Manages the work and teams of two or more departments. Oversees costs, strategies, and staffing. May have managers reporting to them depending on team size/need.
These are universal/foundational competencies define natural or inherent behaviors that are often difficult to measure, such as analytical thinking, interpersonal ability, and taking initiative.
Every team member needs these to succeed in virtually any role across the organization.
You can coordinate multiple team-wide activities, unblock barriers to progress, and plan timelines, checkpoints and/or milestones as part of a project. You can effectively deliver projects through a large group and/or for at least one key stakeholder, or with a significant amount of stakeholders or complex areas of responsibility.
Task prioritization: You ensures cross-team dependencies are understood by highlighting the importance of alignment with organizational strategy. You proactively identify opportunities to deliver requested scope faster, and prioritize backlog.
Time Management & Delegation: You accurately project resource need and skill set requirements to ensure timely completion of a project. You critically review work across multiple teams, ensuring it is appropriately broken down, and well understood.
Work Breakdown: You have a knack for anticipating future needs and can quickly shift resources and tasks to meet the changing needs of the project.
Initiative: You can take ill-defined requirements and lead others to progress on them. You adapt your skillset appropriately for those projects, morphing into what the projects need you to be.
Agile Professional: You are well equipped to tackle unforeseen situations, capable of jumping in to assist projects and teams at any point in their development. You may teach other managers and leaders how to set Agile goals, develop viable plans, and implement Agile approaches.
Shaping and delivering a wide variety of collaborative group activities and workshops with colleagues or external stakeholders.
Engendering Trust: You are considered a role model for collaborative and inclusive leadership. You have demonstrated your ability to ensure that your team fully leverages the best from those around them.
Foresight: Your foresight has been proven over multiple projects involving multiple teams. You can confidently represent relevant stakeholders' expectations, when needed, due to your deep understanding of their incentives.
Driving Alignment: You can lead entire external stakeholder relationships over the longterm across successful and unsuccessful projects and maintained good outcomes.
Radical Candor: You confidently prepare and deliver feedback to key stakeholders to ensure alignment and productive resolution, rarely seeking support from others to do so.
Setting Boundaries: You can protect your team from being thrown off course, addressing difficult stakeholder roadblocks throughout.
Learning: You develop a new set of skills and passions over time which are repeatedly invaluable to your team and organization.
Creativity: Is at their best when given few constraints and a problem to solve. Unfazed by boxes, expectations or existing patterns. Always champions the best idea over their own idea.
Efficient decision-making: You help your team to make decisions in a more timely manner, breaking down assumptions about the shape of the work and encouraging people to value done over perfect.
Unblocking: You can identify a lack of expertise in yourself and others around you, and pro-actively found that expertise in areas not given to you. This leads to a successful outcome on more than one occasion.
Adaptability: You've taken the initiative to tackle tough problems, often going out of your comfort zone to explore potential solutions with existing tools or approaches to think beyond the obvious, and supporting others in evolving their thinking as well.
Able to communicate effectively with a diverse set of teams. Fosters a culture of clear, concise, effective, audience-oriented communication across several teams, ensuring teammates actively listen to others and are understood. Actively demonstrates these behaviors. Pays attention to nonverbal communication. Can lead interactions with external stakeholders, giving continuous feedback and coaching others in this competency.
Timing & Delivery: You are able to communicate complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, establishing alignment across teams and within the broader organization, as needed.
Writing: You are recognized for translating technical findings into clear, high-level explanations for business-centered clients and teammates alike. You are the go-to team member for review and editing of written content across the team, often proactively correcting writing across the team as you see them.
Active Listening: You guide and support teams in making difficult decisions, drawing on their experience and skillset to make impartial, fair suggestions. You are trusted by internal and external stakeholders as a genuine listener and trusted advisor.
Leveraging Disagreement: You foster a culture across several teams where people are encouraged to share their opinions and contribute to discussions in a respectful manner, approach disagreement non-defensively and with curiosity, and use conflict as a basis for constructive, productive conversations. You are able to work through surface-level disagreements to expose the concerns of disagreeing voices and integrates these concerns into their perspective and plans.
Regardless of career track, one's individual capacity for leadership is still critical for success on our team because we believe that success in our business relies on investing in one another, and being accountable for the work being completed.
Understanding your work domain, sharing knowledge frequently with teammates and contributing to team documentation. Looking for opportunities to share knowledge and encourage others to do the same. Having a structured process and methodology for assessing, refining and supporting the strengths and goals of your team. Investing meaningful time to lay groundwork for personal growth, including milestones, goals and structured opportunities. Team members (or mentees) are growing at above average speed.
