We are back for season 2 of Standard Deviation Podcast with a new format, new sponsorship... and a new amazing co-host. In this episode we will cover what are the main things you should expect from the podcast this year, in terms of topics and guests. Check the episode notes out for resources and other goodies mentioned in this episode.
SDP - 2 - Pilot
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[00:00:00] And we are back live with season two of Standard Deviation.
And I'm not alone, as you can see here
"You are nooot alone"
and I wanna tell you that Simo is not here as a guest, as you probably have guessed it.
He is my new co-host for Standard Deviation Podcast, and this is where we should - "Drum sounds".
Nice, putting the sound board out there right away.
Exactly. Thank you for tuning in today for this first episode. Simo, you are my co-host now for Standard Deviation. For those of my listeners that haven't, had the chance to get on your blog or know about what you're doing, just like a short intro.
Well, you know, first of all, it's a total honor to be here. If you recall, I'm the one who came to you begging to be added to this podcast as a co-host. You weren't begging! So it's so cool to be here. I guess if I had to say, what I do in a nutshell is that I'm, I've been working in the digital marketing space for far too long now.
Trying to find a way out for many years, and I still haven't [00:01:00] managed to do that. And I'm particularly obsessed with. Figuring out like how are, how can we all be kind of developers? How can we all be engineers in this space? And I've been trying to convert people to the technical side of things, which I think is foreshadowing what we're gonna talk about in this, in the season of the podcast is how to activate that little nerd within you.
I'm also a sucker for speaking about these topics and I just love spending time chatting about, all these kinds of passions. So I'm really happy to be on this season and I hope that we can, you know, make something really cool happen here.
Yeah. I'm very happy that you did message me because you activated my inner nerd, so when you messaged me, I was like, okay this can actually be really cool and I'm just really excited because as you know, I started the technical marketing blog and it's just like a continuation of, the things that I've learned in the last year.
And I just wanna tell the audience that are used to the format that was before where we were interviewing data analytics leaders.
This season [00:02:00] forward, we're gonna focus on helping YOU unlock that inner nerd. Yes. And helping you grow your path and career towards becoming either a leader either a freelancer, independent contributor to a company, but there's a lot of things that you should focus on and things that are probably a distraction.
So I was thinking like you have somebody that is just getting started in this field. Even if I've been doing digital marketing for a long time...
Yeah.
But, and, but then you have Simo that has been doing this for so long. And everyone that is coming up into the industry might not find the right resources at the right time, or don't know exactly where to start.
So I hope that, everyone that's been listening so far will be even more excited to continue this journey with Standard Deviation focused on technical marketing, activating the inner nerd and learning, because learning is so important.
Yeah, like on of the r eally cool things that I wanna explore with you is that, it would be [00:03:00] so easy to fall into the rut of, okay, let's spend one episode, talk about SEO, one about SEM, then let's talk about analytics, tag management and so on.
That's the easy way out. That's teaching the actual skills. But I'm kind of more interested in knowing, what are the kind of these surrounding. What's the context for being in this field? And there are so many different things that impact how we approach any discipline, including technical marketing.
Like how do we learn, how do we build communities, how do we help each other? How do we spend good night's sleep so that we are refreshed in the morning? How do we do time management properly?
So I'm a bit of a basketball fan on top of many other things. And there's this Detroit Pistons point guard, Isaiah Thomas, a superstar of the 80s and early 90s. And and he was asked at one point, and this sidetracking a bit, but you learn that I do that all the time. So he was asked like, what is the secret of basketball? And like how do you build such an effective team? And his answer was:
It's never about basketball.
And so I'm gonna steal that line of thinking. And [00:04:00] when we talk about what's the secret of becoming a good marketer, it's not actually about the skills, it's not about marketing itself. It's about how our inter interpersonal relationships work, how we communicate, how we build our own kind of learning paths.
All these things that I think many people think that they need to know how data analytics works. They need to know JavaScript, they need to know SQL when, in fact they just need to activate the kind of mechanisms that help them learn these skills. And if we can figure out what those mechanisms are, that's what I think when we've struck gold and also puts us apart from our competitors in this podcasting space, because they're all still talking about the skills.
And we can now talk about the context.
I'm all for context, I only talk about context, I guess ever since I moved to this field I just feel like... All the things that I've learned in marketing and business make more sense than all my technical skills, for the last year, I took so many courses, like I lost track of so many courses.
