Season Finale and Sabbatical Adventures - 112

0:00 Hey there! Welcome, and for those returning, welcome back to How I Met Your Data. I'm Sandy Estrada, here with my co-host, Anjali Banzal. We're your guides through the ever-evolving world of data, where the community is as diverse as the stories we share. From hands-on practitioners to the ecosystem supporting them, we bring you insights and conversations that cover everything data-related. Whether you're here for the latest strategies, a dose of inspiration, or just some data banter, you're in the right place. So grab a coffee, get comfy, and let's dive in. And hey, if you like what you hear, help us out by following the podcast or engaging with us on LinkedIn. We promise we're way more fun than your average LinkedIn feed.

0:42 At least that's my opinion. Music. Hello, Anjali. Hello, Sandy. We have reached the finish line of the season. Can you believe that? I honestly cannot. I can't. It feels like it was so far away, but came so quickly. So I don't know. I mean, I guess we're good at running marathons. I know. I know, right? I have a feeling, though, people probably think we abandoned it because we haven't been dropping any episodes as frequently as we have in the past, which, you know, I take full responsibility for that. I took, for those who don't know, I took a sabbatical of six weeks from work.

1:26 I loved it. I had a really good time. We traveled. We saw things. I did not think about data, although I kind of did at times. But yeah, it was a fun time. So that's why our episodes have been released pretty much once a month at this point. And capstone with this one for the season. This will be episode 10. Yeah. Might be 11, actually. I think it's 11. I think it's 11. But before we move on to talking about our season, I want to hear all about your sabbatical. I've heard some like real amazing highlights, but what was your favorite part and what would you. Never do again. Oh, that's a good one. My favorite part was Olympic National Park in Washington State.

2:07 The first part of our trip, we went to Washington State and stayed there for a couple weeks and went to every national park in the state. My wife and I have this goal of visiting every national park in the country. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Although now she's kind of almost backing out of that goal, which I'm a little upset about, but we'll figure it out. We have the rest of our lives to figure that out so we went to we went to all three and olympic surprised me it actually surprised me it's gorgeous there's a lot of different topographies there and my favorite stop was ruby beach at olympic primarily because if you go during low tide there's all these tide pools and they have these anemones like many many anemones in these tide pools that are massive they're the size of a of a grapefruit really yeah they're so big and i have a couple of my i have a fish tank here.

2:53 And I have a couple in there, but they're tiny compared to that. It was unbelievable. So I really enjoyed that, just seeing that nature, right? But yeah, we wrapped up the two weeks there. We went to all three national parks, spent some time in Seattle, went drinking, trying wines. There's an area next to the city that has hundreds of wine tasting rooms from all the wineries in the state. They all decided to have a tasting room in this area. And we spent a couple of nights there. So we had fun. And literally today I got one of the orders that we, well, the only order we put in at the last winery we tasted at, got it today. So super excited to pop that open. Oh, fun. Just in time for the weekend. Exactly. Exactly. Tonight, I'm going to need it. And then after that, I came home, we did some stuff around here for about a week.

3:40 And then we went off to Barcelona, Spain. I had been there before, but my wife, it's been on her bucket list, so We went for a week, ate all the tapas, drank all the wine, saw all the sights you can possibly see, spent some time. The cool part of that trip was Sagrada Familia, the Gaudi church. Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. I had been there about 20 years ago. I went with a couple of friends for my first European trip and just seeing that progress was mind-blowing. Just seeing the difference and how much they still have to go was absolutely mind-blowing. So which is incredible i saw it maybe 15 years ago and i mean there was so much left to do but there were all of these placards saying in the next five years in the next you know whatever it's going to be completed i i mean it's the never-ending project yeah there's still i thought they were just finishing with the towers that they have at the top of the building but as we were taking a tour she said there's a third facade and i i was just like excuse me she's like oh yeah we have the birth, the death, and then there's a third facade, I guess, that they have to finish.

4:45 So that's another X number of years because of the artwork, the type of way they do it. But they actually, just technology and the way things are, they've moved things, progressed things a lot faster now than they used to just by the way of the build. But after that, our capstone was Taylor Swift in London. We last minute decided to change our flights. It was before we took off for barcelona we made the decision worked out really well for us and ended up being much cheaper than seeing the show in the united states so it's good awesome it's a good time we had looked to go to to europe to see taylor swift and just in the end couldn't justify it but the price differential between the tickets in europe anywhere in europe compared to you know any city in the u.s was insane where it was actually more compelling to apply to europe stay in hotels and go to the show, right?

