations to the format that will be easiest for stakeholders to understand.
Amplitude in Action
How I use Amplitude to facilitate easy communication
At Amplitude, we initially used scorecards based on complex machine learning (ML) models that predict an outcome with a figure between one and 100. While these predictions are technically precise, they’re derived from numerous inputs, making them challenging to interpret. When someone saw a low score, they often asked for simpler signals to understand the analysis further.
We’ve now started to share these simple, explicit signals—like how the number of users in an account is growing or shrinking over time—up front to help people get insights faster. These signals are immediately understood, their implications are clear, and they facilitate meaningful conversations.
The Amplitude platform also empowers clear, action-focused communication around analysis. Notebooks, for example, enable us to combine charts with important context in a single, shareable document. Stakeholders and analysts can tag each other in comments to continue discussing different insights.
Seamless integration with other tools, like marketing platforms, makes turning data-driven insights into action easy. Let’s say the Amplitude data team pinpoints a segment of users struggling with specific features. Our marketers can then easily target these users with personalized product education campaigns.
Help your team find new challenges
Treating your data team like a ticket queue will lead to burnout and disengagement. To keep your team motivated and inspired, it’s essential to continuously present them with new challenges and opportunities for growth. Here are two ways to do that.
Upgrade analysis with Amplitude
Analysts are often eager and excited when they start a new role. They dive into learning their area of the product, understanding the data, building relationships, and exploring ways to have an impact through research and analysis. They start answering various questions and tackling different challenges.
However, over time, they might repeatedly address the same questions and generate repetitive monthly or quarterly reports. Work starts to feel like playing the same chess game over and over again. As someone in charge of a data team, it’s your mission to support analysts in finding newer, more challenging games to play.
At HubSpot, analysts began to train the rest of the organization to perform ‘level one’ analyses. The Amplitude platform was a core part of this process. Amplitude is easy to use, even for people without a data or analytics background. With a little support from the data analysts, the rest of the team was empowered to answer queries. Analysts went from working on the same analyses to assisting others with training or reviewing and correcting mistakes. This freed the team from around 80–90% of repetitive work, which meant they could focus on more complex, impactful, and interesting questions.
Give analysts autonomy over process
Another way to stop analysts from feeling like they’re on a production line is to give them the freedom to conduct investigations in their own way. This approach helps keep your analysts engaged and leads to better data outcomes.
Communicating exactly what you want from a data request is tricky. Stakeholders might ask for a specific type of analysis, but they’re not experts in the field—the analysts might know a better way to do it. Even as someone who has managed data teams, I sometimes have trouble articulating precisely what I want from an analysis.
Set the expectation that analysts don’t have to mindlessly follow stakeholder requests and give them autonomy to determine the best approach for their work. Encourage them to dig into why the request is being made. What’s the real question being asked? What’s the best way to find that answer? Are there other relevant analyses that could provide additional insights?
Empowering your analysts to make decisions about their processes keeps them engaged and builds trust in your data team as experts. Stakeholders will see them as valuable partners who bring more than just technical skills—they bring insights and innovative solutions.
Embrace constant evolution
Keeping your data team engaged and productive is an ongoing process. The goal is to cultivate a team that constantly tackles new challenges and develops new skills. For this, it’s important to have tools that grow with you.
At Amplitude, we consistently evolve and develop our product offerings so we can keep serving the most ambitious product and data teams. Give your team a platform to help them thrive—get started with Amplitude for free today.
Kirk Hlavka
Former Director, Growth Data and Product Led Sales, Amplitude
Kirk is a former director of growth data and product led sales at Amplitude. Previously, Kirk spent eight years at HubSpot.
More from Kirk