I've taken SQL, Python, R [00:05:00] just introduction stuff. and they're good because I can read the data layer, I can read a custom html tag. But at the same time it's like, what are we doing this for? What is the business trying to achieve? How are we mapping all this technical skills and tools with the mindset of the business?
Like what's the progress? And I remember when I had you as a guest in the first season, you said something that people tend to externalize the, their thought processes to tools and technology. And this is where you become like super narrow in your view, and you don't think about anything else.
But Simo, tell me. I know that I learned about technical marketing from you. , but where did you first encounter this I guess concept, this layer of of technical marketing?
I'm certainly not gonna claim that I was in any way the first person to use that, but for me, it was a counter reaction.
I'm one of those really annoying music fans that when I find a band, I'm super proud that I found them. But then when they become popular, I'm like, oh man, that, that's so lame. And I [00:06:00] do that all the time and I'm really ashamed of it because I've lost interest in many good bands because of that.
But the same thing, I think comes with technical marketing in that I found that so many products and platforms were being pitched with this notion of a non-technical marketer. So if you just googled, you found like this is a great way for non-technical marketers to do tagging. This is a great platform for non-technical marketers to do SEO crawling, and I always found that really funny and ironic because we are working in digital marketing.
Like literally the word digital is in there, in the name. And we're working in an inherently technical medium and anything we do has to do with the internet. And if you think about skills that don't sound like they have anything to do with technical marketing, like copywriting, you still have to figure out like screen resolutions, header alignment, fund kerneling
what, how different types of screens present your content.
So just this idea, why are some people celebrating this negative thing?
They're proud to be non-technical marketers when in fact they can't be by [00:07:00] definition because they're working in digital marketing. So that's when I wrote this kind of a ranty blog post where I called this behavior off and said that why, why instead of celebrating that you're a non-technical marketer, why not explore all the possibilities of what technical marketing enables you to do?
And I still don't think that it's a specific kind of movement or anything else. It's just a handy way of categorizing the type of digital marketing that has to do with programming with different types of markup languages, meta languages.
That has to do with using tools in a more technical way and. It's just a way of categorizing things, I think. It separates the certain type of marketer from the non-technical kind where you're not afraid of code, where you're not afraid of learning technical things and celebrate the fact that, I am working in the internet.
I'm working and I'm understanding how these things work.
So I think that's been a huge focus, especially since we created Simmer a couple of years ago, just helping people.
We talked about activation, helping people activate that, [00:08:00] understanding that it's not difficult. It's time consuming, but it's not difficult and it's something to celebrate.
In my view at least. I dunno. What's your thoughts? You just wrote the technical marketing guide and you obviously explored this dynamic. So what did you think? Why did you do that?
I found your article that you wrote out of some time back and I was reading through it and I think when I was at CXL when Peep told me, Juliana, you're great but you need more technical skills.
And I'm like: I do? And I actually attribute to Peep, he said, just go do this technical marketing minidegree. Simo did it. You'll like it. And Peep didn't know, probably that's gonna make me leave the company in the end.
But, I went through the technical marketing minidegree, and the structure of it, and it just makes sense.
And as you said, these are the building blocks of the internet. And if you're working on the internet with internet businesses, you have to understand how the internet works.
And I feel like a lot of us that, call them I used to call myself non-technical too before, and I was wrong because I was technical without knowing it.
Exactly.
[00:09:00] You can be super technical or technical adjacent to how Doug Hall names it without even knowing or putting a label to it.
But I think we as marketers, 'cause I'm a marketer, I think we are faster to put the non-tech label on ourselves versus the technical one. Because the technical one, would make us look different from the other crowd of marketers that are all very demand gen and content and whatever.
But the problem is that, if you continue like that, you're not able to join those conversations.
And I feel like the way the industry is moving right now, it's impossible to survive without knowing how things work.
It's, it is. That's why I wrote that article and I tried to break down all the things that I had to learn and unlearn.
I don't think I know them perfectly. But, if I'm put into a conversation, I will know how to engage in that conversation. And I think that's how it started for me with just being able to join the conversation and not having I guess that chip on my shoulder that I don't know what's being talked about.
And I also see this [00:10:00] differentiation in the market between digital marketing and product analytics that's happening.