5:39 Which would have ended up being significantly less than us going to a show here. Crazy. Right. Yeah. So that was the trip. I've been back for, I think it's been a month now. Awesome. So what would you never do again? I don't know. I think I would do all of it. I would do all of it again. And that was an amazing week. Absolutely. I want somebody else to train for it. Maybe if somebody else is paying for it. You know what? That's fair. That's absolutely fair. Well, we are glad to have you back though. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Glad to be back. You had an exciting summer too. We did. We were busy. We were very busy. So we started our summer with a trip to a national Park as well. So we went to Yellowstone, which was incredible pictures.

6:19 Do not do Yellowstone and Grand Teton justice by any stretch of the imagination. Just, I mean, just the scenery, the wildlife, absolutely insane. It's everything that you could imagine and so much more. So the first night that we were there, my husband and I were driving back from a restaurant and a baby bear just ran right in front of our car and ran up the side of a mountain. And I'm just looking at my husband like, you keep going because if the baby bear was there, I don't even want to know what the mom is going to do to us. Like, just walk away. Just walk away. Yeah. Oh my God. It was just like, it was such a cool experience.

6:59 We saw moose, which was great. So many, so many bison were, you know, were everywhere, you know, first in like one, you know, one or two at a time. I mean, you're like, oh, my God, that's amazing. And then you just happen upon the herds of them. And it just takes your breath away. So, I mean, that was great. The geysers, the thermal pools, just everything. So just a really, really great bucket list trip. So what surprised you the most? I think just the majesty of it all, right? Like I said, pictures do not do just the beauty of nature justice.

7:41 So getting there and just seeing the mountains, the open sky, all the plants, the greenery, the natural features. I've heard old faithful can be a little underwhelming when you go. No. I don't know what people are talking about because I just thought it was incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it was just that was all really surprising to me that, you know, there's people that can say it can be somewhat underwhelming. And then you go and you're like, okay. I miss that. I must have a very low bar of expectations, I guess. I think people are just so used to manufactured entertainment that they forget that is nature and it happens.

8:22 You know, they're a geyser that shoots water out every few hours and very high. Like that's mind blowing. Very high. And it gets so hot, right? Like we were right in front and it gets so hot really quickly. So, I mean, that was incredible. And then we were at Biscuit Basin maybe two weeks before its grand explosion that like destroyed the walkways and have like kind of shut down that area. So we were so lucky to be able to see it when we did. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that was incredible. The last day that we were actually driving through and heading on out to West Yellowstone, we were driving past River Drive, which is a stretch of maybe two miles.

9:06 That goes right along the water. And there's kind of a mountain cliff on your left-hand side. And so as we're driving, my mom, who happened to be in the back seat. Says to my husband, stop, stop, stop, I see something. So we look, we stop, and we go, you know, kind of looking, and my husband reverses just a little bit. And there's a juvenile grizzly bear just hunting for food. You look up at the top of the ridge and there's all these cars that have stopped to watch the bear just moving around. You see people getting out of their cars. Why would you do that? I mean, you suddenly made yourself into bear feed, but okay.

9:47 It was such a prime viewing spot because then the bear started to move forward. Like to the front of our car. And I don't know what came over me, but I opened the sunroof thinking that the bear would cross in front of our car. And as I see him like make that turn to go in front of our car, I popped out up out of the sunroof, started taking pictures and then came back down before I got the bear's attention. That's great. That's hilarious. Yeah. I mean, that was part of our summer. And then we spent time down in Hilton Head as a family, which was which is lovely i think out of the you know we go there pretty much every year we have been for the last four years and this this year was probably the best weather we've ever had yeah it wasn't too hot no rain we got to i got to play pickleball we got to golf and my daughter took part in all that too so she's finally big enough to do that so that's awesome that's beautiful that's fantastic Yeah, I agree.

10:48 The photos do no justice. Sometimes I get questions from people like, why are you going to every national park? And I think it's because every time I go, they blow me away. There isn't a single national park that I've gone to that doesn't deserve to be a national park because there's always some wonder there. When we went to Yellowstone, I was excited for Yellowstone and I had zero conception of like understanding of the Tetons. But when you see that... I mean, I've seen mountains, but the hat is, I mean, I thought I was in Europe. That was incredible. It was just so majestic. And just the way the cliffs just run right into the valley is unreal.

