Data Teams — Focus on Service or Innovation?

Servant-based teams exist to fulfill the requests of their business counterparts. Innovation-based teams spend time-solving and challenging their company with new questions and raising new quality bars.

But which team brings the most value?

Today’s post is an exploration of the question: do data teams innovate or do they serve?

Data teams innovate: their KPI is innovation within projects they are working on.

Data teams innovate new ways to serve their customers better and solve their internal business problems.

Data teams innovate: they’re constantly looking for those tiny improvements that will make a huge impact in the long run. They keep innovating on new projects and fine-tuning the existing ones.

It doesn’t matter if a project’s main goal is sales or product development, data teams focus on innovation and it comes naturally:

“The organization will prosper not who invents memorable marketing slogans but rather who converts them into lasting business insights. A data scientist’s role-as the interpreter of that insight-is in many ways more important.” — Peter Drucker

Data teams serve: they innovate on existing data to serve the business better

When you put people together to work on a single project, they somehow start shifting their focus from innovation to serving. Some team members start wondering how the project’s deadline will affect their billings. Some start wondering how to satisfy their boss’ needs. Others start wondering how they can deliver results faster.