And I see that the product analytics pile is getting bigger and bigger. And mostly I see companies interested in customer experience and customer journey and activation, as you said.
And if you want to be in that category, you need to understand how the internet works. Yeah. How the websites work. What is a customer journey, what's a DOM (Document Object Model). Like, if you want to track everything how, if you cannot read the DOM and understand, what's an element attribute, you won't be able to track. Yeah.
It's just like that .
But because it's January and everyone probably already failed the resolutions by now.
I didn't start the gym. I still have pink hair and I said I was gonna give up on my pink hair, but it's still here.
I guess we can create some sort of resolutions for where we want to take this podcast.
I also want to ask you before we get there, I'm gonna drop something for you right now. There you go. Before we talk about resolutions. [00:11:00]
Oh yes. This dirty disco beat. It reminds me of my youth in the seventies when I wasn't born yet. So paced by this lovely music.
I wanna share a few words about Simmer because we are, whether you like it or not, we are the sponsors of this podcast.
Yay. And we enable this wonderful audio quality, for example. So at Simmer. We believe that curiosity is something that should be nurtured and nourished. So that's one of the reasons why we found this podcast so easy, too easy to help out on. And we do this at Simmer by offering these kinds of affordable but still self-paced online courses around topics that we feel are relevant in the world of technical digital marketing.
So it's a completely arbitrary decision what becomes a course. But it's been quite fun thus far, just creating that content. When you enroll in one of our courses, you get lifetime access to the content and which I always thought was a pretty cool offer.
And in addition, so you can find as a teamsimmer.com, but you can always use the coupon code "deviate",
so that's D E V I A T E to get 10% off an individual course purchase.[00:12:00]
So that's teamsimmer.com and the coupon code is "deviate". And we'll have these little advertisements every now and then in this podcast, but we'll change the beat around. But the disco beat is really nice. Can we have it back on? Actually, yes. There we go.
I was ready. You will find the links for Simmer and the discount code in the episode footnotes.
Or if you're watching this on YouTube and seeing Simo dance, you'll find it in the video description.
Cool. So Simo, let's talk about this new year resolutions.
How was your new year? What did you do? Oh, I slept through it.
Well done. I'm the worst. That's a parent talking. Yes. So I was with my son in his room.
The baby was sleeping. He was with my husband, and I was at my son. It was 11:45. There was no fireworks.
Like we were just waiting for the fireworks to start outside. And in Romania, as a normal Romanian, you would start the fireworks from 11. But no, this time there was nothing. So me and my son just gave [00:13:00] up.
We played Uno the whole time. We're just waiting. So we gave up around, I think it was 11 and 50, and then they started, and I remember I was with my son and I asked him, do you wanna watch the fireworks? He was like: Nah. Let's sleep. So we just basically fell asleep. I know it sounds crazy, but when you have kids, it's not that fun, I guess.
But I think it was good for me because I spent, New Year's with who I wanted to spend it with. Exactly.
And it was a good memory because the next day he was like, yes, see, challenge accepted my son. We slee ped through it. Yeah, that's that. I know it's not fun, but that's exactly what I did.
How about you?
We were actually in Tallin. We took the ferry to Estonia and spent the night in Tallin with our family and friends as well. And yeah I can't remember the last time I've actually been awake at midnight for New Years . So we, yeah, so we spent the night in a hotel room playing, just talking, and just our kids were watching the tv.
They got to stay up a bit later. But yeah, we definitely fell asleep before, before midnight. Which is fine because in Tallin the official fireworks were canceled because the weather [00:14:00] was really bad that it was so windy, but they, oh no.
There was this huge battery of fireworks just outside our hotel room window at around, midnight when we were all trying to get some sleep and the kids had already fallen asleep, which is it's still weird because our kids slept through that and it was like, like somebody was bombing the apartment . But my wife and I, of course we just woke up in immediately, so that kind of sucked. But, let the others have their fun. We're already grumpy with families it's over. Yeah, exactly.
It's over for us. But it's true. I mean Yeah, it's nice to have the dinner and talk, but I think at some point, again, I think it's a age thing. You're just like, it's just whatever, , yeah. And you'll get it back. When your kids are old enough, you'll, because they'll wanna stay up as well and they'll wanna see the fireworks.
So then you'll get to relive that. But I think, yeah, when you have young kids, it is what it is. They decide how your life works, and that's quite fine.