11:31 Right you have to see it to actually understand it right so and like just one last thing about the national parks they do a fantastic fantastic job of engaging children as well oh yeah so if you yeah like if you go into any of the visitor centers this was this was new for me or a new finding for me if you go into any of the visitor centers they will give you an activity book for your child to fill out and it's age appropriate they have like different challenges by by age group. And if you complete the challenge and bring the book back to a visitor center, you get like a little National Park badge. And the way you're giggling, I'm wondering if perhaps you and Mary do the same thing. We have it, but I'm laughing because she will listen to this and turn to me and say, we've been buying badges for what?

12:18 Like I could do this whole activity book. And every time we're at Disney, she tries to find the activity, like whether it's a scavenger hunt and they're kid related, she must do it for the prize. So you get deputized as well before you get your badge. So that I would love to see video of if you, if you actually take that on. Oh, it is happening. It's how I guarantee the next trip that we go to a national park, she's going to go get this junior badge for sure. Oh, it's awesome. It really is great. And like the kids learn a lot and actually have to spend time looking at nature to the point that they forget about their devices, which was amazing.

12:58 Yeah. Yeah. That's a triumph, honestly. Yeah. So let's debrief on the season. I think it'd be really interesting to share some statistics. I was looking at the data today for our podcast and I admittedly have not looked at in probably a month or two, maybe. So what did you learn when you met our data? When I met our data, I learned that apparently our first rodeo, which is our first episode, is the highest downloaded episode from our last 10 with a good number of downloads, almost 200.

13:39 Oh my God. Yeah, it's wild. And I think, I hope that it's not just my mother re-listening to it over and over again, because it's the only link I gave her, hoping that maybe it would be a different episode. I'll just put an asterisk on that. There's no way that that was 200 people. You know what, Sammy? We'll never know, right? We're not going to get a new account. We'll never know. It's just my mom listening to her daughter. But I will say, I just actually recently had a conversation with somebody new to our organization. And, you know, he actually really flattered me in terms of saying that he felt like he actually knew me before we met one-on-one because he'd been listening to the podcast before he even joined Cervell. Oh, that's sweet.

14:30 Yeah. I was like, oh, my God. So he may be one of the 200. He may be. And thank you for that. Thank you for listening. but the follow-up is our episode with Erin on data-driven success in sports which is not a shocker I knew that as soon as we decided to have her on and as soon as we wrapped up that episode I said this is gold it is so good so if you have not listened to that one I would highly recommend listening to that episode called data-driven success in sports it's not what you think it is not about performance of players. There's just so much more to that business that we talk about. And then the next one, and I do not want to pump his ego up.

15:14 No, is it? I really don't. I don't. I know exactly what you're going to say. James E. Anderson with Snowflake with a mesh coming in third place. You know, he could say it's second, but it's third, James. Sorry. You're behind me and Aaron and Anjali. So that was third place. And I'm not going to name the rest, but those were our top three for this season. So I'm really proud of that. I think those were great conversations. I think it just also goes to show the type of conversation folks want to listen to. So very excited. We'll take that as feedback for next season. I think for me personally, I'm curious, Anjali, what surprised you in terms of this process?

16:00 It was a zany idea. We decided just to wing it and do it. And we did. What surprised you about it all? So I think two things, right? One was our collective excitement and which fed into making the kind of the topics and the topic ideation as well as the conversation so easy. I don't think or at least I didn't feel like while we're having these conversations with our friends, our colleagues, industry leaders, that it was a forced conversation in any way that we were trying to manufacture content to push out. It was friends chatting about really cool, interesting topics.

16:42 So that was surprising a little bit because I had it in the back of my mind like, all right, how are we going to structure the interview? What are our outcomes? Very consultant think going into this, right? Yeah. And then the second kind of like almost naturally flowing into into this is the excitement and engagement of our friends, our families, our colleagues and people that we've never met before. Actually, like, you know, listening, providing like, you know. Relevant, useful feedback to us, feeding us topics that they want to hear and volunteering to come join us. Like that was amazing. Kind of unexpected, which I love. Yeah, I'm with you on both of those.

