Jul 6, 2017

Presentation at NYC General Assembly: Talk Data to Me

Posted by Wendy Weber

Professional development used to mean attending a mid-day “formal presentation” at The Yale Club.  A speaker would bring a presentation that would last an hour or more.

Nowadays the trend is towards evening meetings, with 2 or 3 presenters speaking for only 10-20 minutes each, followed by some Q & A.

Last night I attended a sold out meeting at NYC’s General Assembly.  It ran from 6:30-8:00pm.

The topic was: “Talk Data to Me”, and the speakers were:

Benjamin Reid, CEO of Elasticiti

Winston Featherly-Bean, Data Scientist at Argo Group

Luke Mortensen, Director of Analytics at Conversant

The group was young…30ish…I was impressed that they showed up “on their own time” after a long day at work.

Interesting lessons about using both common sense and data to drive decision making…encouraging junior level employees to dive deep and look for problems that may not have been laid out in front of them.  Or question that problems that had been laid out in front of them.  One example was that a client said it was taking “too long” to get products up on a website; “about 30 days”.  A closer look showed that it was actually taking 40 days, and an outdated process of transferring Excel data was responsible for the delay.  Not rocket science, but someone had to question the problem, and identify the solution.

In