But talking from a technical marketing perspective, what are some like New Year's resolution for you with technical marketing?
Because I feel, and maybe [00:15:00] I'm partly to blame for this, but I feel like it's catching on more. and I see a lot of people being interested in the topic and taking courses. And I get people messaging me, unfortunately, good or bad messages, but I get people messaging me all the time and asking me like, what should I learn next?
What should I do? What should how should I approach it? And I see a wave of people moving from digital marketing to technical roles. Two product management. to product analytics, data engineering. Yeah. Data engineering. Exactly.
Yeah. We just have a colleague right now at work that used to be an art professor, , and she learned Python and R and now she joined as a data analyst and I was like, that's really cool.
Wow. That's really cool. Yeah. So what are your thoughts? It's becoming mainstream . Yeah. Yeah.
My actual New Year's resolutions, the little that I did them have nothing to do with my professional life. So they were like one of them is that I have to learn.
I think I put the limit at a hundred names of Pokemon so that I can have a fluent discussion with my son and just relax more and [00:16:00] stress less. But like for me, the focus for the last years has been just becoming a better developer. I think in general, like understanding the development ecosystem, not just about learning to code better, which is obviously an important part of it, but how to build projects, how to build products how to engineer kind of product development work.
And I think that. One of the important streams, which I think is becoming more and more relevant to marketers regardless of what they're gonna focus on, is just understanding the cloud better and understand the possibilities of an almost infinitely scalable cloud infrastructure. And because that applies to almost anything like you can build applications, which is a traditional way of approaching the cloud, but you can also build data pipelines so you can build simple visualizations.
You. Big query to do analysis. You can build data warehouses. There's so much you can do on the cloud that I think that if people are right now struggling and what should we do next? I have all these options, then taking the umbrella of cloud [00:17:00] enables is a very good starting point.
And then starting building your learning paths from that, because the future is definitely in scalable computing, in machine learning in things like that. And especially in analytics.
So I think understanding those, you talked about it's important to be able to join the conversations and cloud is one of those things, has a million different components and it would be impossible for you to learn about all of them, but just to understand the basic building blocks and being able to join conversations around, virtual machines and scalability and things like that is, I think it's becoming more and more important.
So for me it's a constant learning journey. My, my goals haven't changed at all for the last four or five years. It's just to figure out even better, this weird, hybrid of engineering and marketing and people skills that I'm trying to juggle with.
I totally agree with the cloud. I'm going through through a training right now.
What else is new? "Juliana is taking a course", but I'm going through a very intense training it's called Google Cloud Leader and this is a Google Google Cloud training. Is that on Coursera or? It's actually for free. They're given it for free on [00:18:00] CloudSkillBoost.
Okay. But it has nothing to do with the exam. So Google says in their marketing page. Yes. Take all these courses, get the badges. And this is gonna be in the exam. No, they're not in the exam. You have to learn totally different things. And I will share in the footnotes, if you're interested in the Cloud Digital Leader exam, there's a FreeCodeCamp course on YouTube.
Six hours, but it's worth it. And that's exactly what's in the exam.
But, I'm seeing the value of cloud when it comes to qualitative data. A lot. A lot because people have tons of reviews. Like for instance, if you're selling on Amazon, you have tons of reviews from different people. And instead of trying to do all of that analysis in a Google sheet, you could use natural language processing, write a nice AppS cript and have everything there, you can still use Google Sheets, but at least it's faster if you upload 5,000 reviews. And then you can use things like natural language processing, or you can use VertexAI actually like VertexAI. There's so many things you can do.[00:19:00]
I saw Julien Coquet the other day he used App Engine to do this little app that changes, the temperature. Yeah. I was like, that's so crazy. Like it's so easy to do anything right now.
So I agree. I agree. Cloud is becoming very important to learn. But you shouldn't know everything or you shouldn't have to know how to code an app.
Yeah. But you should understand, like how it works, how it, how can it benefit the business, what are the things that you have, what are the options?
And I think, AWS, Google and Azure, everyone is doing a great job, pushing this into the mainstream. So you have where to choose from.
You just need to understand how it works. And I do like the BigQuery option, and I like that people are starting to talk about that and take that into consideration more. It's difficult to get there. Of course. It's not as easy as everyone is trying to make it look like. So you should probably take some courses for that.