17:26 I think for me, the other angle was we work in very stressful environments. We have stressful jobs. I'll be honest, folks, consulting is not an easy feat. But we found time for an hour every other week to meet and bring somebody to the table and have a conversation. And I feel like in that hour, and we alluded to this earlier, but it was a little bit of therapy. And every single time we've had this conversation, like leading up to it, it would stress me out that it would be coming because I'd feel unprepared. I'd feel like, oh, gosh, I need to be prepared for this person. I don't want us to not be prepared for this conversation. But at the same time, even if we felt we weren't, it was easy to just talk about topics that we're passionate about because we're in it every single day with our clients. So for me, that was a surprise.

18:16 I didn't expect it to have that kind of effect on me or us, quite honestly, because I feel like you feel the same way about this. But it's just been a joy to do. And I'm looking forward to bringing more during season two and mixing it up a little bit. I think there's room to perhaps have a couple of guests on at the same time to make things a little more interesting and provocative for folks. I think that is fantastic. Other thing that I really enjoyed was learning from others and their perspectives, right? I feel like, you know, we're, because of the nature of the work that we do, the stress levels that we manage, it's easy to fall into our blinder space, right? And just be like, all right, now we're going to do it because.

19:00 I just got to get it done. But to learn from others, I think is what was a great opportunity for us as well. But bringing more people together to have that conversation and really hearing those kind of diverse, diverse opinions and ways of working, I think is going to be fantastic as we go, you know, as we think about our season two. And, you know, what more can we bring to our friends and listeners? Yeah, absolutely. And also just setting our own egos aside for a minute, it, right? Because the reality of the situation is I don't profess to be an expert at all things data. There's industries I've never worked in. There are topics I'm not deep on.

19:41 I'm a pseudo technical person, I always say. I know enough to be dangerous. I can architect solutions, but don't ask me to go build it. There's teams for that. So I think for me, just having that breadth of experience and having people come and have those conversations with us and educate us on things that maybe we haven't been exposed to has been fantastic. And on the flip side, validating from others in terms of what they're seeing and how they think about things and that being pseudo aligned to what we've been doing as a firm has been validating as well. I really, really do have enjoyed that aspect of it. Oh, I agree. I agree. That has been fantastic. And that adds to the therapeutic component of our hour together every few weeks.

20:28 Yeah, absolutely. I have probably two more questions before we wrap this up. One question unrelated to the season, really, you know, time has passed. We started this towards the first half of spring and we're ending it now and we're going to start it again fairly soon. But what technology trends has surprised you in the time that we've kind of lived through these episodes? It's the one everybody's tired of hearing about yet we can't get away from. You know, Gen AI, you know, this time last year, we were going, all right, what are we going to do with it? We can't ignore it anymore. And then within 12 months, we've seen so many different innovations, so many great ideas come up and actually get tested out.

21:15 Right before we joined this call, you know, we started talking today, you and I were talking about a way in which we accelerate a core migration activity for our clients, right? That was something that we, you know, our teams incubated, they thought about and said, you know what, wouldn't it be great if we could do this? It's going to simplify lives, it's going to accelerate the way, you know, where we do things, it's going to promote a better work-life balance for our people on the ground. And guess what? It actually worked. Yeah, it not only worked, it blew us away. It's funny because I look at that and I think to myself that in order to compete, you have to be more effective, you have to be cost competitive, but you also have to enable, right?

22:00 So the beauty of the things that I think that I've seen in the marketplace as well, even with our own firm, leveraging technologies like that, specifically Gen AI in a way that accelerates something simple, like a migration. Migrations are not simple. If you're in the middle of a TSA exit or you're trying to modernize as quickly as possible, people have little patience for that. Because there's typically very little value in migrating from one solution to another. But if you're able to accelerate that down significantly and do it in a way that it's accurate, it's understandable, and isn't just a like-for-like migration, you're actually modernizing as you go, allows for more value. Because if you're doing the things that are minimal value at a much faster rate, you then have time to use that budget in other ways that actually bring additional value to the business. And I, we've seen that happen with our clients who have engaged with us in those ways.

22:53 But the beauty of this is that we've also enabled our clients to leverage these technologies as well. So we're not just using it to finish a project. It's like, Hey. This is our process. And we're going to enable you as a team to leverage this in ways that enable the business as well. And I, I, I love that about where the market is going and what people are doing and how they're innovating with this. And I know we're not the only ones out there. I know there's other firms that are doing this as well, but it's really exciting to see that because now we're solving real business problems and focusing on real things instead of moving from one tech to another, which is to me, yeah, it costs a lot of money, but it also takes a lot of time and it burns people out.

