Balancing your soft skills and technical skills in data - Isaac Josephson

In this episode Andy Davis talks to Isaac Jospehson, the SVP of Data Platform at Viacom. On the show they discuss how to create consistency across your team. Andy asks Isaac how he deals with disruption. They also chat about balancing your soft skills and technical skills. Isaac tells Andy how he quantifies the ROI of a data team.

Isaac Josephson is an executive with two decades of digital media experience building products and businesses for best-in-class brands. Prior to Viacom, he was on the product leadership team at Audible - Amazon's audiobook division. There, he oversaw the company's primary web, mobile web, and mobile app experiences.

Show Notes:

1.07 Having a sense of purpose in business and a vision.

3.13 People care about outcomes and thinking about the bottomline.

5.03 Creating consistency across your team to ensure your aligned with your business's goals.

6.27 When you look back at your career do you chuckle at some of the behaviours you undertook at work?

7.50 How do you navigate disruption in your sector and look forward and plan for what’s coming next?

9.30 You naturally gravitate towards things that interest you.

10.39 Is it necessary to place yourself in tech hubs like London and New York to truly be successful in your career?

13.29 What are some of the key traits you think are essential to be successful in your career?

15.03 Are softer skills now essential in the hiring process?

16.06 You can teach the technical side of a role but you need to see your company from a macro perspective.

17.10 The product management mindset.

19.47 Managing people within data and everything really being a people problem.

21.15 What do try and continually learn and strive to be good at?

22.31 Has it been difficult for you to learn the hard skills around data?

23.41 Having the belief in yourself that you can figure stuff out.

25.00 Data leadership and the journey data is on.

28.44 Do you think that Data is fully understood outside of the data department?

31.51 Quantifying the value add of Data and do you feel confident you can directly quantify the ROI of a Data team.