It's moved away from the, it's moved away from the, the original premise of renting machines. And externalizing your computation. And it's really more about the serverless processes now, because you can just [00:20:00] delegate a single thing, a single function, a single timer to the cloud and just have it run every seconds, for example.
And that's, and I think that's where the cool stuff is. And if you're looking at things like, the biggest trend of this year is definitely gonna be people just spamming these ChatGPT articles, and now there's gonna be a new version coming out, which is like a zillion times better than version three.
And so we're just gonna have even more of those. That's all about computing, that's all about taking like a crap load source data and training data and then applying algorithms on that, and that wouldn't be possible without a scalable infrastructure in it, it's not like it's running in the closet on a machine running in your closet or something.
It's actually out there virtually. So just understanding that you can delegate all these processes and when you learn about the cloud, you start looking at, okay, what am I doing right now that's taking an unbelievably long amount of time, me manually doing it every day? And I have a lot of that stuff because there's a lot of overhead in running a e-commerce business.
So whenever. See that, okay, I'm spending 12 minutes [00:21:00] every day on this particular task. I start immediately thinking, okay, how long will it take for me to turn that into a cloud function that runs every day at the same time, for example. And that I don't have to know exactly how to do it.
I just need to know that's a possibility. It's a possibility. Yeah. Yes. That's the activation thing. Again I have activated within me a new kind of thought process, which goes. Am I spending too much time on this? If yes, then move it to the cloud and then I can start Googling, okay, how do I update a WooCommerce API?
How do I get the orders and how do I push them into a Google sheet using the cloud?
And then there are a million different options for that.
I think it would be actually really cool this season to have a talk about cloud engineering just on a Kind of a high level and there are certain people that we need to talk about that.
So let's put that on the backlog as well.
I would love that. And I would love that because I am just learning this stuff. Yeah. And this is like probably one of the things that people that move from a non-technical to a technical role, you'll be in a candy shop every day.
Yeah.
And if you are curious and have a bit of [00:22:00] ADHD like me, everything is gonna excite you.
Yeah.
Everything. I'm excited about everything.
I opened Looker, the actual Looker not Looker Studio a month ago. I lost my shit. I was like, whoa. Oh, you can put, different models of data. Oh there you can visualize this. This is better than Metabase, because I used to use Metabase.
Yeah. I'm like, whoa, this is so cool. And then you get into Google Cloud and I'm obsessed with natural language processing, but that's because I'm a marketer.
And there's so many things that people do in companies big or small, that are time consuming.
And this is not about this conversation of AI or machine learning, replacing people. It's about people being able to know what's possible and use these things to help their jobs..
And you shouldn't use ChatGPT to write your blog post. You should use ChatGPT probably for research, or you should use it to find more about a specific topic.
So I'm excited about cloud in general. I'm excited about machine learning and I think it's a great moment[00:23:00] like everything that's going on in the analytics and marketing world with privacy, with new tools and tool-war-games and all this stuff that's happening on social media.
I think it's a great time for people to just like, stop and really define, okay, my business is structured to make money like this. Like in your case, you're selling courses and I know that business model very well. Like you are, this is how you're structured to make money. You're selling, either a bundle or individual courses.
Okay. , but what are my internal processes? What are my external processes? How am I allocating resources?
Like these are things that people should talk before they jump into tools and deciding, oh, should I just plug GA4? Should I plug Matomo should I do this? Doesn't really matter what you're using, as long as what you're using fits with your business.
Yes. So it's a great time, in my opinion, for people to use critical thinking, not just to do, feature differentiation. But just look at their own business and how it's running and how they can help that business progress.
Yeah. That's [00:24:00] absolutely true. Actually we could share a million different anecdotes about ChatGPT, but I had just a very specific example that really blew my mind is that I asked ChatGPT, so this was after we already released the JavaScript for Digital Marketers Course o n Simmer. And I asked chat, G P T. Design a curriculum for JavaScript for digital marketers online course, and it gave me a table of contents that was remarkably similar to the one that I created. So I was validated. I was like, wow, this came just out of nowhere. I just decided this is a good curriculum, and then we have this algorithm that helped me, that it was actually a good idea.
So I'm seriously considering externalizing a lot of the initial thought, coming up with ideas, coming up with a course. Yeah. Once I have the idea, I can just feed it to those algorithms and have them give me a structured list of things to expand because I think for that it works really nicely.