Supporting team growth: You've set growth targets for your team, and are clear on what is expected and how they'll be rewarded upon completion. You've then followed through on that promise consistently across multiple team members. You've established space for active learning, including pairing and troubleshooting sessions.
Investing in process: You've invested heavily in rigorous and standardized skills assessment and goal-setting for your team. This has introduced clarity and purpose, resulting in every member of your team growing in a more focused direction.
Outcomes: Your leadership, guidance and process has resulted in career outcomes (e.g. promotions, lateral moves, other internal mobility) for your direct reports as well as others outside of your immediate team. Your efforts foster a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within your team.
Works to build and document behavior they expect to see. Has close trusted relationships with both subordinates and peers, and as such can describe where the company is strong and has room to grow. Coordinates regular team activities.
Setting an example: You make efforts to document and connect company cultural norms for your team, which you cite regularly and stick to rigorously. If you break your rules, you expect to be called out.
Promoting Diversity + Inclusion: You lead efforts to improve diversity in your everyday environment, coordinating working groups, events and discussion across large parts of the company. You look for ways to enhance wider inclusion in your working environment.
Fostering community: You lead the company and maintenance of regular rituals, activities and socials for a large part of teams you're part of.
Enhancing company identity: You produce social media and/or blog posts about company that attract a moderate following. You mentor or participate in a high visibility way externally. You work to positively influence large groups of people on their perception of company.
You are actively finding business insights that you need for your work, using people from outside your team. You help others to understand the business and ensure alignment.
Values Alignment: You have extensive discussions with other leaders about company values and take steps to document them.
Business Acumen: You can explain how the business works, what the strategy is and how that relates to your work, in conversations with stakeholders internally and externally. You seek extra understanding from beyond your team about areas of the business you don't understand.
Balancing Needs: You use your understanding of business needs to lead at least one major function with significant stakeholder interest. You're driven to solutions that meet all the required needs.
Problem Solving: You have the ability to confidently initiate and monitor actions to investigate patterns and trends to resolve problems. You can determine preventative measures and—when necessary—appropriate remedies and assist with implementation, consulting more senior team members or management where needed.
You actively organize other individuals and teams to participate in developing more human-focused experiences. You are trusted by peers and the team as someone who will advocate for others.
Purpose & Empathy: You are able to recognize bias in others and help them to see their peers, clients or stakeholders through fresh eyes. You've proactively developed multiple informal or formal mentoring relationship through your ability to understand a peer or subordinate.
Data-Driven Insights: You help your team use data as a tool, working closely with analysts and thinking through short and medium term experiments. You push for a more human-centered focus for yourself and your team, either enabling or actively organizing research and data-gathering that wasn't previously happening.
Advocating for others: Your work approaches involves recognizing others' needs from the start through the end, pushing for better definitions of outcomes. Your process has changed how your team works.
Attribution: You're an ally to your peers and wider team, protecting them from undue blame and pushing praise onto them. You regularly look for opportunities to give praise publicly.
Required skills and competencies for the Analytics Engineering function
Completes larger projects to a good level of detail, helps project teammates to do the same. Teases out edge-cases and develops for them. Flags pieces of work outside their own which haven't been thought through, and supports improvements.
Attention to detail: You've ensured that code committed by your immediate team is well tested and passing. You're catching and correcting consistency errors across the project's components and pages, and adding details to enhance code maintainability that may not have been requested (for example, feedback around documentation or suggestions for improvement in edge case scenarios or similar). You help others understand the importance of attention to detail.
Testing your code: You consistently test and compare your own work against requirements and designs independently. If working on more complex applications, you may write unit and/or functional tests.
Reviewing others' code: You are familiar with Mindful Communication in Code Reviews and can effectively offer feedback on larger feature requests.
Documentation: You define a process that your projects are adopting, ensuring that everyone can work well together.
Contributes to the development of innovative solutions and best practices for the disciplines, and routinely identifies opportunities for cross-discipline collaboration. Recognizes and influences the evolving trends of the discipline.
Actively striving to understand all aspects of the business. Autonomously looking for information wherever they need to support and clarify your own and your team's understanding. Coaching others in using business needs, supporting others to uncover business insights to use in their work.
