As Kevin McCallister once taught us: just because the house is still standing doesn't mean everything's under control. Everyone's racing to adopt AI, but has anyone actually read the fine print? For this year's International Women's Day episode, we are joined by Aubrey Blanche to unpack the hype, the hidden tradeoffs, and the quiet ways teams are giving up agency in the name of "productivity." We explore how data and tech teams are uniquely prepared and positioned to ask better questions, measure what really matters, and avoid letting the AI teenager run the house. Learn more about "phantom value" and why faster isn't always better… or even cheaper!

For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

We know what the work of the data practitioner is, right? It's everything from managing data ingestion to data governance to report development to experimental design to basic and advanced analytics. It's writing (or vibe-writing?) SQL or Python or R while also being adept at whatever data stack—no matter how modern—is at hand. Of course, it's a lot more, too! And that's the topic of this episode: the unofficial, often unheralded, but often quite important "shadow work" of the analyst—the myriad tasks required to effectively glue together all the data work that occurs out in broad daylight to enable the data to truly be useful at driving the business forward.

For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

From a professional development perspective, you should always be learning: listening to podcasts, reading books, connecting with internal colleagues, following useful people on Medium and LinkedIn, and so on. Did we mention listening to podcasts? Well, THIS episode of THIS podcast is not really about that kind of learning. It's more about the sort of organizational learning that experimentation and analytics is supposed to deliver. How does a brand stay ahead of their competitors? One surefire way is to get smarter about their customers at a faster rate than their competitors do. But what does that even mean? Is it a learning to discover that the MVP of a hot new feature…doesn't look to be moving the needle at all? Our guest, Mårten Schultzberg from Spotify, makes a compelling case that it is! And the co-hosts agree. But it's tricky.

For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.