Episode 62: Leading Organizations Through Analytics Transformations with Gordon Wong

Show Notes

(02:09) Gordon briefly talked about his undergraduate studying Psychology and Philosophy at Rutgers University in the early 90s.

(03:24) Gordon reflected on the first decade of his career getting into database technologies.

(05:34) Gordon discussed his predilection towards consulting, specifically his role in the professional services team at AB Initio Software in the early 2000s.

(08:02) Gordon recalled the challenges of leading data warehousing initiatives at Smarter Travel Media and ClickSquared in the 2000s.

(13:14) Gordon emphasized the advantage of a multi-tenant database over a traditional relational database.

(18:30) Gordon recalled his one-year stint at Cervello, leading business intelligence implementations for their clients.

(21:59) Gordon elaborated on his projects during his 3 years as the director of business intelligence infrastructure at Fitbit.

(26:09) Gordon dived into his framework of choosing data tooling vendors while at Fitbit (and how he settled with a tiny startup called Snowflake back then).

(30:02) Gordon provided recommendations for startups to be data-driven.

(33:24) Gordon recalled practices to foster effective collaboration while managing the 3 teams of data engineering, data warehousing, and data analytics at Fitbit.

(36:44) Gordon went over his proudest accomplishment as the director of data engineering at ezCater, making substantial improvements to their data warehouse platform.

(38:59) Gordon shared his framework for interviewing data engineers.

(41:39) Gordon walked through his consulting engagement in analytics engineering for Zipcar and data warehousing for edX.

(46:17) Gordon reflected on his time as the Vice President of business intelligence at HubSpot.

(50:50) Gordon unpacked his notion of “Data Hierarchy of Needs,” which entails the five pillars — data security, data quality, system reliability, user experience, and data coverage.

(56:55) Gordon discussed current opportunities for driving better social outcomes and empowering democracy through data.

(59:48) Gordon shared the key criteria that enable healthy team dynamics from his hands-on experience building data teams.

(01:02:13) Gordon unpacked the central features and benefits of Snowflake for the un-initiated.

(01:06:25) Gordon gave his verdict for the ETL tooling landscape in the next few years.

(01:08:33) Gordon described the data community in Boston.

(01:09:52) Closing segment.

Gordon’s Contact?Info

LinkedIn

Mentioned Content

People

Tristan Handy (co-founder of Fishtown Analytics and co-creator of dbt)

Michael Kaminsky (who coined the term “Analytics Engineering”)

Barr Moses (co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, who coined the term “Data Observability”)

Book

“Start With Why” (By Simon Sinek)