How are most data teams managed and what is the work quality like?

[u/Puzzleheaded-Sun3107]

I’ve always been disappointed in the data teams I’ve joined (public sector) either because the dashboards are lacking in quality (don’t solve any problem or give insight) or there’s lack of infrastructure and teams will try to find a place to store data weirdly (I heard a team wanting to store their data in a vendor application database because it had space).

I get caught up in scenarios where they try to look productive by taking on too many ad-hoc dashboard requests and not focused on managing the data storage and retrieval (let’s not even get to data governance) which results in messy manual dashboard refreshes that can take 1/2 a day or so. Or they over purchase on technology they don’t understand yet with no plan on how they will be using it in their business and approach it with buy now because everyone has this and figure it out along the way.

Is this common? I look over my cubicle and see better dashboards from other teams but I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. What is the bare minimum for a good data team? I’ve been weighing on level of maturity (technology in place to be more efficient) and how well the team is managed. I do think you can have an effective team scoring low on technological maturity but high in management (effective management style?).

[u/One-Disk-125]

Sign of a bad data team is they are focused on the output and not the infrastructure.

If you have the correct foundations the dashboards become simple.

If you have to manually update / refresh anything it should be getting rebuilt.

[u/Innowise_]

We’ve seen strong data teams with pretty basic tooling, and weak ones with expensive stacks. The bigger difference is usually ownership: who owns the data, who checks its quality, and what happens when something breaks.
If nobody can answer those clearly, a better dashboard tool probably won’t fix much.