Industry or Business Function: Exhibits a high degree of competence in an industry or business function (e.g. marketing, eCommerce, finance, healthcare), possessing the ability to develop sophisticated analytical or engineering solutions tailored to domain-specific nuances. Demonstrates a deep understanding of the data ecosystem and contributes to shaping best practices.
Stakeholder Needs: You have detailed knowledge of the competitive marketplace in the industry and adjacent sectors, including the historical context of key players over time.
Business forecasting: You lead the team on solving new problems in innovative ways, devising new models to solve complex problems. You can build models quickly for complex business questions.
Understanding functionality: You have expertise in a set of related team's domains, including the breadth of services, how they interact, and data flows between systems. You regularly think beyond the immediate toolkit to create realistic workflows and uses for others.
Collaboration: You proactively seek out gaps in your technical understanding, and work with a variety of team members to fill those gaps.
Prototyping: You are an internal go-to expert when your team is thinking through testing strategy for new products and problems.
Strategic tool application: You have defined how your team approaches the use of its technical tools, including workflows and metrics. You've worked with other teams to ensure your strategy covers any crossover.
Advanced: You are highly skilled in data modeling and transformation. You can optimize data models and transformation pipelines for different data warehouses, taking into account their architectural differences. You can create robust data models that handle large-scale data. You regularly consider end business needs when designing data models, and have a holistic understanding of data ingestion, BI tooling, and reverse ETL technologies and can design with these in mind. You are are able to work with multiple data modeling techniques like star schemas.
You build data models for use cases outside of the data warehouse, such as BI tools or reverse ETL tools.
You regularly use modular code (macros, functions) to build out models that contain parameters or dynamic elements.
You've refactored significant parts of DAGs in order to simplify and optimize, in collaboration with business owners to ensure numbers are as expected.
You are familiar with data warehouse-specific qualities, such as Snowflake's VARIANT data type or BigQuery's recommendation for designing denormalized tables.
Proficient - Has a deep understanding, sees actions holistically, can achieve a high standard routinely.
You can configure warehouse ingestion tools like Snowpipe
Performance Optimization: You've optimized compute and storage usage for large workloads, through using hybrid architectures, partitioning, and identifying areas of query inefficiency.
Able to troubleshoot complex queries: You have been able to identify and solve complex issues with data warehouse queries, helping to optimize performance and reduce resource usage.
You are able to provision, maintain and optimize at least one cloud data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake), including planning for or optimizing compute capacity (warehouse sizes, cluster sizes etc.).
You take part in the planning of data migration from one warehouse to another.
Proficient - Has mastery of SQL for building out data transformation pipelines that meet business requirements, and demonstrates deeper experience with Jinja (or similar) expressions for customizing built-in functions and macros to fit unique business or data platform needs. Is beginning to extend basic programming principles to non-SQL/Jinja languages to solve specific technical problems.
Decomposition: You've taken complex legacy SQL scripts and broken them down into logical blocks that produce the same outcome but more efficiently and with far more readable/maintainable code.
Abstraction: You've adapted existing scripts written in non-SQL languages to satisfy technical requirements.
Optimization: You've proactively identified and improved slow code to reduce runtimes, using techniques such as indexing, refactoring, or other data warehouse architecture tactics.
DE specialized track for AEs
Familiar with more advanced data movement concepts such as change data capture. Able to create custom connectors for basic REST API data sources.
Custom connectors: Able to build, test, and deploy custom connectors to straightforward REST APIs (i.e., no weird / advanced implementation details for authentication, pagination, etc.) on at least one framework / platform (e.g., Meltano, Airbyte, an orchestration platform such as Airflow, etc.)
Change Data Capture: Understands the concepts around Change Data Capture, and can deploy CDC pipelines on a managed platform.
Flexible data integration: You have successfully integrated diverse data sources, including files, databases, and APIs, into a target system using a variety of tools.
Advanced Beginner - Has a working understanding, tends to see actions as a series of steps, can complete simpler tasks without supervision.
Network Security: You have identified any potential security risks and set up a plan to address them, staying up to date on the latest security practices.
Analytics specialized track for AEs
Having a deep understanding of data analytics and can identify deviations from the norm, with an ability to identify relationships between various data points.
Business forecasting: You can identify and interpret key business drivers and trends.
Product development: You are able to manage day-to-day analytics for product development.
Performance Metrics Analysis: You analyze performance metrics to identify trends and provide actionable insights that drive operational improvements.
Able to generate more complex static reports or dashboards independently, using advanced features and customization options.