Democratizing Data with Colgate-Palmolive Chief Analytics & Insights Officer, Diana Schildhouse

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Oct 11, 2023

Diana Schildhouse, Chief Analytics and Insights Officer at Colgate-Palmolive, discusses driving business value through analytics, ensuring executives are data fluent, innovating with AI, and her career path through iconic brands like Mattel and Disney.

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ADVICE

Prioritize Business Value First

Focus relentlessly on business value before technology or perfecting data infrastructure.
Prove impact with measurable wins to gain investment and executive support.

ANECDOTE

100 One-On-One Listening Tour

Diana started with a 100 one-on-one listening tour across functions and geographies in her first six weeks.
She used the conversations to learn language, priorities, and pain points before proposing solutions.

ADVICE

Use Benchmarking To Set Strategy

Benchmark your company's analytics maturity with external partners to establish a fact-based starting point.
Use that baseline to set realistic multi-year aspirations and prioritise focus areas.

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Key Moments

Listening Tours: How 100’s of one-on-one conversations helped to narrow in on which business problems could be solved with data and quickly lead to business value (4:50)
Working to benchmark the company against its industry helped to establish the business impact and value of data (6:41)
Transforming from pockets of excellence to uniform excellence. Spreading data excellence as a way to increase data transformation (8:00)
Increasing data literacy via its own data education and recognition program, Data Literacy and Analytics Academy. (9:52)
Because product development lifecycles are so long, data plays a massive role in understanding consumer trends and what consumers will want in the future (19:46)
Use case driven innovation drives business value fastest. (22:46)
Data Clean rooms and partner collaboration is the key to generating useful 1st party data (25:06)
How a center-led hybrid enabled global teams to improve data utilization at Colgate-Palmolive (31:21)
Co-Creation helps create both nuance for specific teams and applicability for broader teams (33:21)

Key Quotes

The approach of let's take five years and invest in data and get it to a perfect spot and then we can start doing analytics and showing that value is just not one that any company has patience for.
That co-creation is so important to us, because..if the business doesn’t understand what a solution is supposed to help them do, it won't be adopted.
We try to be laser focused on what we think will move the business versus starting with the data. We're not trying to boil the ocean. It's hard to show value and progress when you're not delivering tools that can actually help the business make a decision today or tomorrow.

Mentions

Bio

Diana Schildhouse is Chief Analytics and Insights Officer at Colgate-Palmolive. She previously held analytics leadership roles at Mattel and The Walt Disney Company. Diana has an undergraduate degree in Business and Finance from USC and an MBA from Harvard.

Personal Details

Favorite activities outside of work: walking her golden doodle named Bagel, spending time with family, movies, reading
Song that pumps her up: "Who Run the World (Girls)" by Beyonce
Grateful for close friendships with "personal board of directors" from business school
Seen the Barbie movie 3 times and loved it

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.