23:34 Clients like business people do not care for that, those kind of projects. Right because they're not seeing change they don't actually see the chain right the data that they had in front of them yesterday is exactly the same as the data they have today when we do the lift and shift you know the lift and shift work that you know we've we've seen so the only folks who are excited about those projects are the data engineers in that organization because now they are able to work on new technologies. But the reality is, if I give you an Oracle database, or I give you Databricks or a Snowflake database, as an end user, you do not care. Right. You do not care.

24:16 So think about it, people. But what I also love about this is the fact that we are now enabling our teams to work with our clients to actually articulate, identify, and really hone in on the data that actually matters to them. What data are you truly using day to day? So let's really dial into that versus I think this is going to be important to us. So let me put that on the migration path. So that I think has been just a phenomenal uplift in the value that we're providing and where I'm seeing a lot How did the value come from these Gen AI capabilities?

25:03 Yeah, I wasn't excited about it before, but now I am, honestly. I think that's why I was so excited about cloud data warehousing when Snowflake came out, because I could put myself in projects and things that I've done for not only my clients, but also the people I worked for back in the day. And I thought to myself, wow, I could imagine I could put myself in those positions that I was back then with this new tech and imagine what that had looked like, right? The change it would have enabled. And I feel the same way now with Gen.ai. We have a client that we've been working with for four years, I think maybe five now, five years now, actually. And I wish I had this utility five years ago because we would have been done within a year and a half instead of taking three years to do what we did.

25:50 So I think about that all the time. I'm just like, oh, my gosh, it would have been so amazing to have had this back then. And so I do know the value that it's bringing in. Yeah, I'm finally excited about it. I really wasn't. I absolutely was not. I was so excited about it. I signed up to do a whole talk on it that I did a couple weeks ago at Lesbians Who Tech in New York. It was a fantastic environment. It might surprise some of you, but I've never been in a room with just lesbians before. And it was fantastic. It was just the vibe was different. People were super supportive of one another. Everybody was clapping at each other. It was so cute. It was so awesome. And I was just pumped. I had had two shots of espresso before I went up on stage.

26:35 Ripped through it because I only had 15 minutes to actually give tangible feed, like tangible ideas to people. So I had a lot to, I had a lot to give because of all the good work our team has been doing. And it was, I was just afterwards, I'm like, wow, I'm really excited about this topic. I've never been excited about this topic before. So yeah. I'm looking forward to the future and we should probably, unfortunately, have some Gen AI conversations in the next season. Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's any way we can avoid it and still call ourselves data professionals. Yeah, no, it's impossible. It's impossible. Absolutely impossible. In terms of the show, I think we're going to make some changes going forward.

27:17 So for our listeners, we love how engaged you are and how committed you are to our show. But we know there's a lot of podcasts out there. So what we're going to do is actually release an episode once a month. And the goal here is to make sure that we have really good guests, incredible content, and keep you guys engaged as much as possible in terms of the content that we're putting out there. And we also as i said before our jobs are quite stressful so we want to make sure that we give this you know the the focus it needs but also ensure that we give our our clients the focus they need as well so once a month is our new cadence probably going to make the episodes a little shorter we've usually been tracking to an hour i think about 30 minutes is probably more appropriate for today's audience so we'll probably be doing that as well and i am thinking and anjali I'm putting you on the spot because we didn't talk about this before.

28:11 I'm thinking of starting to release things on YouTube because I've had multiple people ask me for this at this point. And we'll just have to let our audience, like our guests know that they'll be recorded and we'll be releasing it. Right. So you're telling me I need to get dressed and do my hair and makeup before we record. Is that what? Hey, you look great. Yes, that's what I mean. I guess I could do that. We'll schedule it appropriately. So, you know, just for our listeners, you know, we've been really excited about the topics that we've been bringing to you.

28:51 But if there is something that you really want us to dive into, reach out to Sandy and I or one of us. Let us know. Yeah. Or just leave a comment. We have multiple ways to reach us. LinkedIn is probably the easiest. we have a linkedin page for the podcast so if you're listening to this and you're a linkedin user maybe go on there subscribe to the page subscribe to the podcast as well please because then you'll get notified you won't miss any the subscription numbers actually help us on the search somehow that's what i've been told there's an algorithm i i i do not comprehend it but that's what it is very excited and thank you again everybody for joining us for our initial season of this podcast, we're definitely going to be back for a second.

29:38 So see you then. Can't wait. See you in January. Music.