How to communicate data effectively

Why clear communication is the key to a thriving data career

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With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

Whether you’re an analyst, data scientist or data engineer, “communicating data” effectively is the best way to take your career to the next level.

But what do I mean by “communicating data?”

First a little story…

When I was a PM, I had to communicate my team’s plans to skip level executives every quarter. This involved a 1hr presentation where they could ask questions.

In one of these presentations, I got very excited about the specifics of a project that I got way into the weeds. My boss had to step in cut me off.

The blood drained from my face!

I thought I had blown it.

Later he pulled me aside and told me that those executives had to listen to dozens of presentations like mine and had no patience for the nitty gritty.

They needed to hear the essence of what we were working on and that’s it!

Depending on your profession, you might need to communicate updates about your data projects, which could be dashboards, data pipelines, ML models, etc.

This is what I call “communicating data”

People at different levels of an organization need different types of communication for messages to be effective. Here’s a guide…

Executive Level

Get to the point as soon as possible. This can be done with a few sentences and a few bullet points. A template to use is Fact-Meaning-Action…

• Fact: What happened

• Meaning: What that means

• Action: What will be done next

Executives can absorb the message quickly and will be clear about what the next steps are.

Management Level

Provide additional detail beyond what is given to executives. This can include explaining more tactics for the next steps or providing additional context on the facts.

Messages may be a few paragraphs with additional bullet points that provide more detail.

Individual Contributor Level

Written communication is critical here. Although you can have meetings or calls, work has become more remote and asynchronous. That requires good writing.

Messages with individual contributors go into detail of the current situation. It’s important you can make the message as clear and concise as possible. Using screenshots or video recordings can also be very helpful here.

Know your audience

Although the descriptions above are a reliable pattern, there may be some exceptions. There will be some executives or managers who want to know more about the details. It’s your job to know who and when to communicate like this.

Ergest