Just as an idea generation machine. Exactly like you can find so many things that are interesting and worth exploring.
And with the curriculum, I did a similar thing with how I structured my blog, the [00:25:00] technical marketer guide, and I was like, Whoa.
It was similar. But I don't like that Microsoft is buying it though. Yeah. I really don't like that. I'm very triggered.
When I saw, I was like hmmm yeah
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan of Microsoft since I tested Microsoft Clarity once, and I felt naked. It was 20 minutes only, and I saw everything on the website.
Like they, that's the worst privacy solution to use. Yeah.
And ever since I had that experience I was like no. Yeah, they did a lot of weird tracking directly out of the box. It's crazy. Had to kinda opt out of that, which was really annoying. Yeah.
But, I want to ask, I'm trying to,
you have to whisper so that nobody hears, nobody can hear it, but I have this good microphone.
So I wanna talk about what people can expect from the season of Standard Deviation.
And again, I'm so happy that you're here. I feel it's gonna be really fun to be able to go through all these parts of this career.
And, [00:26:00] I guess, for me, what I wan t us to do is to be able to help that new analyst that comes in the industry, that new digital marketer that comes in the industry, or even people that are like, because of so many layoffs that happen, I see people transitioning.
A lot. And it's remarkable for me to see very crazy changes.
Oh, I was doing this and then I'm doing this, and I'm the living version of that too. But my transition is not that crazy, but what are your expectations from this season of Standard Deviation podcast? What are you hoping that we can achieve by the end of the season?
Apart from the obvious of having interesting guests and cool topical things to talk about I just really want to explore that activation mechanism.
I wanna figure out like how do we find the types of topics that might not be as obvious, but are still extremely relevant to helping people become better professionals in this industry.
And, one of the things that I wanna talk about, because it's such an important thing for me is just time management.[00:27:00]
Yeah.
We are both like pathological multitaskers. We have so many things going on. And I've never managed to formalize that. So I know that there are other people in the industry who are even let me say, even worse than we are in this aspect. So I'd love to put our heads together and figure out like how, we have all these different responsibilities.
How do we assign. Priorities. How do we figure out what should we focus on next?
For an engineer or a developer, one of the most important concepts is how are you in the zone? So when you're in the zone, you can just do stuff and nothing around you bothers you.
So how do we find those techniques to be in the zone? That's one of the topics.
There's so much cool stuff in marketing right now and I'm just trying to figure out like what would be the dream team of people and dream team of topics and we have a really good season coming up for that.
And there's gonna be a lot of people I've always wanted to talk to and we're gonna have them on the show. That's awesome.
Like Barack Obama and...
exactly. And Beyonce. Yeah, for sure. We'll have to bump her to season three because there are more interesting people. Of course, but...
We're getting, Lars Urlich from Metallica as well.
Yeah. That would be cool.
I have some words to Lars about [00:28:00] Metallica in the 90s, but we can certainly leave that.
I miss Metallica in the 80s. Oh, wow. We should talk about Metallica.
The new single isn't bad.. It's a return to form for them. I think in many ways. I'm afraid to check it out, to be honest. Like lately, I've been trying to not destroy my image of perfection, but I prefer Metallica in the eighties.
The first four albums are like hallmarks of the genre.
Exactly. Yeah.
So I'm trying not to, but yeah as you are very specific with things like when they become mainstream, you don't like them. I'm also very specific and with good things that I like and I don't want to watch something else because I might not like it.
Oh yeah, I don't wanna, yeah, I'm very weird with music with music like that.
I'm also very excited for this season because I feel like activation is the missing link in in analytics and in marketing because everyone is planning you know, to track different things. They're planning to look at different KPIs, but nobody's talking and thinking about [00:29:00] the outcome.
So I was presenting at Measurecamp Stockholm last year. And my topic was about measurement planning. Okay, we're planning these KPIs, we're asking ourselves questions. We're setting up tags in Google Tag Manager, and we have these metrics that we're looking at. Great, but what are we doing next?
What are you doing with this data? Nobody's planning.
So instead of just saying, oh, I wanna know my CLV, it's my curse, but I wanna know my CLV.
Okay, great. And what are you gonna do if your CLV is bad? And what are you gonna do if your CLV is good? Like you have to have some sort of continuity, but people don't plan for this stuff.
