Book Review "Telling Your Data Story"
by Scott Taylor, The Data Whisperer - Data Storytelling for Data Management
What to expect?
Data people love to talk about data and technology, diving deep into the technical details. In the last years we learned about storytelling with data as a better way to explain what is the story behind the data. This book is different.
The person, the book
Scott Taylor tells himself someone never build IT systems, but rather being a seller of systems and data. His book is therefore different, but that doesn't make it any less important. He write about storytelling for data management. Therefore, many of his examples are from Master Data Management and Data Governance, where he comes from.
But maybe he is exactly the right person. Because if you want to pitch your idea, project or investment to your management, selling skills could be the right thing.
And indeed his book shows nice and easy to understand examples about challenges with data. And he seems to like frameworks like 4 Cs, 3Vs or 8-Ates which makes it easier to remember and cluster important aspects to tell your own data management story.
Some insights
For me the 3 Vs was the most straight forward framework:
Our vocabulary is confusing → Establishing an accessible vocabulary
Our voice is discordant → Harmonizing to a common voice
Our vision is blurred → Illuminating the business vision
The thing is, make it simple for your audience. Find the right words. Get a common pitch. Find the right tone. Let it support the business. Don’t get lost in technical details but balance the WHY and HOW that it make sense.
New kinds of data books
Interestingly, the frameworks, especially the 4 Cs reminded me of Tiankai Feng’s “Humanizing Data Strategy“ which includes a 5 C framework, that is also about the softer skills you should possibly have in IT and data. I appreciate to find more of this books and would also recommend Doug Laney's “Data Juice” book for understand better what matters if you want to create value with data. Even if Scott’s book is similar in the number of pages and the focus on the non-technical side, it picks out one topic and looks at this from different angles. I like that, but missed a little bit some more specific end-to-end examples, like how to explain data products or data mesh to an executive.
Sometimes it also feels a little bit simple and as a collection of many ideas, experiences and hints to make you a better storyteller. But after thinking about this aspect for a while, this is maybe exactly what it should be. Because there is not the one way to do it.
Your take away
All in all, for a technical guy, similar to Tiankai’s or Laney's book, it is different than the typical stuff they possibly read. I assume managers and sales people in data will feel a higher value compared to technical people. As I already said, to build this skill of selling your (data) ideas, it can be very important and a good starting point. So if you want to get out of the nerd corner at some point to actively promote your topics, this book could be yours. Possibly it is like in the dialog with Francis Ford Coppola in the book, that a good story needs some time. Read it and read it again after some time. And maybe some ideas get stuck in your mind.
If you are not sure, the author published a lot like here on YouTube or on the web.