Sometimes there isn’t time or bandwidth or energy to do everything you “should” do. Knowing when, and how, to do something quick and dirty is critical to successfully pulling it off.
All tagged technical skills
Domain Expertise
Knowing the system is absolutely necessary to supporting it. Know the domain it exists in, however, vastly improves our ability to manipulate and design the best way to use that system. Take time to learn that domain, meet the experts in it and if you can, become one.
On Forests
Keeping an eye on details is important, but understanding how it all comes together, and how those details interact with everything else, is equally critical to success.
On trees
Keeping details in mind is incredibly important in life. Without them we can never really be sure what we’re doing… unfortunately many times though, we lose sight of this and suffer for it.
No Extra
Not doing extra on a task is hard… we always find something we can add, or something that was “missed”. Doing this, howe ver, distracts us from the actual task. At best it results in a weaker final product… at worst, complete failure.
Conceptually speaking...
Rote mechanical skills are essential to learning, but at a certain point the underlying concepts become more important. Knowing how a tool works, or why something is done a certain way is an incredibly powerful skill, and one that takes conscious effort to build.
Understanding both how a system creates/stores data and how it is used is critical to being a good data analyst. Knowing these things makes it easier to interpret information and to tell a good story about any potential results. Failing to Know Thy System at best results in wasted in… and catastrophic decisions at worst.
Finding pain points is a big part of my job…. but finding solutions is much more fun.