And I really think that data should have a roadmap. Yeah, just as a product inside the company, there's has to be somebody that makes sure that, data becomes more purposeful, more ethical I guess more compliant, but also serves the business in a way. And there's a connection between that roadmap of data and the company strategy, growth strategy.
Like you [00:30:00] cannot make progress. Unless those things meet somewhere in the middle. And I would challenge people that if they have product managers in the team that are taking care of a product, they should also have a data manager in the team or whatever we're gonna call that person. to be able to take care of data and make sure it's I'm using this word a lot lately.
Purposeful. Yeah. Because it has to have a purpose. So I'm very excited about that.
But I'm also excited for the people that are just coming into this industry. I can offer them a lot of cynicism and a lot of gloomy stuff. Help me get out of this industry, and you can reel me in and say that, there are still cool things here. They're still cool things.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Like a very cool thing that I wanna share with people is that I learned how to write technical documentation. Nice. Really fun. Congratulations.
I messed it up very bad. Julien gave me feedback and then I actually made it better.
And I really like the fact that it's the logical thinking, right? I was thinking like, why am I so afraid, of doing this?
But that, that that's a good that's a good company to be in.
If you [00:31:00] have people who keep, who not only hold you accountable, but are also supporting you. Yeah.
That's what's missing i f you go as an entrepreneur your main feedback comes from your customers and maybe from the community, and they hold you accountable in a very different way.
Of course.
There's a lot of entitlement because they're paying you or they're following you. Yeah.
They feel like you owe them something.
But it's a good kind of pressure as well. But it's very different from having a friend in the trenches with you, who's fighting the same battles as you and kind working towards the same goals as you.
So having people like Julien and Doug around you.
They're very nice. Yeah. And have a lot of patience and I see that with throughout the whole team.
And there's many companies like that that have patience.
But, yeah I'm very excited for this season and I'm very happy that it's with you and I'm very happy to have Simmer as as a sponsor and before we let people build excitement for the next episode, that we will release.
I wanna ask you like, what's something that you read in the last period that you would like to share with with people.
Yeah I'm gonna give a shout out [00:32:00] to one of my absolute best friends in the industry and my old former colleague. And so Mark Edmondson. Who, just a while ago left employment at IIH Nordic, which is a great company from Denmark.
He's written a book, if not even THE book on Google Analytics called Learning Google Analytics, creating Business Impact and Driving Insights.
I wonder how much he had say in picking that title.
Yeah, you can get it on Amazon right now. I have the book. I've purchased it.
I've skim through it. I've tried to find all the references to me, so thank you, Mark for mentioning me a number of times.
That's the egoist in me talking.
But, it's very good around a very complicated topic, which is Google's analytics platforms.
But the approach is really sound.
It approaches it from a more like a data management, data engineering point of view than just looking at this is what GA does and this is how GA works.
So I really recommend people pick up that book. Use your company budget to buy a bunch of copies for you because that will also make Mark richer with the meager royalties. O'Reilly is willing to give him.
That's awesome. [00:33:00] I've met him in Copenhagen and he said something that is gonna stick with me forever.
He said, realtime dashboards need a realtime person that takes real-time decisions, otherwise it's useless.
Yeah. And I was like, OMG, you're right!. You're right. Yeah. Yeah, he's great. Actually retweeted him and hoping to win.
So everyone, make sure you go and buy Mark's book and also check the link and the description of the video or in the podcast notes and buy his book on Amazon.
And I think that's it. Simo, is it?
I think so. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast. In a good way, feels like I'm just a guest, but I'm super excited that I'm not just a guest, that I'm just gonna stick here like a bad penny and I'll just keep turning up and you won't be able to get rid of me, at least for this year, which is pretty cool.
You're contractually obligated to have me on, even though we never signed a contract, which is pretty cool. But, yeah I'm super excited for this season. We have some really awesome episodes coming up. Hopefully [00:34:00] something refreshing, hopefully something new. And I hope we'll keep our banter as insubordinate and random and chaotic as we've managed to do it in this episode.
So what can I say?
You signed up for this. Yeah, exactly. Just so people take care, tune in for the next episode and.
Keep deviating. Oh, exactly. Yeah. That was horrible. Yeah, we're not gonna cut that out, but that was absolutely horrible. We'll come up with a better sign off phrase for the next.
It's ok. I'll end with the dirty disco. Oh yeah. That's good. That's good. That's it. That's good. See you guys next time.